Dad: I Quit a Six-Figure Job to Stay at Home With My Kids

“Both my boys, I think, are too young to understand that what we do isn’t a normal thing,” says Trevor Mulligan. The Los Angeles father isn’t talking about anything actually outrageous, though, just the fact that he chose to become a stay-at-home-dad while his wife financially supports their family — despite the fact that he was raking in an impressive $120,000-a-year at work.

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“It’s still a concept they just don’t get yet,” he tells Yahoo Parenting about his boys Miles, 5, and Mason, 3, in a revealing interview about the struggles and satisfaction of staying home as part of Yahoo Parenting’s “What It’s Like” original video series. “I know we’re going to cross that road soon, and when we do, I hope they’ll understand that just because [that’s] what society thinks, it doesn’t mean that that’s what you have to do…We’re not in the 1950’s anymore. Dads can stay home and take care of kids. We can be as nurturing and caring for our kids as women can be.” Money, Mulligan declares, “is not as important as being able to spend time with my family.”

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Growing up, explains the former advertising executive, “my wife and I both had a parent at home…and we want to provide the same thing for [our boys].” So after more than 20 years climbing the corporate ladder, the Los Angeles professional decided to step out five years ago and become the primary caregiver for his son, who has since been joined by his younger brother. “I was making $120,000 before I left,” says Mulligan. “I was ambitious in my job, in my career and always wanting to advance, getting kind of caught up in that rat race of wanting to move forward, of wanting more and doing more.” All in all, “I was at a good place,” he says, “that I’d been working hard to get to.”

Yet his take-home was “pretty comparable to what my wife was making,” he says of his other half, who handles accounts receivable for a law firm. Her position offered better benefits, though, and he levels, “one of us had to do it, so I jumped ship.” Looking back to the decision five years ago, he says, “At the time it wasn’t very difficult for me to leave my dream job. Advertising is a super-stressful environment…and the wearing and tearing of that over time made it an easy choice for me to just kind of slip out.”

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The choice worked for his wife as well. “She didn’t feel like she had the maternal instincts to be at home with the kids,” he says. “I think it was more her being scared and not knowing how things would work.” He, however, felt up to the task. “I love being around kids,” he says. “I have the energy for kids. And at the time, I was like, “I can stay at home and play with them all day long. I would love it, yes."

Crunching the numbers, the move made sense too. “Ultimately it came down to being a difference of $500 to $1,000 a month that I would bring home at a full time job after paying the nanny and all the other services that we would need to cover what I do now,” he explains. “So $500 to $1,000 isn’t worth it to me to miss this time with my boys, to be a part of their lives. $500 is nothing compared to me seeing my oldest swim for the first time. No money in the world could cover any costs of the experiences that I have.”

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Of course, it wasn’t a seamless transition. “I definitely lost my identity when I became a stay-at-home dad,” he admits. “Those first six months, it was rough. It was terrible. All my expectations were different than what I thought it was going to be and what I was going to be doing.” Not having perspective was hard. “[I wasn’t going to get] a job review like, ‘Oh, you excelled in this area, but you need to work on this area.’ You know, my kids can’t tell me things like that.” He confesses, “I thought I got to play with the kids all day. I didn’t take into account the laundry, the grocery shopping.”

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Ironically, it was his working wife who helped him get into a groove while she was away. “I’d started getting cabin fever,” he recalls. “I had no adult conversations, and she goes, ‘You need to get out and do something.’ I was a deer in headlights.” She encouraged him to sign their son up for swimming lessons and found him a fathers’ support group. “I was stuck in my own little world,” he admits. “And when she told me, ‘I found this group of dads that you should go meet up with,’ I said, ‘Are you kidding me? No way. What are you talking about?’ But it actually turned out to be the greatest thing ever. She paved the way for us.”

Since then he’s developed a routine, firmed up once they welcomed their second child, three years ago. On a typical day, he gets the kids up, dressed, fed and to school, then he notes, “I have a couple hours that’s supposed to be me time, but it always results in me doing laundry or the dishes or grocery shopping on the way home.” Pickups follow, then activities —“If it’s not swimming or surfing, we have gymnastics for both of them,” he says. “My youngest does soccer” — and homework help before dinner. “My wife will get home about 6:00 and we’ll spend a good hour talking about our day,” he adds. Baths, teeth and the “get ‘em into bed, fight 'em, ‘No, stay in the bed,’” dance wraps things up. “Then it’s kind of a re-set from there.”

