Any given night at TheFamily Dances home studio, James training capoeira, an African Brazilian martial art, with the munchkins.
First, I think I should preface this piece by saying that I have always believed the most profitable, peaceful, and joyful way forward as a mothering entrepreneur who is growing a family business is with my children being an integral and physical part of the process. In looking back, I see that much of what I initially experienced as hardship or what felt discouraging was the unwelcoming vibe I felt from some business spaces and interactions where the dominant, unquestioned rule was that children don’t belong in an environment where revenue is being generated.
The root of my entire entrepreneurial reality sprouts off from this singular divergence in perspective: I know my children belong with me, their mother. Our children are not obstacles to be overcome, silenced, or shooed away in the pursuit of greater things. We are a family moving through these possibilities, changes, and growing pains together, and it costs us something major every time we have to separate. Rather, my intention has always been to discover creative strategies of collaboration, flexibility, and shared learning so that all our needs—as parents and children, as entrepreneurs and artists, as teachers and learners—are honored through the long, slow growing labors of building and running a family business.
This journey to nurture our family business, TheFamily Dances, has been a turbulent, hilarious, exhausting, inspiring, and constantly shifting ride. We’ve been bumped and bruised, we’ve been buoyed and carried, we’ve been loved and encouraged, we’ve been heartbroken and resilient. It’s so all-encompassing of the human experience. And to share so many of these moments with our children has deepened every part of the discovery.
I am actually in the middle of reconfiguring our business structure right now. Unlike the beginning when I jumped into these entrepreneurial waters 3 years ago, I’m taking my time and doing lots of research for every step. I tell people all the time, especially mothers and women who assume I am so much more skilled and advanced than they are, that I’ve made a lot of mistakes, and I’ve learned a lot in the wake of those mistakes. I’ve discovered accessible, and often times free, resources for support. I’ve met people who I would have never talked to and had meaningful conversations with them about the intersections of business building, familymaking, and living your dreams. I’ve signed up for business expos that would have intimidated me in the past. I’ve presented at a fitness festival with a 12-day old baby tied on my still bleeding body—not recommended at all, Mamas. When in doubt, remember this: Postpartum recovery over potential new clients! I’ve made business deals with a baby at my breast. I’ve set up large contracts with children crawling all over me, screaming and begging to be fed, again. I’ve rushed into filing the wrong documents, and spent hours, weeks, months trying to undo the mess.
Me taking a pause from vending at our booth and facilitating a Liberated Booty dance circle at the Black Luv Festival.
My first season of business ownership has been fully immersed with mothering and family life. This is not a model I was taught or had the mindset to plan out well in advance. I grew into this way, and I really love it for all it is teaching me about honoring my wholeness as a mothering artist. So often one of the barriers many mothers express to me is feeling like there’s no room to cultivate their creative works within the overwhelming flow of their family life, other jobs, and daily responsibilities. Through years of experimentation I have been reimagining who has the power to shape my time and decide my priorities. Ultimately, our family business is able to grow, even through all the bumps in the road, because as the core operator of our enterprise I own 100% of my time everyday.
For mothers and women who are feeling they are a long ways off from owning all their time, I encourage them to start with where they are. For instance, there are 1440 minutes in a single day. I ask them, is it possible for you to decide what you want to do with just 30 of those minutes? With just 15 of them? With just 5? When we break our time down into small increments, we start being more receptive to the opportunities we have to shape more and more of our moments. And over time, with lots of practice and intentionality, everything really does start to add up. Whatever the amount of time we access as ours on any given day, the important part is that we practice this gesture of creative autonomy, and exercise our freedom to choose how we use the time we do have. It’s like a muscle we have to stretch, grow, and strengthen daily. The more we are in the habit of making choices about what matters most to us, the more responsive and resourceful we become in the actualization of our entrepreneurial endeavors.
The past 3 years have marked a critical stage of growth for me in many different ways. When I began this journey, I was resistant to taking on all the administrative duties of running our family business by myself. I thought James and I should split the work 50/50, but that proved ineffective from the very beginning. It took me a very long time to embrace the reality that as partners we had very different strengths, and that for the wellness of our business and family, I had to take on leadership in this way. I wrestled with this also because in the beginning of our business building I had an infant and a toddler, was tandem nursing, and caring for them all day and night too. Running the administrative wing of TheFamily Dances so that James could be the face of the business when we facilitated our programs fostered a lot of resentment initially. When we would get into arguments I would say, “I wish I had a Binah to do all this for me too!” I think I spent the whole first year of our business trying to figure out how to get out of being the operations manager/financial officer/contracts negotiator/space rental coordinator/insurance finder/paperwork processor/relentless payment procurer (because you know, some people make you chase your money down after you’ve provided the service…boo!)—all the complex backroom stuff that is not as fulfilling or exciting as dancing and facilitating movement with the people!
