How to balance your business and your family

How to balance your business and your family Some days I am gung ho about entrepreneurship and Im spending the day with my kids while money comes in from my blog and my coaching  and I think Im great, Im living the 4-hour workweek, and for one minute I forget that I hate Tim Ferriss. I hate him for making people think that it is possible for anyone to make money without working hard. Because the next minute, I am telling my husband that I promise Ill pay him back and Im paying my developer for my startup with money earmarked for corn, and Im in therapy from the stress of knowing that probably my last marriage fell apart because I used family finances to support my  startup. And now it looks like Im doing it again. I see familiar signs: My husband in bed at night, unable to sleep because all he can think about is my startups insatiable need for cash. For all you financial snobs I want you to know it is very common  for startup founders to ruin their lives funding their company. Its why I said  Ill never do another startup. I have  online businesses that are stable and profitable. Why cant I just leave well enough alone? I dont know. But I know thats why people say being a startup founder is tantamount to  having a brain disorder. My husband  overhears me doing a coaching call where I say, You cant have an amazing career and be home at 3pm when your kids come back from school. There are no careers where everyone else puts in their full effort and they also want to work with someone who works part time. And besides that, I say, in a speech I give at least once a week, If you start a new career when you have a four-year-old kid, you are competing against 23 year olds who also are starting new careers but have no kids. Thats tough competition. Then the conversation goes like this: Penelope, youre doing it. Youre home with your kids and you have a great career. How can I explain to them that ITS FUCKING TERRIBLE TO HAVE MY CAREER. No one would ever want it. I take insane risks that no one would want to take. Today I got an email from Kiva. They do  micro-financing for people in countries where you can buy a cow for three dollars. I decided to  put a little fund together and then my husband would help the kids go through the site to decide who to lend the money to; Id rather the kids learn how to be investors than entrepreneurs. So the kids sit down with my husband and read the descriptions of the businesses people want to launch. My husband is partial to agriculture. But the kids choose who to fund based on what they look like, which is probably closer to how real investors work. My husband tells me, This week three people from Kiva paid us back. I say, I know. Youve told me twice. Its bugging me. Do you want to marry one of them? He is pissed. He doesnt like that I make jokes about owing him money. He bounced a check and its the first check hes ever bounced in his whole life. Its hard for me to get upset about bouncing a check because I bounced so many checks that I stopped writing them; if you have a hard time keeping track of checks, its really hard to keep track of bounced checks. You have this feeling like its raining bank statements. I see, though, that Im ruining his life. His life is about financial stability. He owns land. He is not liquid. And my financial life is so liquid it practically evaporates. I kiss him. Did you know the purpose of kisses is that women can tell how men feel by their kiss? Men dont need this because woman actually say how they feel. Dont tell me Im sexist. When you are low on cash you have decision overload. Theres research. Click the link. Its why people spend their food stamps on Ho-Hos. The blogger equivalent is irresponsible sexism. So I kiss him and his kiss says fuck you Im going to burn the house down if you dont pay me back. Thats what ISTPs do when they are under stress. They want to burn everything down. As an ENTJ under stress I get too wound up in the details. So I wash dishes while he fumes. We both know that good marriages require two people who are able to be kind to each other even if things are crumbling around us. I dry dishes and he eats chocolate from the hiding place where I make him keep the chocolate so that I dont eat it. Can I have some? I say. He says, No. Its mine. I say, Thank you. Thank you for caring so much about me. And I kiss him a good soft kiss with a little chocolate chaser. And I think that maybe at the end of our financial trouble Ill have a stronger marriage and a  thinner waist and a company that has made it to another round of funding.