'I was told I was insane and I'd crack in a week'

It's work-life balance day. But how do you get the balance right? Adam Brophy tells how he left his office job to mind his baby daughter at home - but quickly found the bills mounting

Four years ago I gave up my job as a commissioning editor with publisher Gill & Macmillan. I used to crawl through the Dublin traffic every morning and evening with the hundreds of thousands of other commuters. I sat in my company car and listened to Ian Dempsey and Eamon Dunphy at either end of the day. As a result I could quote Gift Grub sketches verbatim and had the details of the Eircom share debacle down pat.

In between my journeys I published schoolbooks. Thanks to that I was able to own my own home with my then girlfriend, now wife. Thanks to the housing boom, that house was in an area of town we had previously been afraid to walk through after dark with our sweet, suburban, southside sensibilities. Cathy became pregnant. We were young professionals following the well-trodden path to respectability. I was miserable.

There was never any one, single thing that had me down. The commute was irritating but quite short, the job was interesting and my employer always fair. I had prospects. I quickly came to love the part of the city I lived in; its proximity to town; the sense of community I had never experienced elsewhere in Dublin.

I was unhappy but at a loss as to what was causing that feeling or how I could make things better. Then my daughter, Nell, came along and I found myself head-over-heels in love, in that sappy state of utter wonderment that only new parents experience. Wandering around, clutching her to me, I was blissed out, wondering why I hadn't had pots of babies already just to experience this incredible, prolonged high. No amount of regurgitation, excretion, or witching-hour howls could knock it out of me.

So, when it came to making decisions regarding childcare after Cathy's maternity leave finished, I decided to stay at home. My brother-in-law (a father of two) told me I was insane, I would crack within a week. "There's a big difference between a couple of hours every night and weekends, and 24-hour vomit duty, big fella," he told me.

My boss presumed my resignation was given in jest in an attempt to lever extra readies out of him. My mates (childfree, most of them) scratched their heads. "So what do babies do then? Do they like football?" Suddenly I was in the gaff, alone but for an infant, organising clothes-washing and visits to the supermarket with all the paraphernalia kids come with. All the usual clichés you come across in bad movies about unsuitable men being left with babies turned out to be untrue. It was a doddle. The weight around my neck loosened, my mood brightened in general. For the first time in years I saw the future as one open to possibilities, instead of a long line of hoops to jump through. I felt I was taking responsibility for what was to come.

Then the bills started coming in and the money started running out midway through the month. What had we been thinking? We had extra expenses, less income, and we had been constantly broke before. I was earning some cash finishing off a project for Gill & Macmillan from home, but that ended within three months.

We were missing standing orders, our gas, electricity, and phone were cut off on separate occasions, and I was entitled to €143 per week on welfare (€131 for me, €12 for Nell. Do they think babies come at 1950s prices?).

That may be a generous amount in some developing countries but nowhere near enough to fill the void left by my pay packet. We had not planned well, we just kind of thought we could get by, like we always had. We couldn't. We had to take a lodger into our spare room and I started selling Esat BT's residential phone service in the evenings. Some months we broke even, some months we spent more than we made, but every month it was a struggle to make it to the 27th when Cathy would get paid.

We got married, then used that as an excuse to remortgage, incorporating all our debts into one loan and putting aside some emergency cash at the same time. We just about managed only because we were fortunate to own our own home and had the benefit of one good salary.

Looking back on this experience now a number of things strike me. The most important is that I have developed a fantastic relationship with my four-year-old daughter. God only knows if that will last, but for now I am clinging to the delusion I will always be the only man in her life. That sense of utter devotion has never waned.

You have choices when your first child arrives: one parent can choose to stay home, or you enter the childcare market. We now have some experience of the latter and have found that the services available are excellent, but incredibly pricey. A city-centre creche will set you back €900 plus per month. If you have two or more kids in childcare, unless you are in a ridiculously well-paid position, you are working for the pleasure of holding down a job and maintaining a career. And this is something many people have to do.

Usually it is the mother who stays at home. In the past few years I have met a handful of fathers who are primary carers but we are oddities in the playgrounds. Whether it is mother or father who is at home the groundshift since I was a child is so vast that rarely is the so-called "domestic technician" not holding down some sort of a part-time job.

