Meghann Foye, 38, was jealous of co-workers clocking out for maternity leave, and decided she needed a break of her own. Here, the author of the novel “Meternity” (Mira, out now), tells The Post’s Anna Davies why she believes every woman deserves mandated “me time.” 
 
 I was 31 years old in 2009, and I loved my career. As an editor at a popular magazine, I got to work on big stories, attend cool events, and meet famous celebs all the time. 
 
 And yet, after 10 years of working in a job where I was always on deadline, I couldn’t help but feel envious when parents on staff left the office at 6 p.m. to tend to their children, while it was assumed co-workers without kids would stay behind to pick up the slack. 
 
 “You know, I need a maternity leave!” I told one of my pregnant friends. She laughed, and we spent the afternoon plotting my escape from my 10-hour days, fake baby bump and all. 
 
 Of course, that didn’t happen. But the more I thought about it, the more I came to believe in the value of a “meternity” leave — which is, to me, a sabbatical-like break that allows women and, to a lesser degree, men to shift their focus to the part of their lives that doesn’t revolve around their jobs. 
 
 For women who follow a “traditional” path, this pause often naturally comes in your late 20s or early 30s, when a wedding, pregnancy and babies means that your personal life takes center stage. But for those who end up on the “other” path, that socially mandated time and space for self-reflection may never come. 
 
 When I graduated from college in the early 2000s, I enjoyed the same unspoken expectation shared among my fellow Gen-Xers: If you poured your heart and soul into your career, you would eventually get to a director level and have the flexibility, paycheck and assistants beneath you to begin to create a work-life balance. Then the 2008 recession hit, and people were lucky to have jobs at all. Assistants and perks disappeared across industries, and I felt like the cultural expectation was that we should now be tethered to our desks and our smartphones. 
 
 It seemed that parenthood was the only path that provided a modicum of flexibility. There’s something about saying “I need to go pick up my child” as a reason to leave the office on time that has far more gravitas than, say, “My best friend just got ghosted by her OkCupid date and needs a margarita” — but both sides are valid. 
 
 And as I watched my friends take their real maternity leaves, I saw that spending three months detached from their desks made them much more sure of themselves. One friend made the decision to leave her corporate career to create her own business; another decided to switch industries. From the outside, it seemed like those few weeks of them shifting their focus to something other than their jobs gave them a whole new lens through which to see their lives. 
 
 While both men and women would benefit from a “meternity” leave after a decade or so in the workforce, the concept is one that would be especially advantageous for women. Burnout syndrome is well-documented in both sexes, but recent research suggests that women may experience it at greater rates; researchers postulate that it’s because women (moms and non-moms alike) feel overloaded by the roles they have to take on at work and at home. 
 
 Bottom line: Women are bad at putting ourselves first. But when you have a child, you learn how to self-advocate to put the needs of your family first. A well-crafted “meternity” can give you the same skills — and taking one shouldn’t disqualify you from taking maternity leave later. 
 
 I may not have been changing diapers, but I grappled with self-doubt. - Meghann Foye 
 
 As for me, I did eventually give notice at my job and take a “meternity” of my own. I may not have been changing diapers, but I grappled with self-doubt for the year and a half that I spent away from the corporate world. And I grieved the loss of my dad, who had just died after a long illness. But a “meternity” done right should be challenging. It should be about digging into your whole life and emerging from it more confident in who you are. 
 
 It also gave me the opportunity to help someone achieve their “meternity” dreams — even if that person was a fictional character. My first novel, “Meternity,” was just released, and is about a woman who fakes a pregnancy and discovers some hard truths about what it’s really like to “have it all.” 
 
 Ultimately, what I learned from my own “meternity” leave is that any pressure I felt to stay late at the office wasn’t coming from the parents on staff. It was coming from myself. Coming back to a new position, I realized I didn’t need an “excuse” to leave on time. And that’s what I would love the take-away for my book to be: Work-life balance is tough for everyone, and it happens most when parents and nonparents support and don’t judge each other. 
 
 I want kids in the future, and I might still take a traditional maternity leave. I might not. But either way, I’m happy my “meternity” taught me to live on my own terms and advocate what works for me. 
 
 Counterpoint: The Post’s Kyle Smith says parents in the workplace should be worshiped by their childless peers 
 
 Purchase “Meternity” on Amazon. ||||| Yesterday, mothers across the country clicked on the New York Post headline "I want all the perks of maternity leave — without having any kids" with some sense of the irony therein. 
 
