Leaving for Dublin
Things left behind. Deciding as a family. Acknowledging the inequality of it all. Celebrating moving.
Imagine for a second, you are offered a new position at your company. It’s a position no one has ever done before, in a new country you’ve never visited before.
It requires you to pack up your life and family and move within a few weeks. You’ll be the first person in your company to make this kind of move and you’ll have to figure out most of it on your own.
At the same time, you have to figure out what the company needs to do to be successful in a market of 27 countries that speak 24 official languages.
That’s what we faced as a family. What did we say to that decision? Let’s go. Yes. Of course.
Yes, to my wife giving up her new full-time position teaching at Simon Fraser University, just after she’d been offered it, accepted it and started.
Yes, to pulling my 2-year-old son from his care situation, friends and playgrounds and sleeping routine that he knew.
Yes, to leaving the 1-bedroom apartment where we’d lived for 17 years, to selling most of our stuff and packing the remains into a 5’ wide x 10’ long x 8’ high storage locker. Four hundred cubic feet crammed full of the things we thought we wanted to come back to.
Yes too to finding decent enough answers to all the extra questions that a move initiated. Did we need to keep our crib? How about our bikes? How much should we bring? When will be coming back? Will we be coming back?
We stripped our life down as well as we could for the move. We did sell the bikes, the crib, and anything else we could get rid of. Moving to Dublin dominated our lives with logistics and lists, and those logistics and lists overshadowed some of the larger questions that we didn’t have any answers to satisfy.
Would we be returning to Vancouver? That thought came up occasionally, though it seemed so far off and so hazy in what it could mean that we didn’t spend much time considering it. We didn’t even know how far away it could be — months? years?
Would we succeed in Dublin? What actually was our mission once we landed? Would we find any friends? How could we hold it all together as a family and keep the Slack business growing at its breakneck pace?
I found the process of leaving much like a game of Snakes and Ladders. Plod along, find some wins, shake off the losses, keep plodding. Sequencing the sales of items and pick ups and drop offs and donations so we still had a bed to sleep on and sheets to sleep in and a table to eat at right up until we left was a persistent and mild logistical panic attack.
We got lucky and we worked hard to get set. Our bed went to another couple that were moving into our building. The sheets got washed and donated. We dismantled the table and taped its hardware to its legs and slid its parts between boxes and bags in the storage locker. We drank the wine we’d been keeping for a special occasion.
Our Vancouver life got packed away comprehensively for some unknown future date when we’d be returning. Our stroller came with us to Dublin. It had proven irreplaceable. We used it every day to ferry our son around the world and to carry our groceries. When we landed in Ireland it got renamed the buggy and proved just as invaluable to our daily life in our new home.
Leaving Slack YVR
A few weeks prior to departure, Stewart stopped by my desk for a quick chat. We talked about leaving for Dublin. He made kind inquiries about how the preparation was coming along. Then as he was winding up and moving on I remember he said, “Keep up the good work and you’ll be a rich man one day.”
I’m not sure I had anything to say to this but it made me slightly nervous and slightly happy and it sticks with me to the present. What did he know? What could he see that remained invisible to me? Lots, proved to be the answer. Tons.
The excellent folks at the Slack YVR office put together a leaving party that included air hockey and bubble hockey and a full dose of Canadian kitsch. I felt very spoiled and grateful and knew I’d miss this group of amazing and generous and talented folks.
Truthfully I didn’t really feel like I deserved the hullabaloo. I felt very lucky to be able to play along and provide an excuse to celebrate. But I could have happily just faded away to Dublin too. I don’t meant to sound ungrateful. No! Just very lucky to have landed where I did, in the time I did, with such remarkable opportunities and people around me.
The Inequality of It All
And while we’re acknowledging luckiness, let’s just get this out of the way up front: making the decision for our family to prioritize my career, and for my wife to make sacrifices in her career, was hard. And we were very lucky to be able to do it.
Our aspiration had always been to live equally, to give equal weight to her career and my career, balanced out over time when one of us sacrificed more for the other, and vice versa. We had wanted to raise our son equitably — each of us taking up the jobs that needed to be done. Each of us picking up the tasks that suited us best. I did bathrooms, she did laundry. I did mornings, she did bedtimes. When we needed to adapt and change, we did.
But in facing the decision to move to Ireland, there’s no way to sugar coat what it meant in terms of a one-way sacrifice: my wife gave up advancement in her career for the financial advantage to us that my career offered. And in doing so, we conformed to the model that “greedy careers” demand. (Greedy careers being those that gobble up free time and take bites out of evenings and weekends and largely characterize much of modern high-pay, white-collar work.)
Looking back with the benefit of a few years hindsight I wonder: How best to read our decision? As emblematic of systematic inequality? As two individuals making the best decisions for their unique family? Yes and yes, I’d say.
We definitely thought about how our decision could work out. We didn’t really know it would work out well. This was the spring of 2015. At the time Slack had a few hundred employees and a strong trajectory of growth and momentum. But it still remained a risky venture.
What we did know for sure is that we'd both always wanted to live and work internationally. Now here was a chance to do so in a friendly environment (in a WEIRD place: Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) and with some support built in. So we went for it and compromised as well as we could.
Going through the work permit process we made sure we also got a spousal work permit so we could both pursue and continue our respective professional lives. We had an internal agreement that we’d do our best to make decisions together that offered us both something, and didn’t disadvantage the other.
But was it fair and equal? No.
We’d rebalance in time. Just like we’d buy new bikes to replace the ones we’d sold to go to Dublin.
But even with all the advantages we had, the support of Slack, the history of equality in our relationship, we contributed to the trend of women sacrificing their careers for their partners and families. Just add that to the list of things we left behind.
Up next — Stone Upon Stone: Opening Slack’s Dublin offices at the Guinness Storehouse. Finding poetry in the streets. Finding familiarity by walking.
I remember meeting you guys at Kits beach just before you were leaving on this adventure. Seems like yesterday.