Mommy Detour

This just came to me in a rush of understanding. It is either a stroke of genius or my own version of the Jerry Maguire “mission statement.”

Here is my theory:

We Mommy Entrepreneurs are like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz. We go to the Wizard (Donny Deutsch and the like) thinking they have answers that we cannot provide for ourselves. If you recall, the movie goes like this:

Oz: Come FORWARD!

Oz: I am Oz — the Great and Powerful. Who are you? Who are you?!

Dorothy: If you please, I am Dorothy — the small and meek. We’ve come to ask –

Oz: Silence!

Oz: The Great and Powerful Oz knows why you have come. Step forward, Tin Man.

Oz: You dare to come to me for a heart, do you? You clinking, clanking, clattering collection of caliginous junk!

Tin Man: Oooohhh. Uh, yes, yes sir. Yyyes, your Honor. You see, awhile back we were walking down the yellow brick road and –

Oz: QUIET!!!

Oz: And you, Scarecrow, have the effrontery to ask for a brain! You billowing bale of bovine fodder!!

Scarecrow: Thanks, your Honor — I mean, your Excellency — I mean, your Wizardry.

Oz: Enough! And you, Lion. Well?!!

[The Cowardly Lion faints]

Dorothy: You oughtta be ashamed of yourself, frightening him like that when he came to you for help!

Oz: Silence, Whippersnapper. The beneficent Oz has every intention of granting your requests.

Oz: But first you must prove yourselves worthy by performing a very small task. Bring me the broomstick of the Witch of the West.

The Scarecrow: Bbbbbbbbut…if we do that, we’ll have to kill her to get it.

Oz: Bring me her broomstick and I’ll grant your requests. Now, go.

The Cowardly Lion: But what if she kills us first?

Oz: I said GO!!!

So off they go to attempt a task none feels equal to. And together, doing what each does best and with a bit of luck, they succeed in killing the Wicked Witch. When they return with the Witch’s broomstick, they discover that the Great and Powerful Oz is no wizard at all. He is nothing more than a man from Kansas himself.

After pointing out each of Dorothy’s companion’s traits, he presents him a token representing the quality he sought. For the Scarecrow who wanted a brain–a diploma. For the Tin Man whose maker failed to give him a heart, a heart-shaped pocket watch that ticks like a beating heart. And for the Cowardly Lion, a medal of valor. The three discover they suddenly possess the essential qualities each object represents!

When he gets to Dorothy, he rummages through his empty bag and Dorothy sadly says: “Oh, I don’t think there’s anything in that black bag for me.”

This is where so many mommy entrepreneurs get stuck! The PR is the bag! The ad is the bag! The trade show is the bag! We keep waiting for the Wizard to pull something out of the bag for us! The one magical thing that will take us where we want to go, bring our business to life, erase our fears of failure (or success). We are all waiting to be handed that trinket, that token that “gives” us what we feel we lack.

Back to our story:

The Wizard says he will take Dorothy back to Kansas himself in a great helium balloon….but while the wizard is making speeches, the balloon departs without Dorothy.

Brokenhearted, Dorothy begins to abandon her dream of ever returning to Kansas and attempts to reconcile herself to life in Oz with her new friends. It is then that Glinda the Good Witch of the North appears….

DOROTHY: Oh, will you help me? Can you help me?

GLINDA: You don’t need to be helped any longer. You’ve always had the power to go back to Kansas.

DOROTHY: I have?

SCARECROW: Then why didn’t you tell her before?

GLINDA: Because she wouldn’t have believed me. She had to learn it for herself.

Dorothy returns to Kansas by clicking her heels, encased in the ruby slippers, together and repeating her mantra.

What are the lessons here?

What do the ruby slippers represent?

Is Glinda actually a separate person? Or is she your subconscious mind?

If she is real, is she a mentor? Or a loved one who knows you best?

Who is the Glinda in your life?

What do you possess–what have you ALWAYS possessed–that will take you where we want to go?

I can see clearly now that it is not the Wizard I need, it is Glinda. The Wizard’s bag is a comforting thought to cling to when nothing goes my way. But I hear Dorothy’s truth when I say “There is nothing in that bag for me.” I already possess that which I seek. I just gotta go dig through my mental closet to find my ruby slippers!

