My family’s personal experience about choosing to walk away from daycare permanently, how becoming a SAHM was never part of my “plan,” and how grateful we are for the decision every single day.

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Tears streamed down my face for the third time that week as I drove out of the parking lot and away from the daycare, where I had once again left my crying toddler to go to work for eight hours.

This was going on a month and a half of our first experience with daycare.

I was waiting for the part everyone told me would come. The words “it will get easier!” echoed somewhere in the back of my mind, but easier was nowhere in sight. Since day one, Viv cried as we approached her classroom and held on to me as tight as she could with her face buried in my neck, her silent way of begging me not to let her go before the crying started.

It gutted me every single day I handed her off to one of her teachers. They would smile and try to calm her down, assuring me she would be okay in a few minutes, then wished me a “Have a good day!” as I hung up her coat and bag.

I usually returned it with a weak smile. Then, with a kiss for Viv telling her I love her and I’ll see her later– I promise!–I made my way quickly down the long hallway and out the door as fast as I could, hoping no one else would stop me on my way out and see the tears pooling in my eyes.

After a full month of carefully researching which daycares had the best reviews, and working on finding one of them that had a spot open for her age (not easy, by the way), we had finally landed on our first choice. A semi-boujee daycare franchise that was a structured environment and included a curriculum based on their age, outside time twice a day, nap and quiet time after lunch, and in-house homemade meals (breakfast and lunch) with two snacks provided, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. It seemed like the Four Seasons for childcare.

And they somehow had one spot open for her because another little was moving up a classroom. Talk about good timing!

We were excited to give Viv the opportunity to be social and learn while simultaneously allowing me to get back to work after being home with her for 5 months. The daycare was also conveniently located in the area, and wasn’t out of the way for me to drop her off in the morning before I headed to the office. It all just seemed to work…in theory. In practice it was something different entirely.

Despite the rocky start with teary drop-offs, we kept bringing her. Everyone we talked to–her teachers, other parents, parents whose kids were older now but had been through daycare as kids–kept telling us it gets easier. She’ll get used to it. Trust the process. Hindsight is always 20/20, but when I think back to hearing people say these things, I remember feeling so icky hearing these things.

Why would I want her to get used to being left behind everyday? Her undeveloped brain doesn’t understand what’s happening or why.

My head listened to what everyone was telling me. Surely they must know something I don’t. But my gut knew something felt off. Call it mother’s intuition if you want, but I just didn’t feel right about it. Even though it felt like I was going against everything I valued and believed in, I choked it down and stuck with it.

Our typical day looked like dropping her off in the morning before I went to work, about 7:40am, and my husband picking her up around 2-3pm when he finished up his workday. The two of them would then head to the park if it was nice, or head home and play, and I would get home around 5:30pm after my workday wrapped up.

After awhile, things hit a rhythm. I’m not saying they were working out, but everyone just kind of settled into this new normal. Except me.

I was starting to feel like I was really missing out. I was the one who had to rush her out the door so we were on time, leave her crying and sad in the morning, be away from her all day, and then get home and spend maybe two hours with her before she went to bed, which included dinner and bedtime routine. Not a ton of time for playing and fun and connection.

I was never resentful of my husband, but I was starting to get really jealous. He’s the one that got the warm, excited greeting when he picked her up because she was thrilled to be going home and a couple of solid, uninterrupted hours of quality playtime and laughs.

He was really amazing through this by being such a great partner and dad. Most days, he would clean up dinner stuff, and even got dinner on the table (thank the maker for Hello Fresh!), so I could spend as much time playing with her as possible before bedtime and waking up to do it all over again.

By the end of the fifth month, Viv had been sick more than she had been healthy. Every other week she was coming down with a fever or had some new cough or runny nose.

In case you didn’t know, daycare, much like school, is a petri dish of germs. The kids pass around the same illnesses on repeat until eventually it turns into something else. Everyone always has a runny nose or a cough, despite the constant hand washing. Even during the summer months.

In talking with other moms and parents who had gone before us, most of them said their kids were sick for the first couple of years of daycare. YEARS. Just a constant revolving door of sickness for years before their little immune systems finally kicked everything that was thrown at them.

