Reflecting on My Year-Long Parenting Sabbatical

From July 2025 to June 2026 I was unemployed. I stepped down from my full-time software engineer role to spend the days with my son, Advay, who was a little over 1yr at the time. The goal was simple: be around him all the time, while he was still this small, before daycare, school and the rest of life took over. I’m writing this just to reflect back on it. This isn’t advice. I’m not saying anyone should do this, or how to do it. It’s just my experience, the choices I made, and how they felt.

Why

In June 2025 we flew back to India for 2 weeks. First proper break in 6 months or so. We were in a resort in Mussoorie and I remember spending hours just watching him do random things. He’d play with the hotel slippers, shift from one side of the bed to the other, grab the TV remote and try to figure out what the buttons did while looking around for us from time to time. I was just so happy doing this! (all my fellow parents, you know what I’m talking about)

On our way back, my wife and I were discussing if we’d ever send him to boarding schools (Mussoorie is known for those) and it hit me that this cute magical phase he’s in doesn’t last. He won’t be this small again. His voice will change. He won’t look at simple things with this much wonder and I wanted to observe all of it from now. A few months earlier, I’d missed his first steps. I got home from work and saw it on video, the little guy strolling in grass with no support on his evening visit to the park. For a brief minute or two, that hurt a lot!

Looking back, it was somewhere during this trip that the idea of stepping down from my full-time job took shape. The hardest part for me was leaving a truly special company with a bunch of special people I’d been part of for the last 3 years.

My parents and I kept getting stuck on the timing. Why now, couldn’t this wait another 3-6 months? My wife made me see the “why not now” of it. The dude was growing so fast. He’d start daycare in the next nine to twelve months, and it’s a slippery slope from there. We talked about it at length for the better part of a week. I kept circling back to middle grounds, part-time, fewer hours, something in between. And every time, we’d land on the same thing: I’d neither be here nor there. With her support, I was able to make the hard call instead of hedging.

Masti(a.k.a Fun) time All The Time

After the first 2-3 weeks, where I found myself going back to my laptop/phone every now and then, my days with Advay had a solid rhythm. Start with breakfast, then say goodbyes to Mom (thank you mom again!), fiddle around with his toys, and then spend the next few hours reading “First 100 Words” and alphabets. Advay’s first favorite word was “Helicopter”, if only I had a dirham for every time he said it, maybe I could be writing this in 2030.

Afternoons we lunch and then do some house chores: watering the plants, putting washed clothes out to dry, arranging water bottles, Advay just loved doing house chores. I also have our house help to thank as she took over most of the real household work.

Evenings were mixed, during the hotter months I’d just take him down to the reception area on his small baby bike and he’d ride it around shouting like he owned the building, until security gave him the eyes. In the more pleasant weather months, we took a stroll in the nearby park. Advay would play around in the mud, run barefoot on the grass and interact with the cats around. I was just watching him do his thing, my favorite activity 😀

Now that I look back, somewhere in the first months he figured out that “Papa” was just… always around now. And let’s just do whatever we want. In the evenings I’d take point on all the misc house stuff and let him spend time with his mother as much as possible. With the relatively better energy levels, I was also able to get us out for short drives in the evening.

This Is Too Good To Be True

Yeah right I know, it wasn’t all roses. The elephant in the room was the money situation. We were going to be taking a hit on our monthly income and had consciously taken a firm stand on not compromising on our lifestyle. Even though I’d done all the math on our savings, we did come out a fair bit behind on where we could’ve been otherwise. That’s just the hard truth!

One thing I leaned on for the first time was no-cost EMI on my credit cards, to spread out the one-off big expenses, oh sweet Thailand trips! I wouldn’t recommend this to anyone, but used carefully, it was a genuinely useful tool. The installments still show up every month: a problem past Dhruv handed over to current Dhruv.

Looking back, the real hard stuff was the back of the head feeling of not building products for such a long stretch of time. I’ve been building software products for over a decade now, so 6-9 months without that and I was beginning to itch a little. Throw in the recent LLM advancements and it just made matters worse for my mental health! I felt the worst FOMO I have had in recent times. I eventually started carving out a few hours every other day to work on some side projects to stay sharp (this website is one of them 🧑‍💻).

The other unsettling part was managing our parents. They got more anxious as months passed by. I can’t really blame them, I was unemployed with a one-year-old in the house. In retrospect even I would be mad at myself, no kidding! This was truly something I hadn’t thought out well. It was one of those things where my wife and I worked as a unit to keep things calm as situations arose. No points for guessing who got the news of my new job first!

The Magic Never Stops

Looking back I couldn’t be happier with my decision, hopefully Advay agrees when he grows up and is reading this. My wife was a pillar of strength through and through the period, it wouldn’t have been possible without her emotional support. I felt low, unproductive and like I was letting people around me down by being selfish more than once and she pulled me out of those every time.

As for the time spent with Advay, I can proudly say I watched him hum his first tunes, say his first sentence, his first two-footed jump, his first kick of a football, his first day at daycare, and a lot more firsts. Who knows how many I would’ve caught if I had tried to balance things out.

The biggest learning for me through this year is, parenting is a uniquely personal experience and as long as you and your partner believe in each other, there is no need to worry about making wrong decisions. Every day is simply magical, really it’s MAGICAL, go ask your parents if you don’t believe me.