Mike Michalowicz of The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur, gave kind and honest tribute to us mompreneurs on his blog this week, illustrating the many ways mothers are literally designed for business success. From multi-tasking to collaborating, the modern mompreneur is forging warm, fuzzy new territory in business-building.
Interestingly, one commenter didn’t think Mike’s nod to mompreneurs was altogether compelling. In fact, I think Kathleen Fasanella might have been yawning at the computer screen when she wrote:
“Women have been working from home for hundreds, if not thousands of years. Trumpeting the matter now is somewhat akin to denying our mothers did it too but without a lot of fanfare. I think there lies a danger in defining one’s self in such limited terms.”
In other words: women have always known how to make something from nothing. They’ve always been resourceful because they had to be. Not because it was vogue or fun or gee, just really special and touching to sit alongside other “mompreneurs” and sing Kumbya on the Internet at two o’clock in the morning.
Here’s the part we mompreneurs forget during our digital love-ins:
Moms have been working (for money) and running their own enterprises since Christ was a child. Then in post WWII America we created the mythological Happy Days mom who’s primary job in life is to ensure every nuance of the 1950s Nuclear family is perfectly preserved. She wears an apron, bakes cookies with an idiotic smile plastered across her face, and can’t wait for hubbie to get home each night (not so she can shove her clingy little brats into his arms, but because, you know, she missed her hardworking man sooooo much during the day).
(Cough. Cough. Ahem.)
Before and after Happy Days mom came on the scene, moms worked for pay, with or without their children at their side. Today, moms still build businesses, but now we’re doing it online and in a more public fashion. The power in numbers thing is working for us because we’re visible, we’re able to be collective in our thinking, we know we’re not alone in our Alpha struggles, and we’re getting really good at being honest about the fact that to be a mompreneur is to be often-misunderstood.
Hey, we need camaraderie just like our male counterparts do, in or out of the office.
But do we need to really share everything about our work-at-home lifestyle in the digital space? Maybe Kathleen is feeling, well, a little annoyed by all the chatter about PMS and how many days in a row can you wear the same sweatpants before they stand up on their own and walk out of the room?
I don’t know. I feel like I’m scratching the surface of something else here. Like maybe there needs to be a bolder, more clearly drawn line between old fashioned authenticity and old fashioned “Who cares about your dirty laundry?” I for one, am getting a wee bit annoyed with the fanfare, and I WROTE THE BOOK on working at home as a strong, empowered woman. But at what point does “celebrating our womanhood” start to replace, even cast a shadow upon, building real, sustainable, blood-sweat-and-tears businesses?
Is it possible that we celebrate ourselves into oblivion? That we become irrelevant just as we’re picking up steam (publicly)?
What do you think, dear mompreneur?
About this Alpha WAHM Blogger: Karri is the Alpha WAHM who owns this joint. She also happened to write the book. 
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I wasn’t yawning but I was a little sad. On some levels, I think women are self-deprecated if our biology dictates our self-directed accolades. I mean, we agree men are debased if they’re self-congratulatory over their biological prowess so I see momdom as the flipside of the same expression. It’s just so much splintering; first we are human. Then we are daughters. After that we are wives, then mothers (caveats noted). It just seems so transitory …temporal. We don’t celebrate daughter-dom or wife-dom. This is what it boils down to in a business context; many of the moms I know will have to change their business names/marketing as they age because they’ll outgrow the label. Later will they become grampreneurs? It just strikes me that the human condition is about more than defining ourselves according to a transitional phase of life’s passage. If one’s enterprise is of long term value, then we shouldn’t label ourselves in such a limited fashion. And then, it’s trendy.