For the older kid's second birthday, I bought her a betta fish. His cheap plastic fishbowl sits on a shelf above the old bowling alley scoring table I use as a computer desk. Despite his constant lurking in my peripheral vision, for some reason I always let the water level in his bowl get so low he's barely underwater when I finally clean and refill it. Every day I tell myself, "Oh he'll be fine for today, I'll do it tomorrow." The next day I say the same thing. There always seems to be something more pressing worth doing, or some better way to waste time.

My wife goes back to work soon. And by work I mean the luxury of sitting in front of a computer and looking at the internet without a three-year old climbing on her lap and an infant who smells like month-old cottage cheese on one arm. I don't mean to suggest my wife's job is easy: she's far more diligent about actually working than I ever was. But even she had to institute a moratorium on visiting celebrity gossip blogs last year because they were getting in the way of completing her assignments.

But thank goodness almost every office worker in America has virtually untethered access to the internet. Imagine what would happen to our economy if employers started taking away internet privileges and people were forced to actually work. The sound of crickets would reign at fark, digg, and reddit. Projects would get done way earlier than they needed to be. Soon there wouldn't be enough work to go around. Bureaucracies would actually become efficient. Massive layoffs would follow. The entire American economy is balanced precariously on the fact that the average American white collar worker spends only about 20 percent of his or her time actually working.

How did the cubicle kids waste time before the internet? Daydreams? Productivity seminars? Interoffice romances? Midday martinis? Lawyers used to have to actually look things up in books. It was an arcane, tedious process that involved constantly updated digests that led to musty old tomes of case law that took up hundreds of feet of bookshelf in every office. Now those books are just for show: the cases are all online, accessible through extremely expensive google-type searches. It's a well-kept secret that lawyering in the internet age is little more than highly-specialized googling. And with all the time you save avoiding the law library, there's plenty of time to just dick around on the internet. And Lord, I do miss that.

Our baby boy is at a smiling age. He might cry while you brush your teeth, but pop back into his room and he'll give you a toothless smile so wide you collapse in front of him and just spend the next twenty minutes smiling yourself, making faces, and cooing like some joyful idiot. I remember the mornings before I'd go to work in San Francisco, when I'd let my wife sleep in and soak up time with a smiling baby, knowing I would need those minutes to carry me through the tedium of my day. I almost always missed my bus. And now my wife must prepare for those same kind of mornings, those same kind of paycheck-bearing unbearable easy days.

The hardest I've ever worked was at my first job, washing dishes in a busy restaurant. The dishes didn't stop coming until the last customer was well out the door. By eleven at night I'd smell like wet lettuce but I'd be free: I'd step into my 1986 Pontiac Grand Prix with the different-colored fender and turn on the subwoofers I bought with my first paycheck and cruise from red light to red light through Kalamazoo. It took a week to earn what I'd earn in an hour ten years later. I think, in a week or two from now, I will be reminiscing about how easy those dishwashing days actually were. Or dreaming about working on one of those Alaskan salmon boats.

Most of the time, staying home to take care of Juniper was pure fun. But now, with two of them, this is going to be more like work. Taking care of kids must be some of the hardest work you can do, the kind of work we usually save for immigrants or teenagers. And the pay sucks. Having my wife at home with me for the first two months of my son's life has been such a blessing. I will remember these days forever. But now the time has come to show my stay-at-home-dad mettle, to prove that I can be as badass as the thousands of women who've struggled with the tedium and the just-plain-hard work of maintaining a household and caring for more than one kid while their husbands dicked around on the internet in dockers.

Wood has already left me alone with both kids a few times, but each time has been filled with chaos and foreboding. Every day that passes gets me closer to every day looking like that. Wood knows that every day that passes is one day closer to when she has to start leaving them for ten hours a day, locked in her office with a machine extracting milk from her breasts instead of a smiling baby boy. We both feel like we're running out of air. Or, more precisely, I feel like I'm about to drown. And my wife fears that surely she will die of thirst.

