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."
Jim Marchment, a 35-year-old high school teacher in Port Perry, Ont., decided to take care of all the night-time feedings after daughter Arden was born, thus allowing his wife Stephanie to be well rested for when he was at work.
And while a happy mother made for a happy father at home - "That's exactly true. Figure out what your wife wants you to do to make her life easier," he says - it also on occasion made for an irritable colleague at work.
"A few times I'd get short with people I shouldn't get short with," admits Marchment. "There were times I'd be unreasonable, where I haven't slept, I'm exhausted and you get into some silly argument. You almost start to feel like a martyr. A lack of sleep will do that to you."
One thing Schafer recommends is discussing the division of labour ahead of time and being flexible enough to adjust plans as needed once baby arrives.
That's something Howard Cukier and his wife Abigail are trying to do in preparation for the arrival of their first child in July. Cukier plans to use a week of vacation once their baby is born to help with the chaos of the first few days at home, but once the 32-year-old science research associate returns to work, he's not sure what's going to happen.
"Our parents' generation, the father wasn't as involved and now, in most cases, the father wants to be involved just as much as the mother and it's hard to go back," says the Stoney Creek, Ont., resident. "I know I'm going to want to spend as much time as I can with the baby and at the same time I'm going to want to look after Abby."
"I don't know how I'm going to divide my time, but I'm going to try to give Abby as much rest as I can."
Kay, the TV writer, says things get better as the child gets older. His daughter Annie is over seven months now and he and his wife can't believe how much their lives have changed. His advice to new dads feeling overwhelmed is to keep in mind that the initial crunch eases and eventually you settle into a routine that works.
"If I think back on the first eight weeks, I can barely even remember them, it was a blur. It's like you're on this weird adrenaline," he says. "It's almost like it didn't happen in a way. It was this mad blur and it's just crazy that everything gets done. You're trying to figure out what you're doing and you don't have a clue what you're doing."
"We laugh about it now because Annie is so much easier to handle in every way."
------------------------------------------------------
Some tips from fathers on coping with a return to work while a newborn is at home:
-Take off as much time as possible. With some planning, fathers can create their own brief paternity leave by combining vacation with time owing, sick days and an unpaid leave of absence.
-Get as much sleep as possible and make sure to take advantage of the opportunity whenever your baby is sleeping. "It sounds obvious, but every little bit you can get helps you to function," says Joe Kay.
-Find ways to better manage your time at work and look for ways to ease your workload. "Try to think about the way you operate at work and try to think of a few strategies to make it more efficient so you can get things done and leave it at the office," says Kevin Lasko.
-Remember that your wife is probably even more tired than you are tending to a newborn, so be patient. "Make sure you don't turn on each other. Once you get too tired, you can lose your judgment pretty quick," says Jim Marchment.
-Things get easier with time, so don't worry, it's not mission impossible. "Tune out people with the horror stories," says Marchment.