My little story of business resiliency - Part 6

The Crisis

One night, I come home exhausted.  Running a business is much more demanding than I could have imagined.  Not to mention that I am under constant stress at home, never knowing when I would get lectured or yelled at about my incompetence.

I have a flashback: Even my teachers used to tell her at parents' meetings: "David has enormous talent and intelligence, but it’s all wasted by laziness.  If only he would apply himself." Most parent-teacher evenings would end in a ritual of abuse.

At least the physical beatings had stopped two years ago because of the intervention of social services.

One evening, after dinner, my mom opened my bedroom door and started screaming at me at the top of her lungs.

“Don't you understand that you're just a dreamer who doesn't foresee the consequences of his actions?  Besides, you're disturbing my life with all these messages left on the answering machine.  Who are all these people?  How many employees do you have?  How many customers?  Where does the money go?  Who did you borrow money from to pay for all this?  Why do you have dissatisfied customers calling?  You can't even clean your room; how on earth do you think you can be an entrepreneur? You've got a lot of nerve to have started this!”

The salvo is over.  Despite my apologies, my embarrassed stance, and the admission that putting our home phone number on my business card was a terrible idea, nothing could be done at this stage.  I even offer to install a secondary phone line, but we were past solutions.  The hazards of having a business with all its challenges means nothing to her.

She is so angry that in the middle of a sentence, she announces that she doesn't want to see me anymore and that I must be ready to pay the price for being such a troublesome son and leave home by my 18^th birthday.

I leave the house in a hurry to cry in my faithful Pony, my refuge.  Shame overwhelms me.  Maybe she's right? It's obvious; I'm a happy fool who thought he was an entrepreneur.  Unhappy customers?  Incompetence on my part.  I can't even close the kitchen cupboard doors... I think of my father, who used to tell me about all his projects, most of which failed. 

Like father, like son, as the saying goes...