Still a Business Owner — thoughts on mothering, at work

As I’m writing this, my nearly 4 year old is sitting on my lap during a Wednesday lull at the shop, watching Bluey on my phone. She’s successfully emptied my entire purse onto the floor (of course, covering everything in coffee grounds), play-dough is scattered and smushed everywhere, and her “latte milkshakes” are resting on the counter waiting for her pretend customers to claim them.

She comes to work with me often, usually 3-4 days a week, and has ever since I opened my first shop when she was 6 months old. It’s never been easy, clean, or pretty, but we roll with it. In the years that followed, I’ve found motherhood to be a fitting metaphor for building a business, chaos, beauty and all. Doing the two things simultaneously (mothering and business building) — that’s something we don’t celebrate, or talk about, nearly enough. We are chasing a dream, not in spite of our role as mom, but because of it. Because we know, with piercing clarity, that our children deserve to see their parent operate as a multifaceted person with big dreams just like the ones they have, and because we owe it to ourselves.

For so much of my mothering (to both my businesses and my children), it’s the outside input that tends to discourage me or make me feel less-than. My goals, and the knowledge of their intrinsic value, don’t always fuel me when customers come in perturbed by the toddler-induced mess. (“Are they all yours” is always the question…one which I’m usually slightly sarcastic to in my response). Or when people assume my business isn’t mine, that I must be working for my husband’s business, a creative spin on the stay at home mother stigma. Or when people say “I could never do what you’re doing…my job is xyz…” insinuating that my job must be somehow easier because I’m able to have a child in tow. The way mothers (and women) have to overcompensate professionally just to be taken seriously.

Working through tantrums, parenting while creating, multitasking for days at a time…

It’s a lot, for anyone.

But it’s not too much. I believe so strongly that our mothering goes far beyond our children, into the communities we occupy, the homes we make, the friendships we establish, and of course, the businesses we build. We mother the things that we create. And if someone has the audacity to question our creations’ validity because we choose to bring our child with us (or choose not to — I’ve gotten flack for both), or because of any decision we make, or simply for existing as a woman and mother in predominately male spaces…those questions aren’t our responsibility to answer. We simply keep building, keep paving the way, and keep going.

Your dream-building is enough. Your mothering is enough. You — picking up messes, cleaning up coffee grounds, putting out fires, building your own reality — are enough.