WHEN YOUR LIFE ISN'T WHAT YOU WANT, CHANGE IT

My husband went from managing three restaurants to being a stay-at-home dad and that one thing changed everything. We were at a crossroads in our lives and this extreme step while scary made us realize that money truly can't buy happiness, especially when it's at the expense of your family.

Why Quitting His Job Saved Our Marriage

I recently acquired my real estate license and juggling clients, creating lesson plans (for my preschool homeschoolers, and community college students), while serving on a school board I have spent quite a bit of time away from my husband and kids. And yet I am the happiest I have been in years. I'm sleeping great and I'm making time for the things that I really love.

Don't misconstrue my words, I loved being a stay-at-home mom. Being able to see everything that my kiddos did every second of the day, learning and loving how to bake and writing my first four books but what I didn't realize was how unbalanced my marriage had become. Or how while our kids saw me 100% of the time, their father was only in their lives possibly 10% of the time. Being a wife, mother, and father all rested on my shoulders. It wasn't fair for me to get to enjoy our kids and pursue my dreams while my husband worked away-funding it all. So we decided to revert back to our original plans for ourselves as a couple, our true selves, what we were when we were in college, when we met. A time when we allowed ourselves to be free to dream and live unapologetically.

For some reason once we had kids we adopted roles of what we thought we were supposed to be. We lost ourselves but more importantly we lost the way to each other. We lived under the same roof and had two amazing kids together, but we were living completely separately and he became a paycheck to me. When I realized that he could fulfill his role by simply mailing me a check, I was terrified.

How had we gotten to this point? How had his 80 hour work weeks become the norm? How had I adopted all the household chores, child rearing responsibilities, held down a part time teaching job, and written four books? Well, I was filling my loneliness. The deep and constant longing for my best friend was being buried in busy work. While undoubtedly busy work that I loved and passions that I had always wanted to pursue, but I know if we had remained on that course I would have been racked with guilt and my husband would have been equally plagued with resentment.

We had no balance in our relationship, or in our parenting, but our love and respect for one another was and is unparalleled. That guided us back to ourselves and to the people that we each married.

Through a series of tear-filled, ugly crying and honest conversations we decided that my husband would quit his job and stay home with our two sons. I would get my Real Estate license, something that I had always wanted to do.

Now all the financial responsibility was on my shoulders I wasn't overwhelmed, like I had been the last four years, when everything but the financials, were all on me. This was because for the first time in years I had a partner. When I was at the university's library studying up on Real Estate Law, I knew my children were safely at home with their father. When I walk in the door after showing houses all day, the house has already been cleaned, and dinner is cooking away in the oven. If I forget to check if we have Zip lock bags before going to the store, I now had someone I could call, who could check for me. For the first time as parents we are balanced. I don't mean in the keeping score sort of way, but in the security that we each feel in our relationship.

While being a stay-home-dad is something that is much more prevalent in our society now, it is still stigmatized, however that's not the thing that people have the hardest time wrapping their head around when they hear of our new arrangement. It's that fact that at a time where a number of college grads are having to move back in with their parents, how could my husband quit a job? Especially with two small children at home? In all honestly that frightened my husband, but for me what was more frightening was how we were going to give money have that much power? Were we really going to let the security of a savings account end our marriage? When phrased that way, the answer was clearly, an emphatic no. We struggled for a little bit, before I sold my first house, our savings was quickly depleted, but knowing that neither of us were going anywhere we got through it, and our children soured. Turns out they just needed their dad, not money in the bank.

I'm thankful for our second chance and for being married to a person that hates change but trusts me enough to sometimes just leap first, no questions asked.