Rock On: The Entrepreneurial Mom

I was out of down this weekend visiting my new nephew.  It was so lovely to hold a little baby again.  I thought I'd forgotten how, but the baby and I worked it out. 

The lesson in the weekend came when my daughter and I babysat for a few hours.  I rocked the baby to sleep and tried to put him down in his bed so that I could race to the computer and answer email, check web stats, all that obsessive entrepreneur stuff I can't shake, not even for a weekend. 

He stirred and whined.  He threatened to break out into a full wail if I did not pick him back up like RIGHT NOW.  So I dropped everything and picked him up. 

In my mom's day, the experts would have told us that picking up a crying baby meant that you were spoiling the baby and letting the child manipulate you.  I have always believed that to be a pile of hooey.  I will always pick up a crying baby (a whining teen is a whole other issue...). 

As I plopped my butt down back into the rocking chair, baby heavy in my arms, I thought, "Okay, now what am I supposed to do?  Do I just have to sit here rocking?"  Instinctively, I knew I was supposed to "do" nothing.  I've forgotten how to do nothing.  Even when I meditate, I often feel this insistent tugging to think about something, focus on anything but the nothingness.  Nothingness is frightening to most Americans, me included. 

I used to rock my own baby like this for hours on end.  Sometimes just for fun (because I am dorky nerd at heart)  I would sit and calculate how many diapers she would soil in her young life and figure out the CPP (cost per poop) or how many gallons of breast milk I would produce in my lifetime.  Sometimes I didn't think about anything and was hypnotized and relaxed by the squeak squeak of the rocking chair on the wood floor.

I was where I needed to be when I was baby-rocking 13 years ago with my own daughter and rocking my little nephew this weekend. 

As entrepreneurial moms, our businesses are our babies.  Their needs change constantly; sometimes they are ridiculously needy and other times we must step back, take a deep breath, and trust the growth process is progressing as nature intends. 

There's no such thing as perfect parenting.  There's no such thing as perfect entrepreneurship.  As a former childbirth educator and doula, I always have believed that each woman knows exactly what is right for her baby.  I believe that the reason there are so many books and experts out there telling us what we should and shouldn't do is because many women have lost touch with the intuition they were born with through no fault of their own.  This entrepreneurial mom is beginning to think the same applies to business. 

Here's to occasionally putting away the computer, the how-to books, the unsolicited advice, the phone, the email, and here's to regular rocking. 

Rock on. 

Ann Zuccardy, Vermont Shortbread Company's Rockin' Mom/Businesswoman

Comments

[Cynthia McKenna LPC, NCC]

Ann,
this is a very fine piece. Thank you for taking the time to write it out on your blog - I really appreciate it and, I can relate to the need to just "be"
Cynthia