The reality is that both parents need to be working for the family to have the standard of living which is now considered the norm. We presume we need a car less than four years old, a new fitted kitchen, a holiday in the sun each year and preferably a week skiing over the winter break. Then there's the investment property and getting insured up to the eyeballs.

This is insane and the insanity grows as our four-month-old children are introduced to the variety of carers who will look after them for up to 60 hours a week for the following four years of their lives. But at least they will be travelling to and from the creche in a recent-model vehicle.

Taking the step to stay at home involves more than just giving up the job. You give up luxuries and you give up certain choices.

Sometimes it is obvious the father would be best suited to staying at home. Maybe he earns less than his partner, maybe he is not finding his career particularly satisfying, maybe he would rather spend his days up to his elbows in nappies and nappy rash. Sometimes mum is the obvious choice. But it is our societal and not our biological roles we need to question.

The hardest thing I have had to address in recent years is my own identity. I found it very difficult to accept I was a househusband and would not admit to it even on the occasions when I had no other work. I was always doing something else as well. There were a number of reasons for this.

A lot of the time staying at home can be deadly boring. You cannot sit there sipping Chianti and watching Rikki Lake; if the TV is on, it is for a steady diet of Barney and Bear in the Big Blue House. You can get lonely and feel you have little to contribute to conversation when you meet friends out of the house. This is an age-old housewife complaint and I managed for a long time by viewing the situation as temporary. Finances are also a problem; your budget has to be revised to survive. I had an ongoing paranoia that my friends thought I had copped out just to avoid working. Yeah right, I had planned on dragging a screaming toddler around Tesco looking for somewhere to change a full nappy before things went nuclear, instead of sticking author lunches on the company credit card.

But the greatest problem I faced was accepting to myself that I was no longer a "commissioning editor", a "professional", going somewhere, anywhere.

Our identities are intricately linked with our jobs and our roles in society. As men, we are traditionally expected to support our families and we do that by going out to work. It is not hard to adapt your role according tothe needs of those most important to you, your family. Infants should not be in care all the time; it's a non-argument. Experts say that it can be detrimental to their development if they are taken care of by somebody other than their parents for more than 25 hours a week. Think of your own childhood, remember how long 25 hours seemed? Forever.

Your kids need you. It is that simple and yet hugely complicated at the same time. If you can adapt your lifestyle so that your family can live comfortably and you need to assume the role of carer, could you consider it? The rewards far outweigh any new car or extension. My Nell is far from the perfect child, I am sure I have indulged her more than is healthy. She fights with other kids and in the past has gone as far as to piss on our living-room carpet to wind me up. We engage in battles of wills every day, which she invariably wins, but she has grown up presuming her Dad is always available and I would not have it any other way. I am a brutal housekeeper and an even worse cook but nobody has died yet. I am still "always doing something else". I have worked, among other things, as a security guard, a media monitor, a telecoms salesman and a freelance editor, and now I am studying again.

In December 2004 daughter number two, Mia, arrived and all those other things now have to be worked around her schedule. She came along at a time when our family life and income were still in a state of flux, yet she found a family far less anxious at her arrival than we had been at her older sister's.

We have not discovered a magic recipe for surviving on buttons, but we now manage our finances a little better than we used to and live within our means. I combine minding the kids with work and study, but for my own sake and the family's they are taken care of two days a week by an excellent creche/Montessori in Fairview.

I still struggle with my responsibility occasionally and look enviously at those besuited office workers strolling to work, sipping cardboard cappuccinos, as I attempt to come up with yet another day's entertainment for the most demanding audience in the world. But most days I give thanks for the baby drool left on the shoulder of my T-shirt, and that my primary concern is holding off on demands from my eldest daughter for chocolate before midday; and not cutting costs in the stationery cupboard.

My happiness is wrapped up in my children's and, through choosing to become a father, I gave up having any other choice on that matter. My role is not a temporary one, it is the most demanding, thought-provoking and ultimately rewarding one I could have dared to choose.

Adam Brophy is a househusband, freelance editor and trainee psychotherapist who hopes to qualify in 2007 and continue to work around his children's needs