Here's a lie I tell about leaving my career for full-time parenthood—and why I'm going to keep telling it

Being on the Senate floor is actually more fun than changing a diaper, which I keep forgetting for some reason

Trade a lucrative legal career for full-time parenthood, and you’re going to get some questions. Last week, I tried to address why I did it—the answer, of course, being that a frenetic internal sheepdog made me do it.

They say inside you are two wolves. But not me. I just have a sheepdog.

Probably the next most common question is how I feel about it.

There are a few different possible answers for this. But none is perfect, thanks to the Conversational Triple Constraint, a groundbreaking model that I just made up. When answering a complex question like this in casual conversation, there are three categories—Accurate, Succinct, and Meaningful. The problem is, you can only have two.

You can choose only two.

The truest and most succinct answer is: it’s complicated. Unfortunately, this isn’t interesting or illuminating enough to be a viable response in conversation.

The answer that is both most correct and the most meaningful is—this project! That’s right: the entirety of The Fare Well Files. Which is, uh, not succinct. Telling someone to read a series of essays as an answer to their polite question is like offering to strap them to a submarine when they ask for a glass of water.

So when people ask this, I typically stick with an answer that I think is both satisfying and quick: “A bad day as a dad is better than a good day as a lawyer!”

It’s perfect, as a conversational device. People can smile, nod, and then move on to whatever else they’d like to talk about. It plays into the folk wisdom that lawyers are kind of bad and that being a lawyer is also bad. It doesn’t burden people with negativity or detail, and it has a pleasant rhetorical symmetry.

It’s perfect. Or, I suppose, it would be perfect, if it were true.

A good day as a lawyer (feat. all three branches of the federal government and C-SPAN)

I hate to admit it, but I had some pretty good days practicing law. Take, for instance, my very last day before I quit for good. It was one of my best—and not because I was approaching the finish line.

It was late fall in Washington, DC and I was wrapping up a month-long stint working as Special Counsel for a United States Senator. I had thought that my previous job, working at a high-profile firm in DC, would be my last. But this opportunity came up very unexpectedly after I gave my notice there. It was like in those heist movies: they wanted me to come out of (four-week) retirement for One Last Job.

It arose because one of my mentors and former employers had been unexpectedly nominated to be a Justice on the United States Supreme Court. The gig was to support my home-state Senator as he participated in the confirmation process from his position on the Senate Judiciary Committee.

I wasn’t there long, but it was a blast. Very West Wing-ish. I have never enjoyed following politics, quite the opposite. To me, it always felt like a soap opera or professional wrestling or something. But it’s one thing to watch something like that, and quite another to be on the production team. And that’s literal—a lot of our hearings were on TV, and I was often just out of frame, taking notes or doing research on the fly. I have to admit that, for all my prior distaste for it, it was fun to spend some time in the ring.

A rare occasion when I was in-frame

On my last day, the Senate held its confirmation vote. I had been invited by my boss to watch from the floor of the Senate Chamber, the one you see on C-SPAN with that iconic blue carpet. (I was just out of frame!) They read out each senator’s name, and one by one I heard each call out their “Aye” or “Nay.” In the end, they voted to confirm, and my work was done.

Then, as if that wasn’t cool enough, I immediately hopped in an Uber and went through the dark DC streets to the White House lawn. There, surrounded by my friends and colleagues, I got to see my former boss be sworn in by the President. It was absolutely surreal.

Now—very, very little of what I did as a lawyer looked anything like that day. And very few opportunities in law offer that much excitement, intrigue, or sense of importance. But I can’t deny it: that was a good day.

A bad day as a stay-at-home dad (feat. dishes, guilt, and meltdowns)

So now let me tell you what a not-so-great day looks like in my current career. At random, I’ll pick: yesterday.¹

I wake up at about six to my two-year-old bellowing. I feel like trash. I had stayed up until one in the morning revising my first Substack essay as if I were planning to file it in federal court—despite the fact that I was writing for an audience which, to put it charitably, didn’t exist.

I make breakfast in a dish-piled kitchen—the usual empty carb (today, frozen waffles) that I balance nutritionally by putting some kind of sugar on it (today, jam). I push away nagging guilt about this because breakfast is the only meal that I can count on them to eat willingly and I’m not about to make my morning harder.

While I play Toaster Chef, my wife gets ready for work. She’s a Harvard MBA who does strategy for a large business her parents founded. She’s poised to lead the company in the next few years, at which point I expect to still be washing the same dishes that are currently in the sink.

My wife takes the kids to their morning preschool on the way to work. Those short hours to myself in the morning are a huge blessing, though I have complicated feelings about them. For one thing, I feel a vague sense of survivor’s guilt when I think about parents who don’t have that help. I wonder if it’s unfair to call myself a “full-time parent.” More than that, I worry that using childcare is unnecessary and selfish. If it were enabling gainful employment, I’d probably feel differently. But I usually use it for creative projects—projects I take very seriously, but which are still purely speculative and haven’t made me a dime.

Today, I use school time to try to finish my essay. The morning flies by—just as I get in a groove, it’s time to pick them up. As soon as we’re home, my hungry son throws his usual huge Pre-Lunch Fit. This is followed by Lunch Fight, where I try to get them to eat, then the first of many Share Fights, where they lose their minds over some item neither of them will care about ten minutes from now. I wearily repeat “Do you want a time-out?” like a mantra while scrubbing dishes. I realize I have a headache.

I send them off for an hour of independent play. This is supposed to be good for kids. I think it probably is, but that’s not why most parents do it religiously. The real reason is that it gives the grown-up some alone time—at least in theory. (If I left my job for the love of my kids, why am I always trying to be left alone?) I try to work on my essay through repeated interruptions of “Dad I’m boooored.” Just as a revolt is about to break out, I hit publish. A flood of adrenaline rushes through my veins, and not the fun kind. I wonder if putting myself out there was a bad idea.