*sigh* I’m still here. Everyday, I come and sit in front of my empty blog screen and try to think of something to say. But the words don’t come. I try to post about the business, our new styles for Fall, our plans for expanding the Grand line, anything that might be of interest to people who came here to read about Secure2Me happenings, but it feels insincere. Or disloyal to my baby. Or immaterial. I dunno. I cannot find the words to explain the fog I am in. I don’t cry much and I don’t feel depressed. I am just a bit numb and a lot apathetic. I think it will pass. I thought about removing my blog. But my hope is that my experience may help someone else. So my blog lingers.

Sometimes I think in movie quotes and I have had a marvelous line from Steel Magnolias running through my mind for the last week. You remember the part where Daryl Hannah’s character Annelle kinda breaks down in front of her new boss and then recovers by saying, ” Miss Truvy, I promise that my personal tragedy will not interfere with my ability to do good hair.” That is how I feel. For my husband, for my children, for my business, the show must go on.

I feel stronger each day and I am at peace with what transpired. Even in tragedy, there was perfection. As a natural birth advocate, I trust the process of birth and this situation was no different. A pregnant friend asked me if I was “terrified” by the thought of having another miscarriage next time. I thought only for a moment before replying because my truth has not changed.

I trust the process. I trust my body. I trust my baby. I am not afraid, though, of course, I hope this never happens again. To live in fear, to mistrust my body, solves nothing. I have to give myself wholeheartedly over to the process and trust that all is as it should be.

We will celebrate our next pregnancy from day one, joyfully trusting in the miraculous process. When we know, you’ll know.

And in the words of my hero Forrest Gump, “That’s all I have to say about that.”

You know how Oprah always talks about the Universe speaking to her? This phrase usually confounds me as I have no good concept of who or what the Universe is.

Well, out of the blue, while I was assembling a photo collage of my beautiful boys for a post on counting my blessings, the Universe showed up with a personal message for me in the form of an error alert. Here is a screen shot of what I saw:

It says: “Something went terribly wrong. Please try again…”

I read it again.

“Something went terribly wrong. Please try again…”

I read it aloud.

“Something went terribly wrong. Please try again…”

I read it like a conversation.

Universe: “Something went terribly wrong.”

Me: “No shit.”

Universe: “Please try again….”

Me: “Okay.”

That was it. I received the message and instantly felt some clarity. There are no real answers for why our tiny baby died. Sometimes, no matter who you are, no matter how much you have to give, no matter who or how you worship, no matter how healthy you are, no matter how badly you want it, no matter how good a mother you would be, your pregnancy ends with no baby in your arms. That is just the truth. “Something went terribly wrong.”

I am moving on to the next phase. “Please try again…” I gracefully accepted my demotion from Pregnancy Tracker to Fertility Friend. I bade a tearful farewell to the darling little girl pregnancy ticker I created. My nightstand is filled with fertility monitor strips and I am again temping and charting and waiting.

I am grateful for the message I received. I choose to believe it is really some greater, wiser power communicating with me in a way I can understand. I like the message because it is clear, concise and unambiguous. The message speaks to my heart and to my mind in a language I understand. It is the language of understanding and hope. And it feels like a hug from God.

My friend: “Mommy Detour” is on your business site, right?

Me: Yes.

My friend: So anyone that comes to Secure2Me can click on it and read it, right?

Me: Uh-huh.

My friend: Then why did you put all that personal stuff about your miscarriage on your business blog?

Me: (long pause) Because I am a mom first.

This blog was never intended to be a hollow attempt at slipping S2M promotion into quote-unquote everyday ramblings on my blog. I started the blog because I am a real person and everyone else has one and I get  emails from other moms asking about life/biz balance and I like to write and… and… and… the list goes on.

I am a pretty transparent person and I do not have many objections to sharing personal information with people. I think many of our sorrows and travails could be lessened if more people told the unvarnished truth about common, yet personal experiences, like birth and death. Why the taboo? Who does the secrecy and white-washing serve? Certainly not the woman in your community who has the same experience shortly after you. She (I am her now, just so you know) walks around in a haze feeling like she is being melodramatic because she never heard anyone else talk being absolutely heartbroken over a miscarriage at 6 weeks. Other people mentioned their miscarriages like they were job interviews that didn’t result in an offer. “Well, it just didn’t work out,” or “The timing wasn’t right.” I realize those women didn’t take the events lightly. And I am not suggesting that everyone is obligated to burst into a torrent of tears at the playground and tell me all the intimate details of such a private loss.

I wish it wasn’t such a private thing.

