Mother’s Day and our other “babies”
I hope everyone had a Happy Mother’s Day. I sure did! We grilled out (shocker!) Tuna steaks. I’ve talked to a handful of people who took the time to email me and said they were thinking about me as they too were grilling out for Mother’s Day and really needed some Grill Charms™! Ahhhhh…. Sweet sweet Validation… we all need it! This leads me to my topic for today… validation, criticism and our little (sometimes big) inanimate babies (aka our inventions).
A fellow inventor-mom emailed the other day to vent. She recently had something very exciting happen to her and her new invention and was elated. About a week later after the dust had settled from this exciting thing, she was left a little blue. She was finding that some people (no mompreneurs® mind you) had nothing nice to say about her invention. She read on other boards and on comments from the website hosting this exciting thing that many people (surprisingly quite a bit of people) got online to do nothing but talk “smack” about the honored recipients of this exciting thing.
What people don’t understand (or maybe they do and just don’t care) is that an invention is like your baby. You conceive it, you create it, you birth it (sometimes by way of China… but it’s birthed nonetheless) and you love it unconditionally. So when someone has something not so nice to say or tries to knock it down a notch or two, it’s a pretty big blow to the chest. We all want people to love our babies as much as we do, but alas, nobody will. That is just a fact of life we are prepared for but meanness for meanness’s sake is unnecessary and uncalled for under any circumstance. Nobody’s baby is perfect, and as mommies we are often blinded by our love for our babies so much so that we can’t see its faults. Sometimes our overpowering adoration for our babies make us overlook a potentially fatal flaw that could collapse our baby’s very existence. For this reason it is crucial that “invent-moms” receive the opinions and criticisms of others but in giving comments and suggestions we must be cognizant of tone and motivation.
Next time there is the urge to pooh-pooh someone’s baby; we must take a good look at the force behind the message. If we are motivated by nothing but the green-eyed monster that lives in us all, just shush! Those comments will do nothing to better this world in which we all live and will probably ruin a fellow human beings day. There are enough people and outside forces that make our lives challenging enough without contributing to the problem by projecting our own insecurities, jealousies and ill-will onto our fellow mom. Before we speak (or type) we must ask “are these comments sincere, polite and constructive?” If the answer is yes, then comment away! It might be the life preserver that someone’s baby needed.
Leslie Haywood, Founder and President of Charmed Life Products, Inventor of Grill Charms™ www.grillcharms.com
