Wanna Be A Stay-At-Home Dad?
July 02, 2010, By Jason Avant 9 comments
The first thing you need to know about being a stay-at-home dad: the mess never goes away. The piles of dirty laundry and reeking dishes retreat, then advance, then retreat again. Your house becomes the Western Front, circa 1917. I’d been attacking the neverending mess for a little over a year, and it was starting to wear me down.
The next thing you need to know about being a stay-at-home dad: it will challenge you in surprising ways. I’ve enjoyed being able to be at home with the kids. What I didn’t realize was how much I enjoyed going to work.
Last week, I got a call from a recruiter that I’d met a few years back; I was working as a corporate recruiter for a large semiconductor outfit, and she’d been working for a staffing agency that was looking to get some business from me. I was surprised to hear from her – I’d thought that the job market wasn’t improving, at least to the point where my once-valued services were needed. She told me that one of her clients needed some help finding engineers, and she needed someone with technical recruiting experience. She’d gotten my name from another old contact of mine … and so it was that on Tuesday, I found myself back at work. In an office. In fact, I was sitting behind a desk in the same office of the very company where I began my recruiting career, some ten years prior.
It was weird. I half-expected to see Hurley and Ben Linus sitting in the cube next to mine.
I began the process of re-assimilating myself into the world of metrics, cold calls, networking, and headhunting. It was a blur – I learned the company databases, made a trip out to visit the clients, and dove into the task of finding the perfect candidates, reading resume after resume, tossing most, jotting questions on some, and saving one or two that looked close to perfect. It felt like I’d never left. All thoughts of those piles of laundry and dishes, of what I was going to make the kids for dinner, of what we’d be doing once they got home from school and the nanny … all of those thoughts vanished. I was saying goodbye to all that.
And I had no regrets.
There’s a lot of talk about how great it is to be a stay-at-home dad, and there are certainly some great things about it. It’s certainly demanding; unlike the office, you can’t pop out for a smoke break or zip over to the business park’s Starbucks for a latte when you have a screaming, hungry and tired kid to contend with. The time you get to spend with your kids is indeed priceless, and if you’re fortunate enough to be able to afford not working (or if you’re in one of the few professions that enables you to work from home), good for you. Parenting is incredibly difficult, and I believe that being a stay-at-home dad presents some unique challenges (ever tried to give a two-year-old girl ponytails?), but I don’t have a lot of sympathy for those who rail for SAHD equality. I was lucky to be able to do it. In this day and age, most everybody needs to work, and most of the work that’s out there requires one to be someplace else. Complaining about that is like complaining about the weather.
Taking the job was done out of necessity – put bluntly, we needed the cash. But deep down, part of me needed to get back to work. Recruiting was something I was pretty good at, and in this life, one doesn’t get to be good at a whole lot of things. I felt like I was actually using my brain, putting years of hard-earned experience back to work. Immersing myself in my job felt like recapturing a part of myself that had been lost to smelly socks and crusty dishes. And it was good to be around people – people who didn’t constantly ask me for a snack, or need to have their diapers changed.
Did I feel like I was somehow less of a father because I was no longer a SAHD? No. In fact, I wondered if being out of the house would actually improve my parenting skills. One needs balance to be a good parent; if all you’re doing is spending time with (and on) your kids, you’ll get bored, then frustrated, then resentful. I found that when I came home from the office I was revitalized, and I think my kids sensed that as well. Things still needed to be done – the mess never goes away – but now I had a sense of perspective that I’d lost from being at home day in and day out. And ultimately, things hadn’t drastically changed. I’d merely gone from being a stay-at-home/work-from-home dad to an office dad. The constant? “Dad.” The rest – just a matter of location.
Jason Avant is the founder and managing editor of DadCentric.com. He is a frequent contributor to ManoftheHouse.com.
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