What’s your story?

Warning: ramblings coming up and not of the walking kind!

So I’m wondering whether you can help me answer this question? Since when has it become ok to insult other families lifestyles and their children? I was talking to someone a few weeks ago and what she said still rattles about in my head a bit.

It’s ok to not understand someone’s background, but instead of insulting it, whatever happened to talking first? See what I mean about still being bewildered even now??

Keith and I talked for years about opening a website for outdoors kids clothes. Last year we were fortunate enough to be able to act on that dream and I quickly got to work on it. It was so exciting, a steep learning curve for sure and one of the most rewarding yet equally frustrating experiences I’ve ever had in my work life. So when we decided a few months ago to close it down for various reasons, it was heartbreaking and definitely not an easy decision to make.

But we chased a dream, our dream. We started a brand new business from scratch. We had sales, excellent feedback and good relationships with distributors. It was great. It was ours. We weren’t buying in to a franchise or looking after another persons already established business. We acted on our dreams and made it happen, if only for a short time.

So how can this be classed as not a ‘real job’ and as a failure? Just because you don’t see the point of something, or you see a failed business and those associated with it as failures doesn’t mean it wasn’t a ‘real job’.

I’ve been dismissed by family members who also see it this way. Now we could say it failed, but you know what? Me and Keith choose not to see it that way. We learnt a heck of a lot from running that website and if it weren’t for that ‘failure’ we wouldn’t be where we are now, doing more of what we love and having opportunities passed our way because of it.

I was also argued with about how old our son was. He’s 4yrs old next week but he’s small for his age. I mentioned he will be starting school next year and I was corrected; “Don’t you mean preschool?” Ummm. Nope, definitely school. After politely correcting her back, I was told “But he’s so small!” Sigh. Needless to say the conversation went downhill rather rapidly after that!!

So come on fellow parents, regardless of what stage we’re at with parenting, regardless of our background, jobs, religions, cars, whatever; surely we’re in this together. We all have our own individual stories. We’re all on a journey. We’ve all had successes. We’ve all had low points. One thing we have in common is that for the most part, we’re all trying to provide what we can for our kids and do our best for them.

So how’s about instead of the judgement, insults, knocking each other down and trying to undermine each other, from one family to another, let’s focus on talking more, getting to know each other more, support and learn from one another and tell our stories.

I’ll go first; Hi, my name’s Stacey and I love my family, the outdoors and chocolate…

Your turn…