Wil Andruschak

Male Homemaker | Ian Doig with his 17-month old toddler Kate.

Turning my flashlight off, the wall of black northern Manitoba summer night recedes as my eyes adjust. My surroundings become visible if only in silhouette; Lake Winnipeg sloshing against limestone boulders at the edge of my campsite, the tidy manicured grass of Beaver Creek campground ringed with parkland trees. Tonight I’m lying on a picnic table that’s aligned with the Milky Way, writing this story and watching an unexpected meteor shower as the campfire embers burn down.

“This is what we ought to be doing,” my younger brother Lorne said minutes earlier over a wiener-sticked hotdog supper. By “this,” he meant working on self-directed projects like the one that’s brought us here. We’re in our beloved Canadian backwoods working on a story about Lake Winnipeg’s commercial fishery.

My three siblings and I grew up traipsing through the northern Saskatchewan bush, and though we’ve all studied, worked, and travelled internationally, nature, the woods, and the family farm have stayed close to our hearts.

Lorne is asleep in the tent after a heavy work week at his research science job at the University of Saskatchewan. He’s here on the lake as my co-writer and photographer courtesy of his enlightened workplace. For both of us, this is a professional development project. It just happens to be a very cool one. Manitoba’s Interlake region is gorgeous, storied country, and Lake Winnipeg is vast and ecologically complex, one of the world’s largest freshwater lakes. In July, we sailed the lake’s south basin on the Namao, a former Coast Guard vessel packed with scientists who are conducting long-term studies of the Lake’s ecosystem. In the morning, we’ll head out on the water again, this time, with three local fishermen working the fall season. We’re meeting and interviewing people, photographing and writing like it’s going out of style. I owe this burst of professional energy and accomplishment to my 17-month-old toddler Kate, and to her mom’s patience.

For three years, I was editor-in-chief of Fast Forward Weekly, SEE’s Calgary sister paper. I’d worked the previous decade as an underpaid, overworked freelance writer, experiencing professional exhaustion and physical burnout repeatedly. As an editor, the steady paycheque and (mostly) nine-to-five hours alone seemed decadent. It was a dream job. I worked in a fun, fast-paced environment with an endless variety of stories to cultivate, though it left little time for my own writing. I’d still be happily doing it if my wife and I hadn’t decided to have a child a year and a half ago.

The Happy Homemaker
Since becoming a male homemaker, I’ve taken to writing in my head. Writing is largely about thinking, which, though my hands are constantly full, I now have lots of time to do. While strolling at the zoo, cooking lunch, or changing diapers, I think through my writing projects. When the baby is occupied or asleep, I slip my little black Moleskine notepad and pen from my pocket or sit down at the computer and download my prose. I’ve also carefully jotted down ideas and thematic epiphanies. These have coalesced rapidly into concepts for larger projects. One is the story my brother and I are working on, which, in turn has spawned two more stories I’m equally excited about. I have more ideas than I have time to act upon — a good problem to have.

As I write this, I’m now sitting in the shade of my backyard crabapple tree. My little girl is combing through the late-season tangle of our garden looking for the last few peapods. Now she’s pushing my pad shut and poking at my eyes so I can’t write. Yesterday, when I started backyard writing, she began eating pine cones. It’s not a perfect system. When she naps each afternoon, I write furiously at the computer, my head and notepad bursting with words.

Though it has slowed my life down, I’ve found (and this is hardly a revelation) that raising a kid and getting anything else done besides requires careful, disciplined scheduling and the occasional assistance of babysitters. My Edmonton in-laws graciously spent a week with our girl while I ran around the Manitoba woods, and her aunt regularly sits when I have interviews to conduct. With some personal motivation and a little baby-wrangling assistance, I’m getting work done. Though, as I construct this paragraph, I’m coring crabapples for juice, fretting about my shed that needs siding and dinner that needs cooking. These multiple nagging duties are making me crabby. I step back, close my notepad and focus on one thing at a time. Bye for now.

Staying home with the kid seemed a practical idea. My profession is flexible such that I can work part-time without the need of child care. My heart goes out to those stay-at-home hopefuls who aren’t so lucky, and I acknowledge my luck each and every day, vowing not to blow what has become a great opportunity for me and my family. After a year of maternity leave, my wife is flourishing at a new and rewarding job, while I have the time to launch an ambitious new phase of my own career. All this while we raise our own daughter. We’re on a tight budget, but that won’t last forever and neither is it such a drag.

As I write this conclusion, I’m again sitting in the grass of the backyard. It’s a sunny Sunday, and my wife is supervising our girl — a vision of cuteness in a pink floral dress — as she yanks apples from low-hanging branches, takes a bite and hurls them at the compost pile. It’s an idyllic existence. Being a stay-at-home dad is great work if you can get it. It’s forced me to change my working ways. With limited time, I’m more conscious that I ought to be doing projects with higher personal satisfaction and financial value. Besides giving me all kinds of time with my daughter, this new slow career has reconnected me with my outdoorsy youth, my Canadian-ness and my extended family. Now if I can just talk the wife into making another youngster.