Domesticated

The start of the academic school year last month forced me to grapple with a reality I must admit I was in some degree of denial about: I’ve become a stay-at-home dad. With my younger son returning to in-person school and my older son leaving for college, I suddenly realized that at some point in the last year I transitioned from “work from home” to “stay at home.”

Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash

This was not the occupation I envisioned for myself at this juncture in my career. Not something that logically fit on my LinkedIn profile. Like many domestic partners, this also wasn’t really a conscious choice, but the logical culmination of a bunch of rational decisions that led to a place I didn’t entirely intend to go. Like David Byrne, I found myself asking, “how did I get here?”

The short answer is Covid. I don’t want to blame the pandemic entirely, but, like every family, ours was forced to radically alter the two-career lifestyle that had defined our entire adult lives. Unfortunately, due to traditional gender roles and workplace discrimination, women were more often pushed back into domestic roles than men—as housekeepers were unavailable, nannies were quarantined, and the load of domestic chores accumulated with everyone at home 24/7.

My own journey followed a similar pattern. Like most Americans, it started last March when my company implemented a mandatory work-from-home policy. I was running a six-person software startup with half our team offshore, so working remotely actually suited us. We mostly met on Zoom already anyway. But that change had far reaching consequences. First, it forced us to change our business model. We originally targeted businesses as our customers, but businesses abruptly stopped spending money on nascent software startups, so we pivoted to focus on consumers, forcing changes to our product and costing us time. Second, the pandemic made fundraising more difficult, at least in our sector. As venture funding redirected into businesses that benefited from the pandemic, we were on the outside looking in. Third, working from home robbed us of that important hunker down mindset. Distracted by household chores, it was too easy for us to lose focus and allow our energy and enthusiasm to dissipate.

The second big contributor to my new stay-at-home life was more personal. The combination of no household help with the fact all four of us were continuously at home generating substantially more dishes, laundry, and overall mess, meant a significant amount of housework needed to get done—before we were all buried under a pile of dirty dishes and clothes. Meanwhile, Covid was causing my wife’s job to become more demanding. Being in the healthcare field, her business actually accelerated during the pandemic, soon pulling her back to the office for longer and longer stretches. My children picked up some of the housekeeping load, becoming much more self-sufficient adults. They are both wonderfully self-motivated kids, so I didn’t need to become their tutor on top of everything else. Parents with young children or kids with more demanding needs don’t have that advantage.

By late last year, the writing was on the wall for my startup. I’d given myself until the end of December to raise more funding. Spiking Covid cases at that time made that difficult. And we simply hadn’t made enough progress as a business. The end of 2020 was a pretty dark time as we commenced with shutting down the company and laying off employees, while the entire country seemed to convulse with the election, ongoing quarantine mandates, and social unrest.

But the new year started with a resolution to lean into this new, unfamiliar role and take advantage of its silver lining. Although it’s not a path I might have chosen without the forcing function of a global pandemic, I enjoyed the additional precious time with my kids, taking our dog on long walks, and generally slowing down the frenetic tempo of my prior professional life. Plus, most importantly, this change has afforded me the opportunity to really focus on my writing—finally finishing my first novel (coming out next summer!) and writing a second.

So while the pandemic may have turned me into a stay-at-home dad, it also gave me the chance to pursue lifelong goals that might never have happened otherwise. Every path has unexpected benefits.