TORONTO - Joe Kay became a father last September, when he and his wife Lori welcomed daughter Annie into the world.
A mere three days later he was back at work, feeling guilty about leaving his family and desperate to return home.
"It was really hard," says Kay, 34, a TV writer in Toronto. "For the first three weeks I came home from work pretty late and Lori went to sleep so I stayed up with Annie for pretty much the entire night, sleeping every so often.
"I wanted to give Lori a break, and I needed to because she was really losing it, she was so tired. She just needed some sleep so badly. And I just wanted to be with both of them."
Many men can relate to Kay's sentiments, as more and more fathers these days are finding it harder to go back to work following the arrival of a newborn. Like mothers returning to the office following maternity leave, new dads are feeling angst over separating from their baby, not to mention guilt over being unable to ease the burden on mom.
Combined with often absurdly short leaves from work, which offer hardly enough time to adjust to parenthood let alone build any sort of bond with a newborn, fathers are finding it tough to balance the competing demands of family and work.
"There's definitely some guilty feelings," says Kevin Lasko, 29, a Toronto lawyer who lives in suburban Thornhill.
"You get caught up in the moment of the birth and being involved in the whole process, you have some time to spend with your wife and child and then all of a sudden, you have this obligation and you have to get back to what you do. Someone has to make money and go back to work. You want to spend time with your family, especially around this moment. It's definitely mixed emotions."
Lasko spent just over a week at home with his wife Kathy and son Shale, but much of that time was eaten up by trips to the hospital to care for Shale's jaundice. Shale was fine when Kevin returned to work, leaving him to cope with exhaustion and sleep deprivation.
"I was definitely not used to working on the amount of sleep I was getting," he says. "When I was getting home from work I was much more tired than I'd normally be. Even now on the weekends, Saturday night 10 o'clock, I'm totally wiped, I can't wait to go to bed."
Alyson Schafer, a Toronto-based parenting expert and author of the bestselling book "Breaking the Good Mom Myth," has heard stories like this before and says the number of fathers struggling to cope with it all is on the rise.
Unlike men from a generation or two back, Schafer points out, new fathers now aren't content playing passive roles in caring for their newborn. But the extra duties at home combined with the workload at the office can put extra strain on men, and it's something new parents need to be aware of.
"The old days where a man never really held, or rocked or changed a diaper in his parenting role, those days are gone," says Schafer. "Dads are emotionally invested and they want to be there.
"Problems can arise from not being appreciated for really doing double duty. By the time they get home from work, they've already worked a full day ... and then when they come home mom's tired because she's been doing kid stuff all day and so she wants to hand off so that she can get a break. I think the perception of dad is that he didn't get a break at all, because he went right from work to being respite care for mom."
