What's Next? #2

I didn't always wonder what I was going to do after the whole stay at home dad thing runs down. I had plans. I was taking action. I was even working on what's next before the whole thing really started.
I began taking classes in mechanical engineering at the University of Houston a few months before my oldest daughter was born. I started by taking an intro to mechanical engineer course. Just one course. The next semester, after my daughter was born, I took a mechanical drawing/drafting course. These were very simple classes, just the beginning courses that a beginning student would take in their first semester. I already had an engineering degree so they weren't hard, I just had to show up, do the work and collect my grade. The big positive with them was that I was actively taking charge of where I was going to end up in the world. I was retiring from work, but I was going to return stronger, better, and even more prepared. Everything was going well until I hit a bit of a glitch with class scheduling. It's theoretically possible to get a mechanical engineering degree taking a few classes at a time, but it's really hard to do it if you can't take any of them during the day. It would take somewhere around 12 years to get them all done if everything went right, and you'd still end up having to take a few during the day. If you have an engineering degree already and you don't need to re-take many of the core classes, you end up with big spaces of time where there is simply nothing that you can take. You need to wait between one and three semesters for another class to come up. There was no way I could sit around that long and just wait, like I said, I had a plan.
I decided to check out the local community college and see what they had that I could use to either work toward a mechanical engineering degree, or at least help me to become a better one. What I came up with was welding. They had quite a good program that taught welding and non destructive testing. I jumped in with both feet figuring that it was a good use of my time. Knowing how to weld could only make me better at whatever I was going to do in the future and I'd end up knowing how to weld stuff. Nothing is more manly than welding.
My wife was a saint. There were many times where she would leave work half an hour early two days a week to meet me at the college where we would swap cars. She'd take the kids back home and I'd spend two hours welding. I'd come home and everyone would already be in bed and she would be exhausted. She really loved me and wanted me to be happy. She still does, but man, she really put forth a ton of energy to keep me sane. I need to go give her a kiss. There are only so many welding classes offered, and eventually I ran out of them. Then took all of the non destructive testing classes they had. In fact, I'm just one class away from an associates degree in welding and non destructive testing. I just need to have a college sanctioned on the job experience to get it all done. That's the trick, I took all of those classes, but by the time I finished, I never really intended to work in the field. I'm not going to go out in the field and inspect and x-ray welds. I learned a lot though, I met some really good people and I stayed sane.
When it was all said and done, that was the most important part of the whole thing. It would have been, and was, hard for me to transition from a life where I had been working for 8 years through school and work to build myself a good career, to a job where I did.....nothing. Not that parenting is nothing, it's not and I don't think I ever really felt like it was. I did know that I was pitching my career out the window when I agreed to stay at home. I think a lot of people, whether they're men or women, do this when they leave the work force to raise kids, and it's hard. You take all of the momentum you had in life and you just stop. I don't know that this is harder on men, but I suspect that it is. We still have a societal message that it's noble for women to put taking care of their babies ahead of their career. For men, the idea is still that providing is where it's at, and it's hard to not have that affect you.
Having a plan was important for my transition into being a stay at home dad. I needed to know what I was doing and where I was going in order to not go crazy. I needed to know that if I had to, I could step back into the role of provider. I needed to know that I was working toward being an even better provider than I was when I left work. Even though it didn't work out at all, it was important.