One of the reasons I am still single is because all of the single Catholic men I have met — all of them, without exception — expect their wives to quit working and be stay-at-home mothers once the children come along. This is something I categorically refuse to do. Would I “mommy track” my career? Yes. Would I drop to working part-time? Yes. Would I stop working altogether?

Absolutely not, and that “absolutely not” is for the sake of the children.

When my brother and I were born, my parents decided that my mother would stop working altogether and stay home with the children. I’ve mentioned before that my father — who remained the wage earner — died when I was in high school. I experienced what happens to a family when the sole wage earner is abruptly removed. We didn’t starve, and we didn’t lose our home, but there was still a great deal of hardship and much of it was financial.

The reason why? My mother had been out of the workforce for over a decade. Despite the fact that she had a master’s degree and had had a very solid and commendable career before having children, she still couldn’t get a decently paying job. It wasn’t her career field; it was the lack of recent experience.

Whenever I talk about this, the response is invariably, “but that won’t happen to my family. I have life insurance.”

I’ve stopped bothering to reply to that kind of statement. It’s naive to the point of being dangerous, but people don’t believe me.

But they should, and the reason they should is because my father had life insurance too. Plenty of it: six times his annual income, which is more than many life insurance plans will even permit (I usually have seen limits of two, three or five times the insured’s annual income).

The problem is that when he died, he had twenty-four more years of his working life left. My family could have gotten his annual income twenty-four more times. But instead, six times that amount was all that was left. In other words, the effective annual income of the household dropped to 25% (6/24) of its previous level. Social security, savings and a small pension cushioned that, but they weren’t enough to cover a 75% drop in income. My mother needed to go back to work. She was willing and she did, but the time away from the workforce put her in a position where she couldn’t land a job with the income necessary to bridge the gap.

Mom eventually did work her way back up into a career-level income, but it took ten years and some financial effects of the blow to the family finances will linger for the rest of her life. The emotional toll has been far higher.

My parents thought they were being careful. They had insurance. They had savings. They were not heavily in debt. Had my mother been able to immediately go back to work, there still would have been a small drop in effective annual income, but the financial plans they’d laid would have easily covered that. But my mother couldn’t, because my parents made the decision — for reasons that seemed perfectly appropriate at the time — for her to stay home with the children.

I don’t blame my parents for that decision since they had no way of predicting the future, and their case is unusual. Odds are it wouldn’t happen to my family. But, after having lived through what happens when the odds fail, I don’t trust them. The reason I won’t stop working altogether is because I won’t expose my children to the same risk my parents took, no matter how safe it appears to be. I won’t leave the workforce completely until I retire, because I know better — from experience — than to depend on life insurance and savings for my children’s protection.