Rep. Megan Jones didn’t want to choose between her work and her daughter.
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It’s always a great day for appreciating mothers, and the creative ways they find to balance all that is on their plates. Since a video of Senator Larissa Walters breastfeeding her newborn daughter in parliament went viral last summer, more stories celebrating working moms have been gaining attention.
Recently, Representative Megan Jones and her daughter Alma Jones have been making the headlines and lighting up newsfeeds with their mother-daughter companionship.
Little Alma is still too young for daycare, and, as Megan explains, “My husband’s a farmer, so it’s not like he can strap a baby Bjorn to his chest and be hopping in and out of pay loader tractors and chasing after cows.”
Although her colleagues encouraged Megan to take longer maternity leave, she decided her constituents couldn’t wait. The solution? Take her daughter to work.
“My folks deserve to have a voice here,” she explained. “They elected me to do a job, and I needed to be here. So it was never a thought that I was going to take more time. I was going to take what we needed and that was it.”
House Speaker Linda Upmeyer says she hopes Megan’s decision will inspire other young women to know that it is possible to have both a family and a career. She said, “Even if you’re a young woman and you’re thinking about starting a family and all those kinds of things, this is still a possibility. And that’s really kind of a contrast from when I first ran for office and people were still asking me, ‘Well, who’s going to take care of your kids?’ despite the fact that I think my youngest one was perhaps a junior in high school.”
Megan has even had some help from her fellow representatives, like Rep. Matt Windschitl, who quietly fed Alma her bottle when she became fussy while her mom was leading a debate.
You can see more in the video below.
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