Fatherhood continues to be quite a journey for me. Okay, that’s a daft thing to say. Fatherhood will be a journey for any dad. In my case, it has gone in a somewhat crazy circle.
As I stated in my ‘farewell’ blog post, I was preparing to go back into the world of paid employment. This followed many years of being the at-home parent and main carer for my kids.
At this point I am going to digress for a moment. You’ll notice in the title of this blog post that I’ve made reference to having been a stay-at-home dad. This phraseology has always troubled me a little bit.
Why so? Well, for many years I was an at home parent but the truth is I have never been economically inactive. Some of this time I had a part-time job, most of the time my sole source of income was this blog. When I initially gave up full-time paid employment, I never referred to myself as a stay-at-home dad as I knew I would continue working in some form, simply fewer hours and in a role that enabled me to focus on the family.
Other people called me a stay-at-home dad and I got called it so much, the title stuck! I did eventually start using the term to describe myself but only because everyone else had decided that’s how I should be referred!
Anyway, to get back to the matter in hand, way back in 2012 when I left full-time employment, part of the motivation was the fact we were never on top of housework. Mrs Adams worked full-time, I worked full-time and we had one and subsequently two infants in the house. Staying on top of chores was a constant struggle and I felt someone needed to take charge of the family home. That person was going to be me!
For the next few years I did an incredibly mediocre job at household management. Nonetheless, the house was kept in a reasonable-ish state of tidiness and DIY and other tasks were dealt with within a reasonable timeframe. Let’s put it this way, things were not bad enough for my wife to insist we put Service Level Agreements in place.
My kids are now considerably older. The mega-intensive years of parenting are but a memory and I have been in paid employment for some time.
Guess what? We are, once again, constantly struggling to keep on top of housework and household management can be tricky. There are only so many hours in a day and by the time I’ve done a full day of work, driven the kids to wherever they need to be and had the audacity to eat some food, well, I don’t much feel like dragging a vacuum cleaner around the house.
Yes folks, we’ve gone full-circle: I’ve gone back to paid-employment and the house is a mess once again. Then again, this was inevitable, right?
And no, I do not feel any guilt about this. The economic realities of the past few years have been difficult to navigate and the cost of living has rocketed up. While we may have had a tidier house with someone attempting to manage the household, we couldn’t have gone on much longer without me going back into the world of work because our family finances dictated it was necessary.
That said, I do need to find a way to improve the way the household is managed. I don’t quite know how I am going to do that, but I need to find a way. If you have any suggestions about how I can balance working longer hours and keeping on top of household tasks, do let me know!
1 thought on “From stay at home dad to working parent”
The point about never having been economically inactive is a fair one: “stay-at-home dad” tends to erase the part-time work and the blog that kept things going. I also appreciated the honesty that the house slipped back into chaos once you returned to paid work, and that you feel no guilt about it. There are only so many hours after a full day, the school runs and dinner. It sounds as if the real change is less about who does the hoovering and more about agreeing what can slide for a while. How did the kids take the switch?