After Free Play, I often take the kids out somewhere to run around. But this headache is really starting to bloom. So I spend one of my most tightly-budgeted resources: screen time. Screens are your child’s favorite thing to do by a huge margin. There is also an entire industry whose purpose is to tell you to feel very bad if you let your kids use screens too much. I’ve been trying to cut back lately, but today I put on a movie and lay down in hopes that I can clear my headache with a powernap.

Forty-ish minutes later, I wake up substantially recovered. But my attempts to pry the kids from the TV spark tantrums. I try to placate them with snacks and activities, to no avail. I grit my teeth and try to hang on until the reinforcements arrive. I just hope those reinforcements aren’t working late.

Finally, my wife gets home. But just then, my daughter starts to complain of a mysterious stomach pain. This has been a trigger for my wife and me ever since my emergency appendectomy a few years back. We tense up individually, which leads to tension between us. I figure some space might help, so I make a needed grocery run. But I spend too long weighing cheese options and I miss dinner, which my wife does not appreciate. (Remember when I worked at the Senate?)

I come home and help wrangle the kids to bed, despite their best efforts to stall. Each time I say “good night,” it sounds a little less loving and a little more firm. Finally, I close their doors for the last time. Another day in the books. I wish I could feel the satisfaction of a job well done, but mostly it’s a cocktail of relief and guilt. I feel like I’ve been largely avoidant rather than present, but I’m still exhausted, physically and emotionally. I’d like to do something fun or relaxing. Instead, I scroll a little and go to bed early. Because I think I’m getting sick, and tomorrow my boy might wake me up at 5.²

Maybe Monet’s water lilies are truer than photos of water lilies (feat. rose-colored recollections)

Photo by Shay Zukerman on Unsplash

So is a bad day as a dad better than a good day as a lawyer? You could say so! Unless you’re picky about saying things that are true, in which case, no, it’s not.

I mean, how could it be? It was never a fair comparison. Both of these career paths have good days and bad days. And good days tend to beat bad days.

But still, I say it. And honestly? I’m probably going to keep saying it.

Because even after I’ve disproven it logically to myself, I still feel like it’s right for some reason. I really do mean it when I say it. It’s like an impressionistic painting. Up close, it’s nonsense colors, but step back and a truth is evoked. Not a literal one, but an emotional and experiential one.

I’m sure there are several reasons for this, but one has been on my mind lately. I recently came across a Substack piece (embedded below) by psychology researcher Adam Mastroianni³ wherein he explains how our negative memories fade faster than positive memories. This leaves us with pleasantly filtered recollections of earlier eras of our lives.

The end is nigh and here's why

I think this effect is especially acute for memories of parenting young children. If I compare distant memories of practicing law with distant memories of fatherhood, then suddenly my stock answer about bad days and good days starts to ring a little more true.

Let’s compare again, with this in mind.

Reweighing good days and bad days

What memories do the good days in law leave you with? I remember intellectually stimulating conversations with smart people. Love those. I remember the satisfaction of finally cracking some logical puzzle I’ve been chewing on, or finding the perfect case I need to make a key point. Very satisfying. And I remember enjoying the validation I felt when I was in a room with big shots, or when I impressed someone with my credentials. Not bad.

How about the memories of being a parent? I haven’t been one for too long, so I’ll go back as far as I can—to the infant stage. This is perfect because it’s famously hard. And I know in theory that it was challenging. I know that I was often sleep deprived, or nap-trapped, or my nerves were shot thanks to the uniquely gut-wrenching sound of a wailing baby. I even remember saying things like “this is really hard” out loud to people.

But when I look back, I remember different feelings. I remember smiles, giggles, and snuggles which, if you could buy them on the street and inject them, would be a Schedule I substance. I remember the fascination of watching my kids develop, and the thrill I felt as they hit new milestones. Have you ever had a baby—one that you made—call you “dada” for the first time? This is one of the few indisputable ten-out-of-ten experiences that life has to offer.

As I reflect on it, I’m realizing that I don’t remember very many activities or events. Mostly I just remember moments, snapshots. I remember a person, and one that I love superlatively. I know I had hard days with both of my babies. But with a little Magic Memory Dust, even those days feel like they could beat the good days of being an attorney.⁴ This effect might even compound with time—which might explain why people’s apparently unanimous deathbed advice is to spend more time with loved ones.

“I can make your life as hard as I want and you won’t remember it, lol”

It occurs to me that my choice to write about yesterday may not have been so “random” after all. When I picked it, I just thought it’d be easy to write about because it was fresh on my mind. But maybe I knew subconsciously that I couldn’t make my point unless I focused on a day where the hard parts were still fresh. I’m finishing this piece over a week after I first drafted my play-by-play of that day, and already I’m wondering whether it could have really been that bad. If I had waited to journal about it until a month after the fact, maybe the entry would have gone something like:

“Another day spent with my favorite humans in the world. These kids are getting so grown up, and I’m so proud of them. In my spare time I managed to publish my first Substack essay, a new project that I’m so excited about! That night, I bought some cheese.”

Is that more accurate? It’s hard to say. But it’s clearly more succinct. And I believe it’s more meaningful.

I can live with two out of three.

1. At time of writing.

2. He did.

3. Here’s the link to his Substack: https://substack.com/@experimentalhistory

4. The hard thing about this is that, as nice as Yesterday might seem, you’re always only ever living Today. So it’s difficult, or maybe impossible, to follow the ubiquitous advice parents get to “enjoy every moment”—something you only hear from people who aren’t currently doing it. More thoughts on this to come.

If you’ve considered quitting work forever, my story may interest you