I wish people talked about it more so it would lose some of its power to shame.

I wish I had known how much it would hurt so I would have been more prepared.

I wish I knew if other women felt somehow responsible for their miscarriage.

I wish our culture had a ritual to recognize and honor these losses.

But mostly I wish it had never happened. I wish I was still pregnant, still growing my little baby, still living everyday with the excitement of a new life inside me.

Instead, I am stuck in the miserable no-man’s land of miscarriage. Not pregnant anymore, even though the stupid test stick says I am (in a cruel twist, the hcG lingers in your body for weeks) Too weak and too tired to work out. Clueless on when my fertility will return so we can try again. Just sad and puzzled and impatient and disinterested in anything but googling endless combinations of “miscarriage” and “conceive a girl.”

I always try to wrap up on a positive note, put a hopeful spin on things. Sorry. Today, I got nothing for ya.

I feel a bit like a tornado survivor standing outside in the rain, surveying the remnants of my damaged home. One minute, everything was fine and the next, it was utter chaos. I never saw it coming.

I look around my life and see my wonderful husband, my healthy children, my good health, my loving family and I know that I am blessed. It will take some time to clean up this mess, but I know the clouds will part and the sun will shine again. We will re-build and a healthy baby will find a wonderful home with us when the time is right.

After experiencing problems all week, I saw Jean Sala, CNM, our midwife, yesterday and we did blood work and had a sonogram. The scan confirmed that our little baby has died. Like many miscarriages, there are no firm answers. Jean said it was likely a genetic anomaly and the baby stopped developing. We are very sad, very disappointed. We have chosen to complete the process naturally and will birth our tiny baby at home our own way.

Logically, I understand that miscarriages happen in 1 of 6 pregnancies. With three healthy, lovely children in my midst, it is abundantly clear that we have been very blessed. Nothing about this points to an underlying problem and there is no reason to believe it will happen next time.

But none of that changes the fact that my heart is broken by the loss of the baby I wanted so much. I charted my temps for months, we planned for this baby and he or she was conceived with intent and love. I have been pregnant only 6 weeks but this baby has been foremost in my mind and heart for many months. After all this time, I have nothing but a couple of blurry sonogram images and a report detailing the demise of my dream.

In this situation, nothing can be said or done to make it any better. We will grieve the loss of this unique person and move into the new reality that does not include a baby this Spring. I am grateful for the support I am receiving from my amazing husband, family and friends. It makes me even more sure that, when the time is right, a new little person will find a wonderful home with us.

I have been struggling for the past year to be all things to all people as far as my business is concerned. I want to produce the highest quality, most beautiful blankets at a price most moms can afford. I also want to see my blankets in specialty retail stores and online at the likes of Target. And I want to do this while employing legal US citizens in my community who earn a fair wage.

Over the last year, we have tried to participate in the wholesale market. I must say, the results were borderline abysmal. Our products are handmade in the USA, one blanket at a time by professional seamstresses and my fabrics are very high quality goods. Producing Secure2Me products is expensive! Selling my blankets wholesale felt like giving them away and I never saw an appreciable increase in traffic or sales from buyers in surrounding areas. Showroom fees, rep commissions and show specials ate up every bit of our gross profit. It was a win-lose and we were the big losers.

We were at a crossroads a few months ago, requesting samples from overseas manufacturers and looking at ways to make our products here for less. I got a sample from a well-respected contact at the trade mart and it was a hot mess. Poor quality fabric, hideous construction and inferior workmanship. I emailed photos to the broker and he said he was “embarrassed” by the sample. He was supposed to address the issues with the factory but I have never heard from him since. Another factory produced a sample that was technically right, yet looked so wrong. It felt like someone put scary clown make-up on my baby and took pictures of him for our Christmas cards. Seriously, it was that bad.

I know I am not “supposed” to have strong feelings about my product. It is not a person, I get that. But it is my creation. It is my art. I want every blanket out there to be as close to perfect as possible because that is what I want to have for my baby. I would have no peace wondering what blanket #2,193 of 5,000 was like on the inside if I ordered my product by the container from China. I love being able to see the blankets myself from start to finish, anytime I want to pop in at the shop.

I know some wonderful products are made overseas and I am not at all implying that overseas production equals inferior quality. I am saying I lost interest in pursuing offshore manufacturing. Maybe it is my intuition, maybe it is my Detroit DNA, maybe I just need a better broker. I dunno. For a multitude of reasons, we have decided to manufacture here in Texas.