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He admits, “I have times frequently where my wife walks in the door, and I’m like, ‘I need to decompress.’ There’s definitely some difficult times that I go through with the boys and just fighting and battling or arguing. I mean, they’re 5 and 3. If anybody with a 5- and a 3-year-old tells you differently, they’re lying.” And while the rowdy boys love to roughhouse and wrestle, they also “turn around at the same time and play with My Little Ponies. We play with their dolls, and we play family — and I’m the baby. I have to whine and cry. I’m like, ‘How come I have to do that?’ But I have to do it…They [even] fight over who’s going to be mom.”

Adult time is something that’s fallen by the wayside since he’s opted to be home. “I definitely miss it,” he says. “That’s partly one of my reasons I volunteer with the L.A. Dads group.” He’s now a co-organizer of the group that his wife encouraged him to join, and they get together for Dads’ Nights Out. “I have to get out and socialize with other adults. I can go for a week without talking to any other adults except my wife, not counting the chit-chat at a store because I’m doing things with my boys, not watching TV and seeing the news or sitting there on Facebook.”

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Connecting with dads who work doesn’t come as naturally these days. “I don’t think I have a hard time … [but] I think that sometimes they look at me a little bit differently, like I’m kind of crazy like, "What are you doing? Why are you even doing that?’” he says. “And you know, I just kinda have to laugh. I think that sometimes I can see that glint of jealousy in their eye when they’re looking at me and the relationship I have with my boys.”

He’s given up more than a professional title and salary, though, for it. “We traveled a lot before we had kids, and that’s been the biggest sacrifice we’ve had to make up to this point,” he explains. “We can’t just drop everything and go to Europe and go to Paris or wherever and go sightseeing…We don’t have the financial means right now to even be able to do [date nights].” They buy generic food, cancelled their cable, and drive just one car. “And we’re totally fine giving [things] up because we know this is what’s important for our family and this is what we want…There’s nothing I wouldn’t sacrifice to be here with my boys and watch them grow and become the men that they’ll be.”

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The perception that stay-at-home parents aren’t sacrificing drives him crazy. “There’s a large group of the populace out there that look at us and think that we’re just being lazy,” he vents. “I can’t change their mind, the way that they were raised and the way that they see things. All I can do is try to be a good example and show some other people out there who may want do it, ‘Hey, look. You can.’"

He doesn’t regret leaving the rat race for a second. “The best part for me about being an at-home parent is being able to be there for the moments that I see [things] click with my boys,” he reveals. “I remember going swimming with my son and having him have lessons multiple times and him just crying and fighting and not getting it. And then one day all of a sudden I saw it in his eyes and his eyes just, like, widened and went ding, ‘I get it.’ He’s just swimming and it was amazing. It’s the moments like that that are just… I mean, it seriously makes me cry.”

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He doesn’t intend to miss any more moments like that if he can help it either. “If all goes according to what we’ve planned thus far, I will never return to a normal full-time job,” says Mulligan. “When my boys are in high school, I will be at that volunteer parent, doing what I can to help in the school system.” And when there’s downtime as the kids become more independent? “Maybe by that time I’ll actually have me time and I’ll enjoy it,” he says. “Up to that point I’ll have earned the right to be able to say, ‘No, I’m going home for five hours. And maybe I’m going to eat those bonbons on the couch and enjoy myself.’”

“I think there’s a tremendous amount of pressure to have it all,” he reflects. “But I think we’re just looking at it wrong. Look at the needs, not what society tells us to do or how to do it, but what do we need to keep us mentally, physically and spiritually aligned and happy?” By addressing his, his kids’, and his family’s needs by staying home, he insists, “I have changed for the better…On the patience aspect of it, it’s a night-and-day difference. Now I’m a much happier person with a bigger roller coaster ride. The ups are really, really up and the downs can be really, really down, but overall, I couldn’t be happier. I wouldn’t change anything.”

He explains, “I have never regretted leaving my high paying job to spend more time with my kids.” In fact, Mulligan proclaims, “You couldn’t pay me all the money in the world to take me away from what I’m doing right now. Hands down, this is the most important thing I’ve ever done in my life.”

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