September 1st 2010 marked the beginning of a new chapter in our family, as of today I am officially a full-time stay at home dad. The journey to get to this point has been interesting, challenging, stressful, unpleasant at times (many times – work I’m talking to you), difficult, rewarding, wonderful, and I couldn’t be more excited. But since they say “you can’t understand where you going unless you understand where you’ve been,” a little history.
Over the past few years I’ve been working as the manager of an Apple reseller in Victoria, British Columbia. How and why I took the job there is best left for another story, but suffice-it to say that when I took the job I was in need of work. As it turned out though the work I’d chosen itself was in need of work.
Imagine if you will the deepest, darkest, most cluttered and neglected little corner computer store you’ve ever seen. Carpeted floors, a showroom blocked off from the wall of windows that would otherwise have bathed it in a golden light instead of the pallid hues of old pot-lights and fluorescents. Imagine computers displayed on low cluttered tables behind worn-out old office chairs. And imagine the most random collection of bits and pieces of obsolete Apple accessories and items never sold and collected from nearly a decade in business and you’ll have some idea of the business I walked into.
More than just being in a state of disrepair the business was sick with misery and despair and a strange collection of lost souls. If you’d asked me then why I did it I couldn’t have told you. Even now I only have a glimmer of understanding why I decided to work to change this business instead of just packing up and going elsewhere. Somehow it seemed to me that there was an opportunity to demonstrate something I knew of myself, of a capability to work hard, of an ability to excel at business, or an opportunity to pull together the disparate experiences of my working years before this strange place and through the business show the world something of myself.
It took the better part of four years to accomplish and it wasn’t easy but by the end that business had been transformed into a gleaming boutique, from junkhole to admirable, and from dying to vibrant.
In the spring of 2009 our son was born and suddenly the world stood on its head. Work stopped being about accomplishing something in and of itself, or proving anything, and became instead the simply the means by which I supported our family. There is no greater pressure in life than providing for your family, no greater fear than you will suddenly be unable to, and no greater reward than being able to.
Providing however isn’t always enough, and on one visit to Vancouver to visiting family around Christmas time, it was clear to my wife and I that we needed to make a big change. While we had great family support in Victoria we realized that we’d worn out the city, or at least ourselves in it. Our routines were unhealthy, work was too demanding with continually diminishing rewards, and perhaps more than anything we’d trodden the same roads so endlessly that there was no new anymore.
In Vancouver we had other family to connect with, new roads to explore, and for myself a deep familiarity in my blood from having grown up in West Vancouver until the age of thirteen. It was in a way a strange kind of coming home or coming full circle, returning to Vancouver with my son and living in many ways as my parents had decades before.
We made plans, as we all do so optimistically, to find new jobs and move over as soon as possible. In reality this is much easier said than done, which is probably why it occurred to me to suggest working remotely to my work.
Working remotely for a single store computer retailer is certainly a strange circumstance I grant you, but somehow we made it work. Or maybe that is only that I made it work as best I could. Either way, we moved to Vancouver in March of this year and I began working from home.
I won’t say that it’s always been easy. We’re not wealthy by any means and an office, as in a room with its own door, was out of the question. Instead my son, my wife, and myself all made due as best we could in our one bedroom apartment as I struggled with work at a distance. Every second week or so I would also pack up and head back to the Island for a couple of days to be in the store. Whatever the difficulties and frustrations there were over this period nothing, nothing could replace the experiences I’ve had being around so much and having the privilege of watching my son grow up. From first steps to first words I’ve been here for it, and that is something I would change for the world.
Over the next couple of months we found a certain rhythm, getting out in the morning first thing for walks, working, getting into better shape, and exploring our new world. My work was still an ever present frustration and stress (as it had always been) but here too unbeknownst to ourselves the solution (or resolution) was about to present itself.
The news came at the tail end of one of my trips over to the store, the business had been sold.
So there it was, four gruelling years of work culminating in a simple statement offered while being driven back to the ferry to head to my home in Vancouver. Everything that I’d put into building the business had resulted in this, turning it into a business that could be sold… and I wasn’t going to be a part of it going forward.
After three months of transition time I would no longer have a position at the company. Of course it made sense, it was obvious. If I was here and they were there, and they were going to be there running things then they didn’t really need me here, in theory.