Run and Break:
One thing is certain-you can never replace time with a little toddler who then learns to stand and walk, all solo, and wants you to pick him/her up before a wave hits him on a beach! Or the time he/she learns to ride a bike or tries to throw YOU a frisbee or football, help to swim and wants to ride on your back like a small backpack. Also-- this may sound trivial now, but please keep good photos/videos in a bank's safety deposit box. Burglars steal video camcorder bags with everything still in the pockets! Photos burn up, gone forever, along with apartments or houses...
I was divorced when my son was very little, but was very fortunate that the ex- had nowhere else to go and that my company kept its crewbase here. Thank God I never decided to try a different airline (back then with much less corporate debt) and commute permanently over here on a two-hour flight. If necessary, I would have considered changing careers, in order to live in the same city, although I can not imagine working in a cubicle or anywhere inside a building.
For all these many years I've spent numerous days per month with my son (and second, very understanding wife who is the very best type of stepmother: a true angel. Not all of them are so tolerant.) and now he is off to college in a few weeks
. Since he was about seven, we have taken him along to several large US cites and five times to Europe in the summer for about a week. On the other hand, my brother was not so fortunate. He lives hours away and two of his three kids were brainwashed into having no interest in seeing him. After age 10 or so, he never saw those two grow up-and never will. It is all gone, like tears in the rain, and I feel real sympathy for people like that.
But about the career, that is very complicated advice, with various future possibilities if you can relocate years later. Multi-turbine PIC flying is the very foundation of what makes pilots very competitive with each other. The type of calm, likeable person which a company sees in the interview, who is very open to the CRM concepts, all make good impressions. Later, ss for which types of multi-turbine planes you have flown, this often is secondary. Don't know whether any of this helps (I was hired in Oct '85 at age 30). Maybe you can try to imagine your perspective from imaginary hindsight. Good luck with the difficult decisions, but be honest with yourself and maybe try to resist "jet fever".
Flying is flying.
The smaller planes can be more fun and with little automation, you will be a better pilot. Years later with a foreign airline, if so, you will not need to rely on the "automatics" to know what to do, and can fly with partial or no automation if needed. You will be the boss-NOT the buttons on the MCP nor the glass of the FMC screens. And you can fly while at the same time, without even looking over, know whether the FO is keeping ahead of the plane's and ATC's requrements. Many of 'my' best FOs were all civilian, and flew nothing larger than a SF-340 or B-1900 before this 100-seat 'classic' jet.
Even after the prop noise is in your past, you will start to take it a bit for granted and will still want a decent lifestyle with certain days off in a row for people you truly care about-especially for a tiny person who wants you to pick him/her up, and to help the tired Mom with dark circles under her eyes to get some rest (I flew a few months ago with a very sweet lady FO who had triplets and looks at us with dark smudges under her very pretty eyes). If you have a heart, you can not begin to imagine what that totally helpless little person will mean to you-and I could not either. A shiny widebody jet with layovers in Caracas, Nice or Munich with a bigger paycheck, in my opinion, could never begin to compare with the extra time spent with a child (it would seem hollow, empty after a while). Flying a Bandeirante longer or a King Air would have been just fine. If you don't have a heart or nasty surprises happen, then you will have different priorities or be knocked down by fate.