Reprints & Permissions

I did not live happily ever after.

In 1994, burned out on law firm life, I left my job at a firm for a cushy in-house position at CBS. Shortly thereafter, I wrote a book about some of my experiences, Double Billing, in which I described the trials and tribulations of a young associate at a big corporate firm. It looked like I'd made a clean getaway.

But nearly a decade later, I found myself living the life I had fled, absent from the family table, returning home when my children were asleep. My 50-hour weeks had morphed into 60, and then 80. My BlackBerry buzzed constantly, and my voicemail overflowed. How, I wondered, did I get here, and was there any going back?

When I arrived at CBS, I thought I had it made. As an in-house litigator, I could farm out work on a Friday afternoon and return to a shiny new brief on Monday morning. On the thirty-sixth floor of CBS's black granite headquarters, no one worked later than 6 p.m., and on weekends the building was a ghost town. But CBS was acquired by Westinghouse, and then by Viacom. Heads rolled and were booted out the door, while the survivors clung tenaciously to their 401(k)s. I could see the writing on the wall, and it was my blood they were using for ink. When the opportunity arose to join a media law boutique, I leaped back into the frying pan, or maybe it was the fire. It couldn't be worse than my old firm, Covington & Burling, I reasoned, and at least the work was interesting. Soon I added law professor to my resume, and before I knew it, I was holding down two jobs while trying to write, parent, and husband.

They say money is the root of all evils, and so it is. But so is raising children in an expensive northeastern suburb, with its outrageous real estate prices and lengthy commute. So is becoming a one-income family, with mounting expenses and diminishing space. To pay the bills, I sought more work like a man starved for attention or food, and it piled up on my plate, fit for a glutton or a fool. I rarely met a matter to which I could say no, and billed my time as if it were ending.

You want to know how I lost my way? Slowly, then all at once. One day I was an overworked, slightly manic, but mostly contented young man. Ten years later I was depressed, angry, moody, impatient, the father of two, and mostly an absent husband. I knew something had to change. But what?

The answer came to me one night during a fit of self-pity, like a sharp ray of light into a deep well. I knew I couldn't blame my circumstances on anyone other than myself, just as I couldn't blame my law firm for overworking me. No one forced me to take the hefty salaries, the dial-a-cars, the second job. I felt trapped, but I wasn't. All I had to do was say, "Stop." So I did. I stopped.

And started coming home for dinner. In fact, I made dinner my job. When 6 p.m. arrived, I set my e-mail to auto-reply. When clients called, I excused myself. It wasn't always easy, but I found that with a little dancing I could reshuffle and reorder. Did I want to be eulogized as the lawyer who could always be found at his desk, or as the father whose children loved him? I remembered partners with whom I'd worked as a young associate. They never made it home for dinner, ate their meals with the associates in the conference room, had documents faxed to their apartments at midnight. They were trapped by their own choices, sucked into a lifestyle from which they felt they could not extricate themselves. But I could. Like Dorothy in Oz, I just had to click my heels and say, "Home."

Everything is not perfect. I still struggle to pay the bills. Sometimes there is more work than I can handle, and too few hours in a day. But I learned that a man's home is more than his castle: It is his life. And we only have this one.

Cameron Stracher's most recent book is Dinner with Dad: How I Found My Way Back to the Family Table (Random House, 2007).