Birthdays & Business & Liberation
My small business, One Tough Mother, turned 4 today.
Four years ago I launched this company on my birthday.
I thought making the products was the hard part. I was bright eyed + bushy tailed about helping others prepare for postpartum in a way that I hadn’t.
I thought if I just explained it, people could avoid the (literal) pain I had experienced.
My world was very small then – sleep regressions and strollers and anxiety. But now, nearly 7 years into motherhood and 4 years into business, I know nothing is as straightforward as that.
As I turn 37 today, I realize that being a mother means working on yourself far more than it is about raising them to be any specific way. It also means caring about the world beyond yourself or even your own children.
Nothing could have prepared me for everything I’ve seen in the world over the last six months. This world is simply not what I thought it was. It is crueler and uglier then I understood.
Between genocide and climate change, times like these make it easy to think about escape tactics… It’s easy to get tribal in our thinking, to let fear envelope us, and to worry only about our “own.”
But this has never been the way to freedom. It surely hasn’t gotten us there yet. No, the path to liberation – and joy – requires that we come together.
True motherhood is to love all children as your own.
So that’s the ethos I will continue with here.
Thank you to everyone who has stuck with me as this business/account has gone from generic postpartum platitudes to real, intersectional feminism (at least my best effort to work within that lens).
You see a better version of me because I have witnessed the strength and resilience of the Palestinian people.
So on this day I express my gratitude for the powerful, deeply unfair work they’ve done in lifting this veil from my eyes and making my world bigger again.
They’ve shown many us what it will take to create a more beautiful and equitable world for all our children and my promise is that I will keep using my (small) platform to do that work.
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