So much would change if we went overseas. Assuming we found the perfect factory overseas and every single blanket they produced was immaculate, I would have to limit my offerings severely because of the huge minimums required to place an order. I love designing different styles and providing the consumer with lots of choices. I absolutely could not offer more than five styles if we outsourced manufacturing. And what if I guessed wrong on one of those styles?

(It has happened before. Remember ‘Cordial’? I loved it! Moms told me it looked like something out of a whorehouse) Thank goodness I don’t have 5,000 of those to sell

Therefor, I have decided to enjoy my company and my life. I will fall in love again with fabrics. I will create unique clip-on Secure2Me Blankets in beautiful styles that moms and babies will love. I will sell my blankets online and at shows and markets. Should Target come knocking, perhaps I will design some proprietary styles just for them and enjoy seeing my invention on their website.  But the “maybes” and “what-ifs” will no longer dictate my happiness.

I started this business because I loved the product I created. I am determined to enjoy the life that goes along with it!

Tags: baby product, china, entrepreneur, made in usa, Secure2Me Baby Blanket, Target, Texas

Chronologically, I am 36 years old. Technologically, I feel 75. Why can’t I grasp all these social networking sites? I just don’t understand the purpose or how to participate. Little I do in a day seems interesting enough to Tweet about. The few things that might be tweet-worthy are too proprietary to share. I love reading other people’s posts but feel tongue-tied when trying to post “enough-but-not-too-much.” I get Facebook mixed up with MySpace and couldn’t tell you right now which one of the sites I am a member of. It may be both. Or maybe I am thinking of LinkedIn. I just get so confused by all of it.

This must be how my Grandma felt about the VCR. She always called it the “movie machine” and though she liked watching movies, she never really got the hang of operating it by herself. My Grandma also favored old-fashioned, G-rated films and we had difficulty finding movies that weren’t offensive to her delicate 81-year old sensibilities. She would hold up a box at Blockbuster and ask, “Is this a picture I can see?’ like she was underage and the clerk was surely going to ask for some ID.

I downloaded StumbleUpon a few months ago and liked stumbling for a few days, until I got my criterion narrowed to the degree that I was shown the same 10 sites interspersed with random weird site sites every third click. Not knowing how to change my preferences, I gave up and went back to Googling. Now, I find out today you can intentionally go to a site in StumbleUpon and rate it. Doesn’t this defeat the point of stumbling? I am probably really wrong and you are shaking your head and rolling your eyes right now. Fine. I don’t care. I have hit some kind of mental age block and have become the old dog incapable of learning these new tricks.

I don’t feel my horizons are significantly limited by my techno-ignorance. Sure, I wish I knew how to press the pound key on my BlackBerry but thus far, I have gotten by yelling “Agent!” three times after the prompt to enter my account number followed by the pound sign. But I do worry about my future. At this rate, I will be unable to make a phone call, email a friend or shop online in a few short years. I’ll be standing in Best Buy yelling “Agent!” into the remote control of some new-fangled flat panel HDTV I call the “picture box” by the time I am 40.

It is difficult to know how our new baby (and the pregnancy itself) will impact Secure2Me. We talked a lot about the impact of the new baby on the business and vice versa before deciding to seek a new family member so its not like this just dawned on me today. But I confess, the reality is starting to sink in a bit. I keep saying to myself, “We are going to have four children 8 and under and run our business like a “regular” company.” Its my little mantra. Only it sounds like a big, fat lie to my ears.

I have been reading about methods for growing a business while growing a family and the suggestions just don’t appeal to me. I’m not about to post a schedule in our kitchen! Organization freaks and schedules have never appealed to me. For me, the fastest route to stress and misery is a self-imposed schedule to remind me that I am late or behind or just plain doing it wrong. Our lives, the children’s lives and the business all have an organic flow. And I like it this way. This is not to say we let important things slide. I always know what is top priority, do what needs to be done and move forward from there. This method works for us and we get our work done and enjoy our day.

But what happens when the new baby arrives? Everyone knows newborns come first, 24 hours a day. How will I cope with caring for my newborn, ensure the boys feel loved and valued and grow a business? My head spins thinking about it now.

I tell myself it is like the many other challenges in life. It is at first overwhelming, then tolerable, then suddenly, one day, you realize you have mastered the new challenge. And would not want life any other way. I trust this will be the case. Just in case, I am working on an alternate mantra.