The white-knuckle drive from Tyson's Corner, Va., to Ellicott City each weekday afternoon proved too much for Jeff Anderson.
The stress of trying to beat the clock to pick up his then-3-year-old twin daughters from day care by 5:30 p.m. — a two-hour drive on Interstate 95 if traffic was flowing smoothly — finally caused Anderson and his wife, Heather Abrahams, to toss the two-income-family model.
The couple agreed on what seemed to be the obvious way to stop their lives from spiraling out of control: Anderson, who'd been working in Virginia, would become a stay-at-home father.
He did. They now have four children, ages 4 to 14. And after 11 years, the arrangement is still working for them.
"It was a giant decision, but it wasn't hard to make," said Anderson, who is 48 and a former information technology manager with a national newspaper.
The couple knew their lives were operating on a series of near-misses and constant scheduling tweaks and trade-offs, and that they didn't want to keep coping with the stresses built into every weekday.
"Heather was obviously making more money as an orthodontist than I was, so we sat down and did the math," Anderson said.
"Each evening was about racing to get the kids, make dinner, give baths, get them off to bed, and wake up and repeat. We wanted a better quality of life."
Charles Kyler knows exactly what Anderson is talking about. He and his wife, Carey, parents of two daughters, came to the same conclusion when their firstborn was young.
"When we realized we needed — or, actually, desired — one parent to stay home, we looked at who was making the best income," said the former advertising and marketing director.
"Many men are uncomfortable with a woman who's making more than they are," said Kyler, who is 53. "To them I say, 'Foolish you.'"
Income wasn't the sole deciding factor for either couple, who are friends but had made their parenting choices before they met. They also considered their individual personalities and discussed who could better cope with the impending lifestyle upheaval.
While Anderson loves to socialize, he has always equally enjoyed down time and figured he would find it easier to leave the built-in human interaction of a career behind.
"I default to rest," he said, "while Heather defaults to motion."
Abrahams agrees.
"I am not wired to stay home," she said. "When I'm at work, I can be 100 percent focused on what I'm doing because I know the kids are being taken care of 100 percent, and that's a wonderful thing with monumental benefits for all of us."
Anderson says they are happier as individuals — he had worked long hours, including weekends — and as a couple, since they aren't both playing catch-up every evening.
"Being such a big part of the kids' everyday lives, I get to hear them download their day when they get home," he said of Isabel and Sydney, 14; Miles, 8; and Avery, 4.
"When I was still working, I needed a decompression period when I first walked in," and wouldn't have been so tuned in to the children's immediate needs, he said. "I don't ever see myself returning to the corporate world."
Working at his wife's office and substitute teaching are two possibilities when the time comes to work outside the home again, he said.
Kyler says many people — men and women — tie their self-identities to their jobs.
Kyler has been renovating and enlarging his family's 1899 home in historic Ellicott City for the past 15 years, and keeps very busy juggling those projects and his expanded household duties.
He's also teaching woodworking skills to his daughters — Amelie, 11, and Kati, 14 — and has offered Anderson advice on home renovation and repairs.
Vaughn Winchell, 50, has been a stay-at-home father in Columbia since 1999, and says he is ready for the next phase of life now that his daughters — Rebecca, 21, and Sarah, 19 — are in college.
"People tend to hear 'stay-at-home dad' and either think you're a slacker who couldn't hold a job or you're a tremendous hero," he said, adding that neither is true.
"I had been feeling a lot like George Jetson [in the futuristic cartoon series] when he couldn't get off the treadmill," he said. "Celia and I simply picked a parent to stay home so we could stop cobbling each day together."
Winchell ended up staying home longer than originally planned in order to home-school his younger daughter, who had to drop out of school in the ninth grade because of a chronic illness.
Now he is earning a master's degree in mathematics with a goal of becoming a community college professor next year, a path he chose because he missed having an identity tied to an occupation.
"Besides, it's reached the point since our girls are older that 'stay-at-home dad' is a ridiculous claim," he said. "My position has been eliminated."
All three men say they were never welcomed into what Kyler calls the "mommy crowd."
He and Anderson, who met at day care, took their children to Centennial Park one afternoon several years ago and were met with icy stares from a cadre of stay-at-home mothers.
"The women were visibly disturbed at our presence," Kyler recalled. "They seemed to be thinking 'Why are two men at a playground in the middle of a work day?'
"Stay-at-home dads have to be comfortable about being out of the norm because they will be," he said. "But you fall into a place where you find other dads to have an adult conversation with during the day."
Anderson said he often found himself "sitting like an outlier with the nannies behind the rows of stay-at-home moms" at gymnastics and other places, but it didn't faze him; he was just happy to be there for his kids.
Winchell said whenever he was introduced as the sole father to a bunch of stay-at-home mothers, the group dynamic changed.
"They didn't mean to react negatively; they were simply being real," he said.
Though stay-at-home fathers still aren't common today, the three men agree, none of them feel they merit extra attention on Father's Day, and they prefer to keep plans casual.
Kyler is looking forward to "breakfast in bed and no yardwork."
Anderson's twin daughters said their father doesn't want anyone to make a big deal out of the holiday or buy him presents, nor does their mother on Mother's Day.
"Our family is more laid back," Isabel said. "He just wants to have a nice afternoon with everyone being good."
For Anderson, being accessible to his children nearly all of the time has been an irreplaceable gift.
"I was the last of four kids, and my father was a very typical 1970s dad," he said, adding that growing up in Ohio, he felt closer to his mother. "It would have killed me to wait to get closer to my kids, and luckily I don't think that's the pattern nowadays.
"As a stay-at-home dad," he said, "I love that I'm not an enigma to my kids."