Becoming a parent can be an overwhelming challenge for anyone whose last name isn't Pitt or Jolie. There are struggles with anxiety over money, time and careers, plus all of the micro-mistakes that might doom a child to a life of failure and sadness.
Maybe I'm just projecting, because those are the things I worry about as I take my first steps toward starting a family. Like what if I, gasp, let my child have sugar? Or spend more than the agreed 30 minutes a day in front of a screen? At least there's one thing I don't have to stress about, which is that I'm no longer working in a kitchen.
Chefs have the same parenting obstacles as everyone else, the same high costs of childcare and postsecondary education. They also have their own, particular problems. All the cooks I know are poor. Even the ones who graduate to chef status often live month-to-month, and they're usually working 12- to 14-hour-days. In most kitchens, it's only the head chef or sous chef who has a baby on the way, because those are the only people who can afford to.
Chef Philman George and his son Zaihman prepare clams in white wine sauce at High Liner Foods in Vaughan, Ontario Saturday June 4/2016.
Kevin Van Paassen for The Globe and Mail
This is why cooking – especially in restaurants, and especially in hip restaurants – tends to be a job option mainly for people in their 20s. Philman George is one former restaurant cook who gave it up in order to be a good parent.
"I knew, getting into this industry many years ago, that I could kiss Mother's Day, New Year's Day and all those special days goodbye," says George, 36, who lives in Toronto. That was okay when he was a young cook. But as he got closer to starting a family, it became less acceptable. "I was not looking forward to being a father working as a restaurant chef. I grew up without a father, and I did not want my children to grow up with a part-time dad."
In 2006, after 10 years in the industry, George still didn't earn enough for parenthood. His options were to work in construction or leave the country for better pay as a cook. For a while, he lived in Australia where, for reasons I can't determine, cooks make a much better living than here, some even earning as much as doctors and lawyers. "When I got back to Canada, I was just struggling to make 15 bucks an hour."
Like many chefs, George's solution was to move into a corporate environment, where he did eventually earn more money (including one summer, at Toronto's Island Yacht Club, when he was briefly my boss). In 2012, he landed his dream job, as a corporate chef for High Liner Foods. It's a position with high enough pay and reasonable enough hours to make fatherhood possible. His son was born in 2013 and he has another baby on the way.
"I'm home in time to cook every dinner. I pick my son up from daycare on the way home from work," George says. "Every Saturday, while other chefs are gearing up for a busy night, my son and I go shopping for groceries. I can proudly say he knows the difference between a plantain and a banana." Though he sometimes misses the adrenaline of restaurants, he says that he's never sad that he left.
Line cooks who have kids are working poor, says Eric Wood, a recruiter for JRoss Hospitality. "There are a lot of young people who would have loved to have gone to school but they had a kid early and ended up in the kitchen," Wood says. "And they just grind it out and never see their kid."
Wood himself was a restaurant chef for 20 years, until his first daughter was born in 2014. Within 18 months, he'd made a career change to focus on parenthood. "If your kid needs glasses or braces or anything, and you're barely scraping by being a sous [chef] in most places, it's expensive," Wood says. "That was a huge contributing factor to me moving on. Was I going to stay in love with the restaurant industry or was I going to stay in love with my family?"
Every day, as a job recruiter, he speaks to candidates facing the same decision. "I hear people say, 'I'm willing to give up on my dream, so that I can get benefits.'"
For many, the career precludes parenting. But some people make it work.
Chef Philman George and his son, Zaihman, prepare clams at High Liner Foods in Vaughan, Ont., on June 4.
Kevin Van Paassen for The Globe and Mail
There are a few who have found workable solutions within the restaurant world, such as Alexandra Feswick, executive chef at the Drake Hotel in Toronto. She took six months off after the birth of her child in 2015, then returned to work part-time.
"I couldn't take a year off from the industry," Feswick says. "I feel like I had a good momentum before I went on maternity leave and I didn't want to lose that. If no one talks about me in the media for over a year, do I have to rebuild that?"
There was a point when Feswick, too, almost chose between her career and parenthood. In 2012, after 10 years cooking, she was still not making enough money to support a child. "I was getting comfortable with the idea of not having a family," she says. Then she landed the job at the Drake in 2013 and had a child within two years.
The company paid her full salary for the first two weeks she was off (the period before federal Employment Insurance kicks in), then topped up her EI to 70 per cent of her income for 17 weeks. This is unusual: Most restaurants are too small to offer any sort of benefits, leaving chefs supporting themselves on EI, which covers about 55 per cent of wages for a year. "I could tell you that the last two places I worked wouldn't have topped up my salary," Feswick says.
She says that chefs actually have an advantage as parents, as the sleep deprivation you see on the faces of new parents is a look that all chefs learn to wear for years on end.
"We're programmed for this already because we work crazy hours. We don't sleep conventionally," she says. Chefs are also accustomed to scrubbing clean their work environment every single day, so a little spit-up is no problem.
Feswick still works some nights, while her carpenter husband watches their child. But the flexibility to manage her family and career is a rarity.
Chefs who are their own bosses don't have anyone to ask for time off or benefits. For husband-and-wife chefs Kristen Chemerika-Lew and Kyle Lew, the solution was to move.
"The economic obstacle was Toronto," Lew says. He says that the combination of low wages and the high cost of living meant the young couple were never going to be able to afford parenthood while working in the Toronto food scene, at restaurants such as One and Buca and at the Healthy Butcher.
"Even sous chefs for [Mark McEwan, owner of One, Bymark and Fabbrica] aren't making a hell of a lot over minimum wage."
In 2013, the couple split for Chemerika-Lew's hometown of Winnipeg. "We were able to move from Toronto, buy a house, open a restaurant and have a kid within a year," Lew says.
When they placed the crib in their restaurant kitchen, the baby adapted to their sleep schedule. The husband and wife trade off who works nights at their restaurant, Chew, and who watches the toddler.
No matter how you approach it, cooking is not a career suited to parenthood. George, Feswick and Lew represent the available options: Leave the restaurant industry, leave town or find that rare employer who can afford to pay benefits, but still requires pretty intense hours. Each solution entails some sort of compromise between the career you've been working at and the life you want.
But that, as all my friends with kids are fond of reminding me, is the reality of parenthood. You hand over your previous life in exchange for a new one. A child is someone you invite into your life, at great personal sacrifice, who will consume your resources, rob you of your youth and vitality, only to tell you, years later, that you're an idiot because you don't know how to work the computer.
Yet they all tell me the same thing, that it's worth it.
Special to The Globe and Mail