During my first year as a lawyer at a big firm in San Francisco, I quickly got drawn into some massive bankruptcy case involving airplane leases with many millions at stake, the kind of case all gray-haired senior partners smile thinking about before heading off to the land of nod. Such cases come with virtually no restrictions on the number of hours attorneys can spend on them, so partners and older associates use these cases for the big firm equivalent of a fraternity hazing: endless hours of meaningless work performed in the name of "due diligence"; forcefed triple espressos at 6:30 p.m.; and the Friday 4:45 p.m. phone calls letting you know you should probably cancel any weekend plans you might have made, because, yeah, we're going to need to pull some all-day and all-nighters before that motion for reconsideration gets filed on Monday. It takes some time before you realize this is just an initiation. Fresh out of law school, you believe you actually have something to contribute to this case, but in reality you're pretty worthless. They prey on your false belief that you are bright, capable, and worth the $350 an hour they are charging for your time. And then they work you like a Russian hooker in a Turkish brothel. Because you are surrounded by other little pledges in the same position, you think this is perfectly acceptable. The partners do it because someone once did it to them. And that's the way the whole durn legal comedy keeps perpetuating itself down through the generations.

Many weekends during those first few months, I found myself at the beck and call of an older associate clearly gunning for partnership. I never saw him leave the office, except one Sunday morning when he ducked out and didn't come back for hours. Pissed, I sat down and tried to come up with an answer to one of his impossibly arcane questions about subject matter jurisdiction. Later that evening, he showed up. "What's up dude! Guess what: my son was born today!" I knew he had a toddler already, but he'd never even told me his wife was pregnant. I congratulated him. "Thanks, man," he said. "Now how's that research coming?"

"Nothing yet."

"Well, like I said, I won't be surprised if you don't find anything. But if you do, that will be great. Now let's get back to work."

In the following weeks, this poor guy saw way more of my ugly mug than he did of his new baby. During the first weeks of this new life he usually spent twelve to fifteen hours a day in the office. The working weekends went on for months. He would sometimes drink in the middle of the day. He would go out to the bar with us after work and either go back to the office or somehow find his way back to whatever suburb his kids were sleeping in. I didn't give it much thought then. When you're in this sort of environment, this is just how it's supposed to be. I think I respected him, even, working so hard to provide for his family. I just assumed it was an arrangement he made with his wife, who'd put her own legal career on hold to raise their family by herself. I mean, how hard could that be?

But after two and a half weeks with a 3-year-old and a newborn at home, even with two of us taking care of them, I can't stop thinking about this man's wife, and what a saint she was for not putting a shotgun in his face every morning on his way out the door.

Sometimes when the wife gets home and takes over the parenting reigns I go down into the basement and watch an old movie and work on my art crap. I'll put on something with Cary Grant or Gary Cooper or Steve McQueen just so I can remember what it looks like to be a man. Such a manly act itself, I know, hiding in the basement from a child, holding a paintbrush. Distracted from what I am trying to make or do by all the celluloid masculinity, I just slip further and further into self loathing over what I've let myself become. I recently read a biography of Robert Capa, all the time not feeling swarthy enough, or drunk enough to call myself a real man. It takes a real man to treat Ingrid Bergman like shit, I figure, and not just Bogie-with-a-broken-heart shit, but actual real-life shit. What a man, that Robert Capa. Stormed the beaches at Normandy with nothing to fire but a Leica. The other day I was sitting on the floor playing with my daughter and my niece, singing some made-up song about pigs and I heard my mother sarcastically say across the room: "Yep, that's my son. I'm so proud." Then I heard my grandfather ask, "Is he even doing any legal work at all?"

When we picked up the dog after he was neutered, his nutsack looked like a deflated balloon you find under the couch a week after you let it shoot its way across the room. That's how it felt to hear my family talk of me that way. Balloon-sack boy. Watching the dog walk away from me then, I understood the appeal of neuticals. As far as I know they make no testicular implants for stay-at-home dads, those men suffering from too many months of ring around the rosy duets and dinner checks snatched away by paycheck-wielding wives. Occasionally after work I'll put in a DVD with Gene Kelly, because sometimes the only cure for feeling like less of a man is to watch another man dance. I understand why woman fall for men who dance, even those without the Baryshnicrotch. To dance is to fully embrace one's vulnerability. In the same way, I understand why my wife might have fallen for a man capable of the breathtaking displays of sentimentality I cough up here on a regular basis. As sappy as this man can be, and as much as he finds himself outmaneuvered day in and day out by someone under 36 inches tall (to the point where he feels more nervous about her going to school in the morning than he ever did about an upcoming performance in federal court), damn it at least he can say he's never sang a song while tap dancing and wearing a straw hat. But if anyone were to tell you he's painstakingly taught his daughter the entire choreography to Feist's 1,2,3,4 video, tell that lying motherfucker to stop peeking in my goddamn windows.

