The Decision.

The decision for one of us, my wife or me, to stay home with our little girl was an easy one. Both of us grew up in strong, loving, caring home environments and we adamantly believe that it is our responsibility as parents to provide our daughter an equivalently strong, loving, and caring home environment as she matures. As for which one of us was to stay home…I qualified best for that job.

Three years ago I walked away from a good career in policing. The pay was competitive, health benefits were excellent, and the city possessed an attractive pension. In other words, there was a lot to lose by leaving. But the job was killing me from the inside out. Job stress, more than any other factor, caused me to reconsider what a twenty-five year stint in blue would inevitably do to my health. The statistics, provided by the esteemed Cooper Institute in Houston, Texas, could not be more telling: The average life expectancy of a retired police officer is ten years. Ten years! No thank you. The physiological and psychological affect of stress on a police officer, whether from working in a large city or a small town, has been compared to the PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) soldiers recovering from combat zones experience. The primary difference between the two is the intensity and the longevity of the stressors. Obviously a soldier will experience a greater and more intense stress in battle than an officer ever will on the street. However, the police officer does experience the same unrelenting hyper-awareness– only the police officer experiences it five days a week, 52 weeks a year, for 25 years. For me, the writing was on the wall after only a few years on the job. I knew that if I wanted to enjoy my life before and after retirement I needed to get out. I did. I returned to graduate school, earned a master’s degree, and began teaching in the public school system. Around the same time, my wife also returned to school and has recently earned her RN degree.

Financially, my wife’s profession easily pays double what I make as a teacher. It did not take long for us to determine which one of us would remain at home: me. How many years will I be the primary provider (an idiom I’ve subscribed to myself)? I am not sure. But for now my job is to raise our daughter in a world that still frowns on the idea of a household where the mother works full-time and the father is a "Mr. Mom."