Maybe some of you could connect with this: I struggle sometimes, wondering if I suck at adulting. I get stuck between my Moana-style artistic calling and the traditional train of how responsible life should be done — using my degrees, working a job, and retiring. Somewhere in that struggle Mom Guilt creeps in and tells me to give up the dream. It tells me that to be a good parent you have to provide more. Make more. To be a good adult you have to give up your little kid dreams and make adult choices you don’t like, to do things you don’t want to do, for reasons you don’t understand.
And I fall for the trap. I start to believe that dollar signs mark my value and I shrink in worth every time.
It eased up when I started skin care home business. Since it is financially contributing to our family, it loosened the guilt noose around my creativity’s neck to have to produce income. Until, that is, I had a slow month. As business goes — slow months happen. What made this special was that it was my first “slump” and Guilt didn’t waste time sending in the big guns to push me into a hole of anxiety.
It whispered all of the ways my parenting falls short. Husband did his best to combat it and reminded me that what I do has value — in showing the kids to live with heart, in showing them that they can build and be what ever they set themselves to, in teaching them that it may be hard but if you love something enough it’s worth it.
I knew he was right. I know that together we show our kids what a family that values dreams and hard work looks like, but I had worked myself into such a pit of unworthiness and pity that I woke up the next day, physically ill. Literally.
And then, as they often do, kids show us the simple truths of what we, adults, complicate.
The SheBabe wanted to bake cookies and sell them around the neighborhood “to help the family pay for vacations” (because the vacay force is strong in that one*). Determined and convinced of its success, she pulled up a stool next to me to help bake the cookies. She made signs (bilingual signs), got the table, set up her shop, and priced her cookies.
She sat outside and waited. And I was so busy thinking myself into a small, failure-like abyss that I was already thinking her into it too.
Our neighborhood is small.
It’s not the kind of place with a lot of thru traffic.
She isn’t going to sell many but I hope she can sell a couple.
I was prepared to buy all of her cookies when her first two customers came: her brother and our neighbor. They led to our neighbor’s older brother coming. Well, that’s good I thought. It’s something. (And then I paid for Brother’s cookies since he paid in Costa Rican pesos – but I digress.)
And then, without any overthinking, without fear or doubt, she changed her business layout and decided that she would go to the customers. Her brother and neighbor jumped on board. They made a plan and split up, going door to door til they came back with no cookies and a bag full of Mexican pesos (and a few Costa Rican ones).
The kid’s a natural. An entrepreneur. She created a business, marketed, and sold her vision. She chatted with her partners and didn’t wait for things to happen, she went after it. And she never thought she could fail.
I was proud of her and, in the great mirror of life, I understood why that meant I was proud of me too.
because how could I be a failure, if thIS brave and shiny kid wants to be like me?
She says she wants to “be a writer like mami” and reads me the stories she writes. Her pages full of our life with titles that mimic poem books we read her. Everyday they come home from school and run up in awe of my not-so-fancy office and they find me writing for Drinking the Whole Bottle, on a meeting, running one of my two network marketing businesses (Arbonne + Rodan + Fields), or chatting with my accountability partners about my latest creative project. They watch Husband and I execute the coolest Virtual Happy Ours and quote us.
They may not know the logistics of what I do but what they see is their mom zealously working from home, unweariedly building businesses (plural) – following her passions, working hard, and building grit. But what they internalize, as I’ve come to learn, is incomparably greater.
They might have sold those cookies anyway — as kids do — but I’d like to think that maybe something they’ve seen after school in my office has rubbed off.
And that’s worth all the money in the world.
Notes
* after talking with her “partners” she chose to donate half her earnings to “ESF to help others stay in school.” She was spotlighted at her school assembly yesterday!
