Longtime readers of this blog may recall that I was a stay-at-home Dad for years. Many posts from that era reference the challenges of parenting, especially the difficulty in maintaining an active and adventurous sex life when you’ve got a new baby who never sleeps.

When my daughter was born, I agreed to put my social and professional lives on indefinite hold for the sake of my family. I was afraid that I was ill-suited to the task; prior to my daughter’s birth I’d never changed a diaper and I’d held a baby perhaps fewer than five times. Although my somewhat shaky upbringing wasn’t something I was completely aware of at the time, I knew how high the stakes were that this child be raised to be a functional adult. I knew that if I was going to do this, I couldn’t screw it up.

So yeah, I was afraid. On some level, maybe I didn’t even want to do it. After all, I was self-employed, and giving up day-to-day operation of my business was as scary as leaving my daughter with an unfamiliar babysitter would have been. Beyond that, being a stay-at-home dad required me to give up the home I loved and move hours away, to a much more expensive area with no predetermined living arrangements. In this locale there was no way we’d ever be able to afford to buy or even rent a house comparable to the one we were moving out of.

(The monthly rent on the modest three-bedroom, two-bath house [i.e. smaller than the house we left behind] in a decent but not affluent suburban neighborhood where we lived for a year and a half immediately following the move was just south of $3,000. Compare this to the contemporary national average of $1,083.)

I lamented the imminent loss of my house. The two-car garage. The backyard. The private home office I’d set up for myself in an unused bedroom. The pool table. That’s right, I had a pool table, and I had a room dedicated solely to playing pool while listening to music and sipping top-shelf liquor. Though I’d bought the pool table second-hand, it needed no restoration. Still, I maintained the mahogany and regularly cleaned the rich burgundy felt, and ensured both the sticks and the balls were properly cared for as well. It was the sort of extravagance I eagerly allowed myself as a childless married person, but at this point in my life I can’t even grasp that level of grandeur. It feels otherworldly.

So I had to make an adjustment. Or, more accurately, a series of adjustments. It was a major life change that more than one mental health professional has categorized as “trauma”, even though I’m hesitant to refer to it as such. Hell, my wife and I were going to be living under the same roof for the first time in nearly a year! Sleeping in the same bed! Kissing good night rather than texting good night! There are people who’d kill for that kind of “trauma”, my current self included.

It hurt to lose things I’d worked hard to achieve. Accomplishments that, in my mind, I had no right to ever have expected of myself. These were things I was proud of, things that made me me, and to let go of them or even to step away from them hurt me. I think I eased the pain by telling myself that it was just temporary, that someday we’d be back in the same house (which was being rented out in our absence). This was obviously a lie, and I probably knew that at the time. Still, this was the only way forward. My wife’s job included health benefits and mine did not. She had to work; I had to be the one to raise the kid.

Up next: Mr. Mom, wherein I relive the initial trials and tribulations of that SAHD life.