My mom saves clippings from the Announcements section of the local paper to tell me what the people I went to high school with are doing with their lives when they announce their engagements. So-and-so is an architect in Manhattan. He went to Yale. That kid you used to make fun of all the time is a vascular surgeon in Boston. She never saves the ones of the guys who work at the paint store. I know she's just being a parent, trying to get under my skin, insinuating that none of them are stay-at-home dads, that they're all doing something with their lives, and, in turn, that I'm not. This bothers me less than she thinks. These guys are just getting married now. In a few years, their wives will get knocked up, and they themselves will get kneecapped by this whole parenting thing. That is, if they're lucky.

Yesterday morning she walked right into her preschool class without a tear. All afternoon, after school, she sang new songs I've never heard. "Teach that song to me," I said, and we sang together. I thought about Gary Cooper. Steve McQueen. Robert Capa.

Fucking pussies.

Occasionally I have to tell people what I'm doing for a living these days. I try to avoid such situations by never leaving the house, but that just makes it worse. When they do ask, I have to be honest and tell them the truth with shifty eyes and then follow my answer with some exclamation about how good it feels just to be out of the house. Usually men ask the question ("so what do you do?") And when I tell them I am home taking care of my daughter, some chuckle uncomfortably and inevitably say, "playing Mr. Mom for awhile, huh?"

That kind of happened this past weekend. There is this rich little man from Cincinnati whose antique cars my dad occasionally restores, and he came by while my dad and I were working in his shop last Saturday. When he asked me what I do, my dad answered for me: "Dutch here is playing Mr. Mom for a few months."

The rich little man obviously didn't hear him right, or perhaps he is simply accustomed to not really listening to anyone. "Oh you don't want to do that," he said. "My wife had back surgery last week and I had to take care of my son all day, let me tell you, you don't want to go anywhere near that kind of work. What a nightmare." My dad later apologized for his friend, noting that this was a man who bribes his 13-year-old son not to misbehave. In cash.

Still, I had to wonder why even my own father felt the need to explain what I was doing with my life in terms of a Martin Mull film from the 1980s, and also to place a time limit on my doing so when I have never set one for myself. He is clearly a bit uncomfortable with my choice.

I actually don't mind telling people what I do, mostly because I'm pretty comfortable with the decision. And more often than not, I discover some envy in those who ask. "That sounds so great," they say. Or, "You're so lucky. I would give anything to go back and spend those years with my kids." More and more men, it seems, are open about admitting that they would like to do what I am doing, or regretting that they didn't. I have now been doing this nearly six months, which is almost as long as Wood stayed home and I worked. But Wood always had a job on her horizon. Me, I'm trying to avoid getting her pregnant again so that I won't find myself in that 9-month endgame. I like this gig. I have no intention of going back into an office any time soon. If anything, as Juniper gets old enough for preschool, I see myself opening my own small law office but spending most of my time writing.

The one thing that does trouble me even with all the positivity about staying home I get from other men is that all the positivity seems tied to the idea that this is just a temporary phase: that I'm down on my luck but making the best of it. The underlying assumption, of course, is that the natural state of anyone with a penis is to be winning bread, and though I may have been temporarily gelded, before I know it I'll grow my balls back and they'll rest comfortably against the crotch inseam of a pair of dockers once again. One thing my favorite senior partner said to me when I quit my big law firm job was that the longer I spend away from the big firm environment, the harder it will be to get back in. "Despite what people say," he said, "these firms are still old-boys' clubs, and you will not find a lot of acceptance there for what you are doing." But the longer I spend outside of that environment, the less desire I have to return. Quitting that job feels even more significant to me now than it did at the time. I was on track to be a partner there in four or five more years, locked into a cycle of heavy work and heavier pressure. When I first arrived at the firm, I watched as a senior associate on the cusp of partnership worked until midnight every night and every weekend day. Assignments he gave would occasionally draw me into this hell. One Saturday he didn't call me into the office, but the next day I came down in the afternoon. He showed me pictures of his new son, who had been born the day before. In the maternity ward one day, in the office the next. That is the life I left.

And now I feel as though I have been cut free from that life. I can't even begin to explain how good it feels. I will go back to work eventually, and what makes that exciting for me is that I think I will be able to do it on my own terms.