 A lighthearted call for some “me” time from a childless woman who works too much? In the New York Post? As a tie-in for a lighthearted novel about a woman who fakes a pregnancy in order to get some time off? Surely we’ve got bigger fish to fry than this. But as I read on, I wasn’t sure I did, actually. 
 
 In fact, I came away wondering if the article wasn’t somehow emblematic of the entire problem our nation has with mothers in particular, and parents in general: i.e. we aren't curious about their lives, we do almost nothing to support them, and we consider them an unwelcome burden on all fronts. We are a nation that hates children, parents, and families — as a matter of policy, not just in bars and airplanes. 
 
 But author Meghann Foye has a point, doesn’t she? Americans work too hard: Study after study suggests that not only are we more stressed out than people living in other industrialized nations, we work a lot more hours than they do, too. So her call for flexibility in the workplace seems at first glance to be totally rational. Unfortunately, it’s couched in numerous assumptions that she hasn’t bothered to investigate. 
 
 Foye defines her concept of “meternity leave” as “socially mandated time and space for self-reflection [that] may never come” otherwise, suggesting that workplaces should build this flexibility in for “women, and to a lesser degree, men.” 
 
 Leaving aside for a moment the fact that, in the United States, almost no women actually get maternity leave — the figure hovers around 13 percent, since leave is not mandated either socially or legally — Foye seems to misunderstand what maternity leave actually is. It has, essentially, two functions: for the body to repair itself from the drastic event that is giving birth (an event that, for one in three U.S. women, includes major abdominal surgery) and to keep the newborn human baby alive and cared for in a particularly fragile period. 
 
 This is a period that most mothers, I suspect, would suggest has little “space for self-reflection.” I didn’t shower for days, wore only sweatpants, and broke out in post-baby acne during my maternity leave. I actively avoided mirrors: no self-reflection here. 
 
 But beyond that, much of what Foye seems to be annoyed about isn’t that birthing women get a "vacation" post-baby: It’s her assertion that they get flexibility once they're back to work. “I couldn’t help but feel envious when parents on staff left the office at 6 p.m. to tend to their children, while it was assumed co-workers without kids would stay behind to pick up the slack,” she writes. “It seemed that parenthood was the only path that provided a modicum of flexibility.” 
 
 Sure, there are jobs that offer some flexibility for parents. There are workplaces with understanding bosses (especially when those bosses have children themselves). But there are many more bosses who don't understand or care, who fire women for being late once again, who say “no” to time off for a doctor’s appointment. In fact, the gender pay gap between women and men is widened when women become mothers. The suggestion that women get perks or a pass professionally when they have children is so unfounded that it verges on absurd, surrounded as we are by evidence that becoming a mother will hurt or end your career, that you’ll make less money for the same work, and that you will have a harder time getting promoted. 
 
 I do sympathize with Foye: Being a parent is one of those things that is completely uninteresting until you become one. I, too, lingered under the supposition that I could blog from home sans child care with a newborn; that I’d get back into the gym six weeks postpartum; that I’d still go to the dentist regularly. 
 
 But two and a half years into my journey as a mother, the reality couldn’t be more different. The truth is that there is nothing in this world less flexible than an infant (besides a toddler), and being a parent means never doing anything spur of the moment again. It means relentlessly planning backups for backups and often, it means constant anxiety about work: Will you get fired if you're late once more because the kid threw up all over you? Will you be passed over for promotion in favor of a woman without children, or literally any man? Probably! 
 
 Foye may have hit upon a cute premise for a novel, but she's ignoring the fact that, after maternity leave, most women's careers will absolutely suffer. And it is much worse for working-class parents than for the ones she worked alongside as an editor at a magazine. Remember: 69.9 percent of U.S. mothers work, yet we have no parental-leave policy in the U.S., nor do we have adequate or affordable child-care options. 
 
 "Bottom line: Women are bad at putting ourselves first," Foye writes. "But when you have a child, you learn how to self-advocate to put the needs of your family first." It's clear she doesn't understand the difference between the needs of an individual woman, and the needs of her family. When that co-worker disappears at six, she's not going home to watch Game of Thrones; she's clocking in to job No. 2, also known as "the second shift." It doesn't take a ton of detective work to figure this out — all it requires is a degree of empathy. 
 