After hosting our first family capoeira roda at our home studio with our beautiful community.
But the truth was, our business needed me to do all these internal, invisible labors. I tried my best to be gentle with myself in the reckoning process. After all, prior to becoming the matriarch of a family that dances and does capoeira, an African Brazilian martial art, I lived a lovely life as a dancer and movement facilitator, traveling around the world doing my thing, on my time. I had all the time in the world to be my own arts administrator and be in the spotlight. The roughest part of adjusting to our emerging family business flow was having to temporarily step out of the spotlight to sustain James being front and center while we built our brand one product at a time. For logistical reasons, it was more manageable to focus on James facilitating our capoeira programs. It was frustrating that he didn’t always grasp the enormity of all I did so that he could literally just show up to a work site, do an awesome presentation, and then leave. Sometimes he would ask me why I hadn’t put more energy into setting up more dance classes or workshops. I would look at him incredulously, like where was the extra life energy supposed to magically appear from? Not only did I not have time to set up my own programs and facilitate them, I had very limited time with the little munchkins to devote to my own dance practice.
I often felt completely bewildered, misunderstood, and unappreciated for the early part of our family business experiment. It took a lot of time, experimentation, and reflection to give myself room to realize that even with all my mothering and caregiving labors, I still had so much power, freedom, and opportunity to grow my dream family business. I had to come into my own place of illumination within the dense wilderness of entrepreneurship, and identify a way forward that made me feel whole as a mother and an artist and a business woman.
Our first apartment, where TheFamily Dances was born, back when there were only two munchkins to our clan.
The truth was that building a business was not impossible. The biggest hinderance for me in the early years has been overcoming this aggressive, (mostly) external ideology that in order to develop something sustainable and profit-generating that I would need to dissect my selves, boxing Mommy-self into one corner over here and Business Owner-self into another one over there. And while in my heart I knew that was not the authentic process for me or the way forward for our family’s wellness, it still took a lot of time, energy, tears, and revelations to fully embrace my visionary strategy of collaboration with my children being part of my core practices as a mothering entrepreneur.
My process as a mothering entrepreneur evolved primarily through necessity: necessity of proximity to my children for postpartum healing, for breastfeeding, for homeschooling, necessity of being deeply engaged in the labors of growing my creative practices as a mothering artist, and necessity of saving precious financial resources by shrinking our overhead and facilitating our programs as a family, thereby not incurring the expensive costs of separation—read: paying for childcare and the costs of transportation to and from childcare.
Nothing has really been smooth, though. Many of the scrapes, bruises, and criticisms have been felt more personally by me than by us as a collective family unit. But with every hard lesson comes a bright spot of understanding that encourages me to try again, and step forward with a little more confidence than I had the last time. Just yesterday I successfully negotiated an advance payment for one of our projects in the middle of baby girl’s nap time. The boys were hollering for me to get them their snacks in the background, but their father was there to tend to their needs (read: tend to their demands because you know, they always want more food!) so that this time I didn’t have to use wild, silent gestures and plead with them to wait five more minutes while I finish the very important phone call.
Breastfeeding Jubilee and attempting to do our own family photo shoot on my phone at our home studio.
And yes, plenty of times it happens like that when I’m home alone with them. I’ve learned to be okay with that too. This is one of the realities of being a mothering entrepreneur: sometimes the kids are making noise or needing your attention when you’re handling something major. This reality though is not a deal breaker. The work of growing the business can still happen in these collaborative moments of motherhood and business ownership. It will look and feel different from what we’ve been taught to think business is. It will take time to find your own flow through the process. But it’s all doable, and it’s more fun for everyone when we get to figure this familymaking, family business magic out together.
In this next stage of business mama life I am really excited about expanding our brand and being more intentional with how we nurture relationships with clients, identify ideal programming partners, and become more visible within the family business and creative economy sectors. I am overflowing with ideas for new products, programs, and services that are more aligned with our family dreams, and also naturally integrate with homeschooling, worldschooling, and opportunities for presenting our work as a family of creatives around the globe. I am happily, and gradually, making my way back to center stage too, and activating more performance opportunities that celebrate my dancing mother self. I’m also looking forward to documenting more of my internal journeys as a mothering entrepreneur and using my platforms as a writer and facilitator to create more visibility and awareness about how mothering artists can find shared and successful pathways through motherhood and entrepreneurship. Basically, the future is looking grand! I’m ever-grateful for all I’ve learned so far, and also for all the discoveries to come that are inevitably a part of this magical labor called growth.