If that wasn’t enough to make me feel terrible, Viv’s hands were being washed so much that her skin was actually starting to peel off of the tops of her hands because they were so dry from soap and water (and winters in Minnesota). We had to bring in lotion with a note saying she needed to use it every time after she washed her hands so they wouldn’t be burned and red.

The rules of daycare also dictate that a sick child must be fever-free for 24 hours before returning and, unless she got sick on a Friday (which was never), that meant she had to miss the next day of daycare. Which meant I was starting to miss a lot of work. And, understandably, my employer wasn’t exactly thrilled with my unexpected absences every other week.

At the time, I worked in the finance industry in client services and part of my job was preparing for and greeting clients as they came into the office for meetings. Working from home wasn’t an option in my role and the office I worked in wasn’t large enough for me to move into a different role that might be more accommodating.

I was already feeling guilty for not spending time with my baby girl, and now for missing so much work because she was always sick with something. It is such a bizarre and horrible feeling carrying guilt 24/7 for things outside of your control. It also really started to affect my health and mindset. I felt defeated all the time, like I was barely keeping my head above water trying to keep everyone happy and healthy. Everything just felt heavy.

I cried almost every day. Not even at drop-off anymore, but also when I got pictures of Viv at daycare playing and learning, on my way home from work, at night putting Viv to bed, in the shower by myself, and even in the kitchen putting dishes away.

I’ll never forget the evening we were sitting at the table eating dinner when my husband and I were chatting about events of the day when one topic led to another and he said to me, “babe, when is the last time you laughed?” It caught me so off guard that I didn’t even answer, I just burst into tears.

That moment led to a big conversation between the two of us. It turns out that my husband was also feeling pretty burnt out with getting up extra early to get to work, because he was trying to get done as quickly as he could so that Viv wouldn’t have to spend as much time at daycare. He was also battling exhaustion because he had to play with a two year old for two hours and make dinner before I even got home to provide some relief.

What I felt in having that conversation with him can only be described as relief. Like a giant weight slowly lifting from my chest. I felt seen and validated in my feelings. But I also had no idea he was feeling this way prior to this conversation and, the more I thought about it, the more sense it made, and the more sad I became that I didn’t even realize he was struggling too because I was in survival mode on my own.

We learned a big lesson in parenting and communication that day. That is to say, don’t be afraid to talk about how you’re feeling, and be a team–first and foremost. Check in with each other during major transitions and life altering events to make sure each one of you is handling things in a healthy, stable way. We both felt so much better not only talking about the elephant in the room, but actually coming together and realizing it was there in the first place.

But then we had some other big questions to find answers to, like “what do we do about it?” and “how do we make this more enjoyable for our family?”

We tossed ideas around, but none of them were feasible or a real solution, just Band-Aids to the root issue. Neither of us could change our work schedules, such as start times or end times. This was bigger and deeper than just taking a vacation as a family to feel more connected. And we were already a very healthy family, eating clean and doing daily workouts, so it wasn’t really a lifestyle change we needed to make all the sickness to go away.

And then, after some silence, Jaremy said what I believe we were both thinking for awhile, but afraid to say out loud: “What if we pulled her out of daycare and you be a stay-at-home mom?”

I looked up at him from staring at the table and after a few seconds said, “…can we do that?” to which he replied, “I have no idea. Let’s run some numbers tomorrow.”

The next day, we brewed a pot of coffee, turned on Peppa Pig to occupy Viv, and sat down with calculators and a list of all of our expenses and what we each made monthly. As it turns out, my salary was basically paying for Viv to go to daycare and that was it. The few hundred extra dollars per month it was bringing in was something my husband assured me he could make up if he spent a couple of extra hours a week working. If he had more time to do a few more things, rather than worrying about picking Viv up so she was spending the least amount of time possible miserable, the dollars on his paycheck would go up.

We also figured out that some expenses would go down, such as gas traveling to daycare and work for me, and we could cancel Hello Fresh (which is honestly not super expensive in the first place) and just increase our grocery bill slightly by planning out dinners in advance.