 There are many perks to being a mother: Kids are fun, and they force you to learn a lot about yourself. What they don't do, though, is make your life more flexible. Creating flexibility is all your responsibility — something to try to achieve once all the emails are read and the laundry is folded and lunch is packed for tomorrow. Bottom line: The working mothers of this country could use "meternity leave," too. ||||| Meghann told the New York Post that the concept of "meternity" leave was inspired by her jealousy over co-workers who got to take maternity leave and parents who left the office early to grab their kids from daycare. 
 
 “I came to believe in the value of a ‘meternity’ leave—which is, to me, a sabbatical-like break that allows women, and, to a lesser degree, men to shift their focus to the part of their lives that doesn’t revolve around their jobs,” Meghann told the New York Post. 
 
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 Meghann goes on to talk about how it seemed like her mom friends emerged from maternity leave with a better sense of what they wanted in life. So, Meghann decided to give notice at her job and take her own “meternity.” She eventually returned to work after an extended break, and says she learned that the pressure she'd felt to put in extra hours came from within, and not from others. 
 
 While the concept of a “meternity” is cool and all, moms are pointing out that it really has nothing with a legit maternity leave—which is all about putting someone else’s needs before yours, often to the point of total exhaustion. 
 
 Maternity leave is not "me time". Furthest thing from it. You have to go back to work to get that. #HardestJobEver https://t.co/PBNunDimsa — Becky Quick (@BeckyQuick) April 29, 2016 
 
 Maternity leave gives "time and space for self-reflection". I am crying with laughter. Or possibly exhaustion... https://t.co/GWjJM1Ivxo — C. Dodds Pennock (@carolinepennock) April 29, 2016 
 
 Show me a well-rested woman on maternity leave and I'll show you a baby who spent the day with someone else. #meternity #ridiculous — Amber Hagy (@Atexlaw) April 29, 2016 
 
 Hate the idea of fueling the mommy wars, but the concept of #Meternity (or a sabbatical) is very different from actual #maternityleave. — Logan Levkoff, Ph.D. (@LoganLevkoff) April 29, 2016 
 
 Now, if a “meternity" leave came after maternity leave and took place on a baby-free tropical island, that might be a whole different story... ||||| I have a friend in Denmark who gets time built into his career for "personal fulfillment." As Danish radio host Tore Leifer wrote in the New York Times three years ago, "Sabbaticals ensure that we spend time with our children and families, that we refresh our creative depots, and that we grow and develop as humans and professionals." Last year, my spouse, after several years with his company, earned four paid weeks off to use as he saw fit. The contemporary American work model — one that is so relentless and all consuming that an adult professional woman writer might in all sincerity publish an op-ed that suggests time off to have a baby is some kind "break" — is wildly disordered. People need time off for all kinds of reasons and no, Foye's "My best friend just got ghosted by her OkCupid date and needs a margarita" scenario is not equivalent to my 36 hours of labor. But the idea that time off — for any variety of personal reasons — makes us sharper and more focused and better is a totally valid one. It's not selfish. It's just makes sense.
– Fed up with working moms getting all the perks, 38-year-old magazine editor Meghann Foye writes in the New York Post that it's time for childless women to start getting theirs. "There’s something about saying 'I need to go pick up my child' as a reason to leave the office on time that has far more gravitas than, say, 'My best friend just got ghosted by her OkCupid date and needs a margarita'—but both sides are valid," she says. But Foye has bigger fish to fry than working moms getting to leave work on time. She's advocating for "meternity leave" to balance out the maternity leave given to new moms. She defines meternity leave as "a sabbatical-like break that allows women and, to a lesser degree, men to shift their focus to the part of their lives that doesn’t revolve around their jobs." Foye says a meternity leave would allow childless women to get the time to refocus and reevaluate their lives—time that is already afforded to new mothers. Foye actually took a meternity leave for herself and says the experience was invaluable. "I may not have been changing diapers, but I grappled with self-doubt for the year and a half that I spent away from the corporate world," she writes. Obviously, Foye's opinion has been controversial. "I have to laugh pretty hard at a Foye’s description of maternity leave as a 'sabbatical-like break,'" writes Mary Elizabeth Williams at Salon. "It’s not exactly a vacation," concurs Korin Miller at Women's Health Magazine. "You're up every three hours to nurse. ... If you can squeeze in a five-minute shower, it's pretty much a damn miracle." And Laura June at New York Magazine points out only 13% of new moms in the US even get maternity leave.