by Michelle Kim Hall
This week, I spoke with Angèle Torres about nourishing children and finding work/life balance. When Angèle became a mother, she took a three year pause from her corporate career to raise her daughters. One of those years was due to the pandemic. In that time, Angèle started her food blog, Healthy Kitchen Littles. Although her blog is quite successful, and Angèle is currently developing a cookbook, she recently decided to return to the corporate world which we discuss in this episode.
Angèle has kindly shared her green juice recipe below.
Angèle works for a large tech company with a generous parental leave program: six months of her time off was paid and came with the option to return to her role after two years. Though this policy exists, Angèle admitted it is unusual for employees to take the full two years off (note: due to the extenuating circumstances of the pandemic, her employer granted her an additional third year of leave). While Angèle was apprehensive about how her extended absence would be received, when she did return to her job, she was pleasantly surprised by the transition back to corporate life. Listening to her story, I couldn’t help but wonder what the workplace would look like if mothers were encouraged to pause their careers to adjust to family life, and then invited back wholeheartedly to the workforce.
Although paid leave is a proven way to improve employee retention and save employers the cost of turnover and rehiring. One study found that for small businesses, implementing paid leave even made it easier for these employers to account for employee sick days and other absences. If there are many benefits to paid leave, why don’t we have it?
Opposition to paid family leave is historical, and tied to racial division of labor in the United States. As California State University, Sacramento history professor Mona Siegel explained in this article:
This view was rooted in the way different types of labour and, indeed, people were valued in the post-war years, and in the idea that providing universal paid parental leave could encourage the “wrong” families to reproduce. There was a "strong push” to define African-American women who performed domestic or agricultural work as somehow “outside the realm of labour” and exclude them.
With women’s reproductive rights at the center of public debate, we’re rooting for more inclusive policies that recognize ALL mothers deserve the CHOICE on how to manage their relationship with childcare and career. If your workplace has made a public statement opposing the overturn of Roe v. Wade, forward this episode to your HR manager and ask them to give our conversation a listen.
How refreshing it would be if Angèle’s story was the norm instead of the exception! Thanks so much to Angèle for sharing her story and her green juice recipe below!
Angèle’s Green Juice Recipe from Healthy Kitchen Littles
Ingredients
3 small (or 2 large) green apples, cored and roughly-chopped
1 small cucumber, chopped (1-½ cups)
2 celery ribs, chopped
1 small handful parsley (½ cup)
1 piece of ginger (1-inch), peeled
1 handful baby spinach (1 cup packed)
1 handful baby kale
juice of 1 small or ¾ large lemon (¼ cup)
2 cups water
20 ice cubes
Throw all ingredients in a blender. Start blending at low speed and work your way up to the highest speed. Leafy greens have a tendency to make your juice foamy, so to reduce foam, run your blender on low speed for 10-20 seconds after you’re done blending.
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