And even though we wouldn’t be saving any money by pulling her out of daycare, per se (because I would be leaving my job and income), in a way it felt like we actually were saving money because we had been paying for her to go basically half the time.

When your kid is sick, you still pay for them to be there regardless if they are physically in the building or not. So it starts to really become irritating when you are paying money to the very place that got your kid sick in the first place and they aren’t even allowed to be there (not that we would want her there while she was sick anyway, but you get the idea). The whole thing is just maddening.

Possibly the best part about this entire idea was the mental load this would save for both of us, even over the money not being spent on daycare (which was about $1,200 per month). My husband talked about how much of a relief he would feel if he didn’t have to rush through his workday to pick up Viv, and he could actually sleep in a little later knowing he didn’t have to finish working as fast as possible because she would be home and much happier.

He also shared that having someone at home who was keeping up with cleaning and tidying up and making dinner would be really nice. It’s not that he was unwilling to do it, just that it would be another mark in the “pro” column of him being able to focus solely on work and then coming home with no pressure, just to have quality family time. Something else that we weren’t getting much of with our current arrangement.

And we both agreed that not being sick all the time would probably be the biggest benefit. We both have strong feelings about health and wellness and consider it one of our core values. Being sick so often felt like we were full of crap saying one thing and letting something else entirely different happen. Living your values is wildly important to your happiness as a human, in my opinion.

So, we ran the numbers and talked. Ran the numbers again. Mulled it over for a couple of days. Ran numbers for a third time. Talked about it more. Played the “what if” game. Played “what’s the worst that can happen?” Double checked numbers.

And then I wrote my one month notice to my employer.

When it came down to it, it was a lot easier to walk away from daycare and my job than I thought it would be. The build up to major decisions is where true fear lies. Not after you make the decision.

It took a couple of months for me to figure out how to be a stay-at-home mom and to get used to the flexibility of having so much time while simultaneously feeling like I had no time to do anything.

It’s an odd time paradox that I’m sure someone in the sciences could explain, but I’ve learned that every stay-at-home mom knows how this feels and we all just nod in understanding when a new stay-at-home mom tries to explain it. We all just get it.

Eventually I hit a rhythm and a kind of routine came to be. It isn’t always the exact same every single day. I have learned to role with the punches and let go of certain expectations I had going into being home all the time. That was probably the hardest part.

I’m a former workaholic and an Enneagram 3 (The Achiever), so it’s really hard for me not to have an end goal to work toward or a list to check boxes off of. Sure there are to-do lists, but when the laundry is done and the house is clean, you just start over.

It took me awhile, but I also figured out the importance of filling my own cup and making sure I was taking care of myself and my passions too. That came in the form of daily workouts, dinners with friends, accepting help when I needed a break, and the start of this blog.

I also eventually learned to let go of the guilt and shame of not having my own income. Even typing those words made me sweaty, so clearly I still have some more work to do there. But it is something that takes getting used to that I’m not sure anyone really expects to feel.

For the first year and a half or so, I felt like I had to ask to buy new clothes or a pair of shoes, or that I had to buy the cheapest things I could find, even if it wasn’t quite what I wanted or needed. If I didn’t ask before purchasing, I felt like I had to justify my purchases to my husband.

After awhile, he figured it out and reassured me (repeatedly) that I shouldn’t feel like I was using “his” money. That it was our money, and that he viewed it as our money, not as “his” money. He still tells me this occasionally, but now I only discuss bigger purchases with him or when I know something will be more than usual, like a seasonal clothing haul for Viv.

I’m going on year 3 of being a SAHM and I’m only now starting to feel like I have a handle on life again.

The job itself isn’t brain surgery, but it’s harder than any career I’ve ever pursued. Being a mom is one thing. Actively choosing every day to stay home with your offspring for hours at a time, often without a break, feels insane some days. And there’s no start or end time. You are a mom 24/7/365. Your job doesn’t end at 5pm and it often starts hours before 8am.

It’s grueling and tests your patience. There’s no money in it. Fringe benefits? Ehhh. Not so much.

