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A few weeks ago, as I watched Rep. Jimmy Gomez (D-Calif.) gain admiration for caring for his child at home, I began to think about the last time I saw an elected Officials engaged in such public display of parenthood. It was New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern who scraped herself together after six weeks of maternity leave to raise a man and lead a country at the same time.
I don’t remember Ardern getting any general admiration for this balancing act. What I mainly remember was the debate that raged about her breastfeeding decisions. With baby Neve still breastfeeding when Ardern was expected at a summit in the Pacific Islands, the Prime Minister had arranged to take a separate flight from other government officials to shorten her trip to avoid a lengthy absence from her newborn. The additional travel arrangements cost thousands of dollars in fuel. Was that a wise use of taxpayers’ money? Should Ardern have taken longer maternity leave or avoided pregnancy altogether?
“If I hadn’t gone I think there would have been the same criticism,” she told the New Zealand Herald at the time, explaining the careful analysis that went into her decision. “Damn if I did and damned if I didn’t.”
So one lesson of Jacinda Ardern’s tenure was that mothers can’t win, and even at the highest levels of government, a father who rearranges his work schedule for his children is viewed as committed and a mother who does the same is viewed as disorganized. But if you prefer the optimistic view, the other lesson was that if citizens are willing to accept flexibility in how their leaders do their jobs, they can have a leader like Jacinda Ardern.
5 moments that shaped Jacinda Ardern’s time as New Zealand Prime Minister
You can have a leader who, after stepping into her role at the age of 37, has created one of the most diverse cabinets in the world: 40 percent women, 25 percent Maori, 15 percent LGBTQ — a group that, Arden proudly said “the New Zealand she chose”.
You can have a leader who, less than a week after 50 New Zealanders were shot dead in a Christchurch mosque, spearheaded a nationwide ban on assault weapons with no fuss or dismay: “Our history has changed forever,” she said simply. “Well, so will our laws.”
You can have a leader who, in the face of a global pandemic, has mapped out a clear and transparent course of action to stop the spread and is addressing her country as “our team of 5 million” while in the meantime in the United States she is our President publicly speculated that doctors might be able to use disinfectants to fight the virus “by injecting it internally or almost a cleaning.” (New Zealand fared much better than the United States – and many other countries – in terms of Covid deaths.)
Most importantly, they can have a leader who, without ego or pomp, acknowledges when it’s time to hang up and step back. On Wednesday, Ardern announced that she no longer had “enough in the tank” to perform the job to the required standards and that she was stepping down. “I’m human. Politicians are human. We give everything we can while we can, and then it’s about time.”
“I hope in return I leave behind the belief that you can be kind but strong,” she concluded. “Empathetic, but decisive. Optimistic but focused.”
The entire speech felt like a continuation of the “politics of kindness” that defined Ardern’s term: a nebulous concept that catapulted her to worldwide fame — this breastfeeding mother, this millennial feminist — and elicited eye-rolls from her critics. How much of Jacindamania was earned? Could their global fans even name their accomplishments, or were we just mesmerized by a leader who seemed to want to do things differently? My group of friends can’t have been the only ones to pass around a picture of Ardern with Finnish Prime Minister Sanne Marin – herself a millennial mother – as if we were writing a draft for a new superhero movie.
Jacinda Ardern didn’t make it seem easy to be a mom and rule at the same time. She didn’t pretend there was a neat trick to having everything. But she didn’t castigate herself for the fight either. She simply acknowledged that the baby sometimes appears on the floor of the United Nations General Assembly. Yes, sometimes the flight schedule is changed. No, none of that meant she wasn’t up to the task. This meant that we should question how we define the task. We should ask whether elected officials need to conform to politics as usual, or whether we could acknowledge that politicians – and workers and citizens – are people with lived experiences who share their understanding of their countries and the way they are should, can, enrich governs. Systems should adapt to us, not the other way around.
She worked as hard as she could for as long as she could, and one legacy she will leave behind is the fact that she showed the work — what it took to be a leader and a parent, and how it ended up being cost so much that she couldn’t in good conscience continue, not in the way she would have liked.
The work was enormous. But for her admirers, the work was worth it.
correction
A previous version of this column misrepresented the location and death toll for the mass shooting in Christchurch. The killings took place in two mosques, not one, and 51 people, not 50, were killed. The article also misspelled the first name of Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin. The story has been corrected.
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