Who is the man in the moonlight?
I’m a husband, a father of five, and the sole income for a family of seven. I’m also a truck driver working overnight, usually somewhere between 55 and 60 hours a week. I’m not an over-the-road driver. I’m home every day and I sleep in my own bed. But I work a similar type of schedule.
I start at 9 PM, drive hundreds of miles through the night, and go home whenever the work is finished. On a good day that might be 7 AM. On a longer day, or when weather, traffic, or accidents slow everything down, it might be 9 or 10 in the morning.
I don’t despise being an overnight truck driver. But strangely enough, working nights has also given me more opportunity to be a dad than working days ever did. That’s what makes it so difficult to walk away from.
Why I Chose Night Shift
Before working nights, I worked for the same company doing pickup and delivery during the day. I was still working close to 60 hours a week, except I would leave before my kids woke up and get home around the time they were being tucked into bed. During the week, I basically didn’t see them. I couldn’t help with things at home. I couldn’t go to practices or school events. I couldn’t really do much of anything as a dad until the weekend because I was physically stuck at work during the hours my family was living their lives.
Working nights changed that.
Between the extra money and the ability to schedule my sleep around my family, night shift gave us something I never really thought I’d be able to give them: the ability for my wife to stay home and raise our children.
My wife has always wanted to be a stay-at-home mom. Being able to provide enough that she can do that means a lot to me. Our kids get to spend these years being raised by one of their parents instead of us needing someone else to watch them while we both work. There’s a lot about my job I don’t like. That part of it, though, I’m proud of.
What a Normal Tuesday Looks Like
The easiest way to explain my schedule is probably to walk through a normal day. Let’s say I finish work at 8 AM on a Tuesday. I have about a half-hour drive home, so I walk through the door around 8:30.
By then, my two oldest kids are already at school and my wife has spent the entire night at home with our toddler and three-month-old twins. The first thing I usually need to figure out is how her night went. We have three kids under two right now. If the twins had a rough night, our toddler was up, or my wife simply hasn’t had an opportunity to sleep or even take a shower, I stay up. I’ll handle breakfast, bottles, diaper changes, getting everyone dressed, and whatever else needs done. If my wife needs a nap, she sleeps. If she needs a shower, she takes one.
Around noon, I’ll feed our toddler lunch and start getting him ready for his nap. Then my wife and I switch places and I finally go to bed. On Tuesday, though, my daughter has soccer at 6 PM. That means I can’t just sleep until my body decides it’s finished. I set an alarm for about 5:30 and get back up.
My wife takes our eight-year-old to soccer while I stay home with our 10-year-old and the three younger boys. We might hang out, watch TV, do homework, and just do the normal stuff that happens when you have kids.
Then 7 PM comes around and I start my toddler’s bedtime routine. Milk, pajamas, a story, and then the battle of actually getting a one-and-a-half-year-old to stay in bed and fall asleep. Once he’s asleep, I come back out, shower, pack my lunch, let the dogs out, get everything together and try to leave the house around 8:15. I get to work, pre-trip the truck, grab my paperwork and clock in. Here we go with another night of trucking.
What Night Shift Actually Costs
The obvious answer is sleep. Humans aren’t exactly designed to stay awake all night and sleep while the rest of the world is moving around. At least for me, daytime sleep has never felt like the same quality of sleep I can get at night. There’s also a constant level of exhaustion that comes with the schedule. But I don’t think the hardest part is simply being tired. The hard part is the tradeoff. Working nights gives me the flexibility to make it to soccer practice, school events, appointments and other things that I couldn’t make it to when I worked days.
I actually feel like I miss less of my kids’ lives now than I did when I had a daytime job. The problem is that the time has to come from somewhere.
If I have a 12 hour work day plus an hour of commuting, there are only about 11 hours left in the entire day. Somewhere inside those 11 hours I need to sleep, be a husband, be a dad, go to practices, handle appointments, work on things around the house and occasionally have some time where I can just shut my brain off. When the schedule gets packed, sleep usually becomes the easiest thing to steal from. And eventually you pay for it.
When Being Dad Doesn’t Fit Into the Schedule
One day probably explains this better than anything else. My wife called me around 3 AM while I was working because our toddler was having trouble breathing. She had given him his inhaler and was working on getting his breathing under control while keeping me updated. I finished my shift and went home. Instead of going to bed, I grabbed my son and took him to the doctor when they opened around 9 AM. We sat together while he received breathing treatments and they worked on getting everything under control. I finally made it home a couple of hours later and was ready to snooze! Normally that would be the point where I crashed and slept as long as possible. Except my oldest had a doctor’s appointment at 4 PM that couldn’t be rescheduled. So I slept for a couple of hours, woke back up, handled the appointment, came home and tried to squeeze in another couple hours of sleep before it was time to start my toddler’s bedtime routine.