So, is it even worth it? Absolutely.

When people ask me about being a SAHM, especially those who are thinking about quitting their career to become one, there is one thing I can confidently tell them, and it’s this:

You’ll never regret the time spent with them. Over any career path. Promotions. Job title. You will likely not get to the end of your life and on your deathbed think to yourself “I wish I wouldn’t have spent so much time with my kids when they were growing up.” Can practically assure you that will not cross your mind.

I have been blessed enough to witness milestones, growth, and precious moments with my baby girl that I would have missed otherwise if I would have stayed behind a desk. When I’m having a “wow” moment with my daughter, like when she figures out how to do something new by herself or is helping me in the kitchen, I think to myself that I could have missed this, and what a gift it is that I get to have it.

It’s not something that every family has the luxury of doing. I’m well-aware that we are so fortunate that my husband can be the sole income provider and allow us to live comfortably and have this experience as a family. It’s not something I will ever take for granted.

If you’ve made it this far, I’m guessing you either are considering (or wishing/hoping/praying for) becoming a stay-at-home mom, curious about how I actually left the 9-5, or just really enjoy my storytelling (ha ha ha).

I’m going to assume that you are hoping for some tangible takeaways, rather than just reading to be entertained, so I’m going to share a few of most important parts of our journey with this experience so far that I think will actually help anyone wanting to make this transition.

No. 1: If you truly want to become a stay-at-home mom, I highly encourage you to talk to your spouse or partner about it. In talking with friends, family, and other moms, so many of you are afraid to even talk about it because you think you won’t be supported. That it will just be a hard “no.”

First of all, this breaks my heart. And second of all, you might be surprised how the conversation goes after the initial shock wears off. It is a big deal to quit your job and lose an income. I will never downplay that. But if this is truly on your heart and it’s your dream to be home with your kids, at least while they’re little, I think you owe it to yourself to have the conversation.

Be honest about your feelings and don’t expect an immediate decision or even a response. Make sure it’s understood that this is a serious conversation, not just a nonchalant comment like “wouldn’t it be cool if I stayed home with the kids?” and then you awkwardly laugh. And do not even attempt this conversation while your kids are around or you have any type of distractions.

Make sure you are ready to have a conversation about it. A conversation means both people talking and exchanging ideas back and forth. Try not to just word vomit everywhere and let them get a word in edgewise. Take pauses to give them a chance to respond so they aren’t just sitting there unintentionally ignoring half of what you say from the potential shock (especially if you’ve never mentioned it before).

You know your spouse or partner best, so utilize that to your advantage. For example, I know my husband does not do well with late night conversations. He’s tired from working and it’s time he needs to decompress. I know that if I need to talk to him about something important, I need to call him and talk to him while he’s at work, he’s had coffee, and his brain is firing on all cylinders, or immediately when he gets home around 3pm before he shuts down for the day. Play to your partner’s strengths.

But for the love, have the conversation. Don’t keep putting it off because it’s “not the right time.” There isn’t a right time when it’s something you want really bad. And time is ticking on this one. Your kids are growing up fast.

No. 2: Do your best to understand how they feel. My guess is that initially they might feel shocked and the immediate, knee-jerk response would be something like “You’re kidding, right? No way. Not possible.”

Allow them to have those feelings right away. You just dropped a bomb. How would you feel if the situation were reversed? Shocked, right?

Start with acknowledgement. Example: “I know, it’s a lot and it’s a big ask. But I would really appreciate it if you would take it seriously before totally dismissing it so we can talk about what it could look like. This has been on my heart and I feel really strongly about it, and I would like to at least have a conversation about it when you’re ready to further discuss it.”

And then actually give them time to digest it. A day or two. Maybe a weekend if it’s a busy week. If they don’t bring it up, bring it up again a few days later. “Are you ready to talk about me being a stay-at-home mom yet or do you need another day?”

Also consider the flip-side reaction. I’ll be honest, being a stay-at-home mom was not entirely my idea and I did not feel “called” to be a stay-at-home mom. I was looking for solutions to problems we had in our household, and this happened to fix quite a few of them. It took me a little while to warm up to the idea, but when I started to visualize the possibilities and a better quality of life for everyone, I really started seeing myself in the role.

