How I Became a Hausmann

My parenting journey began in 2013 at the age of 27, as I was finishing up a Doctorate in Seattle. While my partner and I were weighing when to have kids, we decided that I would be their primary caregiver, partially because I like cooking, spending time with kids, and taking care of the people around me, but also because the Doctorate that I was finishing up was in Tuba Performance (not a booming industry), while my partner had a full-time job.

Before holding our daughter, I had held babies for a total of five minutes in my life. Becoming a Dad was a huge learning process for me. Going to classes on childbirth and parenting at the hospital as well as joining a New Parents group helped, but because I didn’t have many people around me that were in the exact same boat, there was a lot of existential questioning and a nebulous concept of self as I maintained and built upon my career as a musician while caring for our growing family. 

To find some balance in supporting my baby and partner, I had to become much pickier about which gigs to take (just the good ones). After always feeling like a zombie in the morning as I would scramble out the door to playgroups/playrooms/playgrounds, I also shifted my focus from performing/composing to things that could be done more easily in the day (recording/mixing/composing). I was lucky to have helpful In-Laws in the neighborhood and eventually a couple days of daycare per week, and so although it was difficult to maintain a good balance, I look back on the time when I was working part-time in Seattle as a real gift.

Our son was born in 2015, at which point I, as a person with one sibling, felt that our family was complete. When he was almost one week old, we were shocked with the news that he had several heart defects, and one week after that, he underwent open heart surgery. We were incredibly fortunate that he had amazing medical care, and thankfully he is doing very well, but the experience was quite traumatic.

It took a long time for me to process what happened in that period, and to be honest, it is something that I will probably never finish processing. In the spirit of “Life is precious,” “We’re so grateful for the health of our kids”, and “YOLO” (in modern parlance), we decided to have a third kid!

A few times early on, the kid(s) and I flew from our home in Seattle to spend some time in Europe with my partner, who was going there frequently for work. Going back and forth between Europe and the US with kids, I came to appreciate how practical it is to have a solid public transit system (my children hate sitting in cars), and universal health care (our son’s heart condition is a “pre-existing condition”).

A couple months after getting pregnant with #3, swept up in the aforementioned spirit of YOLO (as young people called it at the time), we decided to move to Switzerland! Moving internationally obviously involved a ton of logistics, and it meant that I would be leaving my network of musicians and friends, but the costs and responsibilities associated with having three kids meant that I would be more of a Stay-At-Home-Dad either way. I thought that if we were going to be doing all of the baby things again, it would be more fun, or at least more interesting, to do it in a new setting.

We’ve been here for 5 years now and we love it (although we miss our friends and family in America terribly). The pressures and expectations that surround parenting here are different in some ways than they were in Seattle, and after years of struggling to define what my job really is (“Full-Time Dad”? “Stay-at-Home-Dad”? “Tuba dad”?), I feel like I’ve been fitting into the role of quite nicely, however I feel like defining it at any given point in time. I believe, perhaps falsely, that it’s a mostly non-controversial thing to be here, and despite it not being the path that I had envisioned for myself as a kid or young adult, I feel immensely lucky and privileged to be living my life as it is.

If I could go back and talk to my 27 year-old self, I wouldn’t advise him to make any big decisions differently, but I know that he would have had a ton of questions. There are a lot of little things that I would tell him that would help make the coming years more enjoyable.

The intention for this site is to positively affirm family arrangements that are less commonly seen, help inspire confidence in new parents, and share ideas for making it all easier.