I am a lawyer. At least, I have been, and will be for the next few weeks or so of my life. This is something that I haven't written much about, primarily because it's boring. Despite hundreds of hours of television research over the course of my life telling me that lawyering is exciting and dramatic, in reality the only exciting thing about being a lawyer is the indigestion you get from the 17 cans of diet coke you consume every day. It's a grand illusion, television lawyering. I wonder if the same is true for detectives and surgeons: the only other two professions with at least 4-5 prime time shows devoted to them each network season.

"When kids apply to law school promising to do public interest, the admissions officers just laugh," writes one of our readers. And it's probably true. Everyone enters this game ready to pursue justice, to defend the weak, and to change the motherfucking world. Everyone envisions themselves the next Clarence Darrow, but the vast majority will end up like me, sitting in an Aeron chair in a nice office overlooking some big city somewhere trying to look busy while wondering why a voice inside them begs them to quit, begs them to do something else; eventually some suppress and even laugh at that voice, because it, unlike the law firm lords and masters, can't provide the security of a six figure salary. Occasionally you meet a law student in an interview who tells you some bullshit like, "I'm really interested in mergers and acquisitions," or "I've always found corporate transactions fascinating" and you stare at him like he just told you that he's really interested in licking mud-encrusted emu testicles, and so you say, "Don't bullshit me, Keanu. You're just here for the money."

I made a lot of money as a lawyer but I could never really figure out why. What was I doing that was so valuable? Defending some company that got sued, I guess. Some other lawyer decided to sue that company so that company came to me to defend it, and we lawyers all huff and puff a lot and the company pays me and then eventually gets sick of paying me so it pays the lawyer who sued less money that it was sued for and then we all shake hands. It strikes me that this whole industry is little more than sanctioned racketeering.

Last Friday my mentor and the partner who has assigned the bulk of my work took me out for lunch, and after some talk, while picking at a cool hunk of salmon draped on a bed of potato-crab hash I told him I had to resign. My voice sounded hollow, dull and distant when I spoke, he sat there stunned and silent, and I went on and explained, saying the things that anyone who reads this blog already knows. There was a tremendous pressure in the front of my face, between my eyes, and I felt tears in those eyes, and I rubbed my cheek. The partner reached across the table and gripped my hand, and he looked at me with tear-filled eyes and said, "James, you know I care about you. You know that, right?"

For four years I have been "James" at work. That's not what Wood calls me, or what my parents call me, but it's what my resume said when I applied and it's what everyone has called me when they saw me in the law firm's halls for the last four years. I know when I'm at home and someone calls my cell phone asking for James, it's about work, and my head goes straight to where it needs to be to talk about work, because when I'm home and spending time with my baby, I don't want to be James. I don't want to think like "James" at all when I'm home.

There is that famous quote from Nathaniel Hawthorne: "No man for any considerable period can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true." I looked at the partner, who has been a father figure to me trapped out here on this coast so far from my family, and we gushed on and on about how much we've enjoyed working together and all the good we thought of one another. I realized this man was one of the truly great people I would meet over the course of my life, and I held him in a reverence I'd always saved for my most dazzling and brilliant college professors. Had I been lying to him all this time, or had I become truly bewildered as to who I was? We spoke of a future that I pretended, for his sake, to want: a future much like the path he had taken, or as close to such a future as I could get, having just that hour forsaken the path that would have led to exactly where he was.

I have never been good at quitting jobs. Even the Russ job. I never really give a damn about the company, or the job itself, but what I care about are the people who have come to depend on me. In some ways my entire life feels like a desperate effort not to disappoint anyone.

When I got back to work I just stood in the empty elevator bank with my back against the wall and I listened to the whistling of air and elevator hauling people up and down 28 stories. I've worked a thousand days here. Six thousand times or more those elevators whistled me up and down. How could I let myself become such a duplicitous fuck? I sat there and listened to those elevators long and long. I went back to my office and looked at the pictures of Juniper, my engravings of John Brown and Walt Whitman, my photos of Clarence Darrow and Charlie Chaplin on the wall. My feelings towards myself softened. In the end, it is good that what I will miss about this place are the people, and not just the paychecks. Some other sap will come along and get my office and my Aeron chair and he'll bill hours and realize that these are good people and this is a good place to work. And maybe he'll stay, and maybe he won't.

And I'll be somewhere else. With Juniper. Change isn't always easy, but it is necessary if you can't suppress the yearnings deep inside you, if you haven't yet fooled yourself into thinking you know exactly who you are. All I'm really sure of now is that I'm not James.