I also had no idea that Jaremy was feeling so burnt with the arrangement we had. I thought it was all a ‘me’ problem. Turns out he was feeling pretty similar. If you are in a similar type of situation we were, consider just having the conversation about you (or your partner!) quitting their job to stay at home with kids. See what they say. Run the numbers. Maybe your partner doesn’t think it’s possible either, and maybe it’s not, but then at least you would know.

No. 3: Trust your gut. If something feels off or wrong, you’re right. Either figure out why, or don’t, but trust your gut.

This could be super vague advice and applied to just about anything, but it is very good advice regardless. And I am so grateful that I knew in my gut that pulling Viv from daycare was the right decision. I knew we had to get her out of there some way, somehow.

I didn’t have to unpack it or even consider how we could make her experience there better…and while we’re on the subject, if you are having to force a situation to work, it’s NOT actually working. And you probably know (in your gut) that it isn’t. I’m not saying to quit your job to solve it…but I’m not not saying that either.

No. 4: Not everyone will support your decision, even the people you thought would be supportive. There’s always judgement.

If you ultimately do decide that you are going to be a stay-at-home mom and your partner is on board and you put in the notice to the daycare and to your employer, and then decide to start sharing your news with people…expect some push back and a whole lot of questions that are usually filled with judgement.

When I shared with people that I was leaving my promising, stable career in a great industry, most people asked why I didn’t want to work (a fair question coming from those who knew me back in my workaholic days). Others asked if everything was okay. One asked if I got fired. But in most of the conversations I had, there was a lot of subtle (some not-so-subtle) judgement and snide comments. Some people were flat out rude about it.

Lots of moms think it’s not for them. That they could never do it. That they’re a better mom because they work. And if that’s what you believe, then I believe that for you too.

I was told by dozens of moms some version of, “I could never be a stay-at-home mom,” that was usually followed up by several reasons why. Which I politely sat through and listened to even though I wanted to roll my eyes and sometimes even get up and walk away.

Instead I politely nodded and smiled, and eventually tailored my response to be exactly this: “This is what is working for me and my family and I’m grateful for the opportunity to be able to have this time with my kiddo.”

On the off-chance you’re the one doing the judging, consider just how difficult of a decision and transition it is for your friend/sister/coworker/neighbor. Even if you don’t agree, try offering a little support instead of a judgmental or snide comment that makes you feel superior and makes them cry later on. Trust me, they’re already feeling vulnerable and insecure about it. It’s not your job to understand it. It’s your job to support them when they are choosing to share this major life change with you.

No. 5: You will never regret the time you get to spend with your kids at a young age.

I’ve been at this for going on three years, and I’ve met a lot of moms now, many with kids who are in school full time and some that have even graduated high school. Do you want to know what none of them has ever said? “I wish I would have worked through their childhood.”

This was actually something I was told very early on by a close friend who didn’t get the opportunity to be a stay-at-home mom as her kids grew up. I was talking through the decision with her including the doubts and what-ifs, and then she just smiled and said, “Well, all of that may be true. But you’ll never regret this time you’ll have with her.”

I tear up even typing it out now. Because it’s the single best piece of advice I’ve ever received in being a mom. I’d like to think the data was what made me truly decide to make the leap, but I think hearing this actually was everything I needed to hear when I was so unsure about it all.

My journey to being a stay-at-home mom isn’t exactly traditional. I know plenty of moms who knew they were ready to quit their jobs and careers the second the strip turned pink so they could be a stay-at-home mom. I also know a couple moms who would prefer to be working rather than staying home with their kids, but they’re making it work. And then there’s some of us who never thought this would be a part of their life story, and here we are.

There are definitely tough days. Of course. I am in a season of raising one hell of a strong, independent little four-year-old girl who still insists she do everything herself but also still carry her to bed. We are learning all kinds of things together and navigating some big emotions. It’s tough. I cry a lot and so does she.

But I still believe this is one of the best decisions I’ve ever made in this life, so far.