Starting a Company While Starting a Family

I took my son to the library yesterday to reload on books for each of us. After we got two more Dr. Dolittles for him, plus some other stuff (books on raptors, on mythical flying frogs and on household etiquette), I did a quick search on PR and kitchen remodeling. I love to browse the stacks, and as I was doing so I found a book called "Mothers Work" by Rebecca Matthias. She's the woman who started Mimi Maternity, A Pea in the Pod and Motherhood about 20 years ago. She was 28 and pregnant, a civil engineer with a hankering to start her own business, married to a computer scientist who had launched more than a handful of software companies. I've only just begun the book (should be a quick read), but I'm loving it.

Of course, I can totally identify with this woman, who discovered that at the time she was starting her family there was no such thing as professional maternity garb. She describes going into a store and seeing "...a collection of dresses that I can only say would be more appropriate for a ten-year-old than for my day off. The first one had a big white sailor collar and little puffs on the sleeves... Did pregnant women actually wear these things? Did they suddenly revert into 'cute' little girls to counterbalance the obvious statement their bodies were making: 'I had sexual intercourse!'"

The process of starting her company only weeks after giving birth is familiar to me as well--I remember the exact same sensations when I had Sebastian. I felt like a new person, saddled with tremendous new responsibilities but also with the need to finally be true to my own dreams and destiny, now that I had a child. "Things somehow did develop over the next few weeks," she writes. "As I recuperated physically, I got my old energy back. And I learned how to get things done in spite of having an infant as my partner. I took the attitude 'Where I go he goes.' Which is actually the only atttitude a nursing mother can take. I had this cheapy fold-up stroller which was really low-end compared to the Cadillac types of strollers most new mothers invested in. But the nice thing about it was it weighed about four pounds and I could carry it on my wrist like a pocketbook."

Similar to how Edward Tufte launched his highly successful book "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information" with a classified ad in Scientific American (if memory serves), Matthias placed just two classified ads, one in the Wall Street Journal and the other in the New Yorker, and the requests for her yet-to-be created catalog of executive maternity wear started pouring in.

She has some great commandments for balancing work and home, admonishing those who embrace the "supermom" concept (one I'm guilty of). Give up one or more of the following: cleanliness, lots of friends, dinner parties, the PTA, cooking, committees or any of the other energy drains that society says you should shoulder as a mother. Enlist your whole family in the effort. Feed your marriage. Create some family traditions (like sitting down for dinner at 6 pm every night, even if dinner is take-out). Divest yourself of guilt, that useless emotion. Be organized. Get help. Enjoy life.

"Remember that you're doing this because you want to. No one is putting a gun to your head to start this business and to have kids at the same time. It so happens that the optimum time in your life to do both occurs right around the 25 to 35 age, so many of us end up in this crazy situation. But let's get rid of that martyr syndrome right at the outset. You're doing this because you want to achieve greatness. Because you have a burning desire to rule your destiny. Because you need the rush that comes with creating something out of sheer nothingness."