After he fell asleep for the night I started to go through what little routine i had before heading to work. I packed everything up and went out the door towards another exciting night on the road.
Those are the days that make me realize I cannot do this forever. At the same time, that day also shows exactly why I work this schedule. I was able to take my son to the doctor without missing an entire day of work. As the only income in our household, that matters. Night shift gives me flexibility. It just doesn’t give me any extra hours.
Then There’s Everything Else I Want to Do
Being a husband, raising five kids and working 55 to 60 hours would probably be enough by themselves. Apparently, I don’t like making things that easy. I’m also renovating our house while we’re living in it. I’m trying to improve my health and eat better. I’m working on Day As A Dad because I enjoy exercising a different part of my brain and having somewhere to be creative. I’m constantly listening to podcasts while I drive because the job can be incredibly boring and I’m trying to use that time to learn something. I’m interested in business, money, learning new skills and figuring out how to improve our situation. I also find myself thinking about side jobs or things I could do on the weekends to make additional money that we could invest, use to pay down debt or put toward something the family needs.
All of those things sound good individually. Put them together with everything else and something eventually has to give. A lot of the time that’s my health. Cooking better meals takes time. Exercising takes time. Sleeping enough takes time. When the schedule gets crazy, those things are very easy to put on the back burner. That’s something I’m still trying to figure out.
Why I Can’t Just Get a Day Job
The obvious solution would seem to be: stop working nights. I wish it were that simple. Going from days to nights gave me a five-figure increase in income. As the sole provider for seven people, I can’t simply decide I’d rather work days and give that money back. Changing careers isn’t particularly simple either. Truck driving pays me well. To move into a completely different career at similar income, I’d likely need education, experience or qualifications that I don’t currently have. And there’s the catch: getting those qualifications requires time. Time is already the thing I’m short on. So I’ve found myself in a frustrating position. I have a job that provides well for my family and gives me enough schedule flexibility to be involved with my kids, but it’s also a job I don’t want to do for the rest of my life. I don’t think the answer is quitting without a plan. The answer is building my way out.
What I’m Actually Working Toward
For me to eventually leave night shift, something financially has to change first. Maybe I build a side business. Maybe I eventually buy a business. Maybe Day As A Dad turns into something that produces income. Maybe paying down enough debt lowers the amount of money our household needs every month and gives me more freedom to consider another career. I don’t know exactly which one of those will ultimately get me there. What I do know is that it will require time, work and consistency. That’s actually one of the reasons I wanted to start this blog. I want somewhere to document what life looks like right now, what I’m trying, what works, what doesn’t and whether I’m actually able to build something better from the situation I’m currently in. Hopefully, a few years from now I can look back at posts like this and see how far things have changed.
The Balance I’m Trying to Find
The hardest thing about providing for five kids while working nights is trying to give everyone what they need without completely ignoring what I need too.
My kids deserve my time.
My wife deserves a husband who’s actually present and able to help.
My employer deserves someone who is rested enough to safely drive a truck hundreds of miles through the night.
And somewhere in there, I need time to sleep, decompress, work on myself and build toward something better. The challenge is figuring out how much I can take from one of those areas before another starts falling apart. I don’t think night shift is sustainable for me until retirement, and I don’t want it to be. But I also can’t ignore what it has made possible for my family. It’s allowed me to financially support seven people on one income. It’s allowed my wife to stay home during some of the most important years of our children’s lives. And in a strange way, it’s allowed me to be more involved as a father than the daytime schedule I had before. So I’m not looking at night shift as the destination. I’m looking at it as the bridge. It’s providing for my family today while giving me an opportunity to try to build something better for tomorrow.
Today’s Lesson
Providing for your family isn’t just about making enough money. For me, it’s been a constant balancing act between money, time, sleep, health, marriage and actually being there for my kids. I haven’t figured out the perfect balance. I’m not sure one exists. What I do know is that I don’t just want to give my family a good life while I spend mine exhausted and working overnight. I want to build something that lets me continue providing for them while also giving me the chance to live that life alongside them. That’s what I’m working toward. And hopefully, this blog is where I get to document how I get there.