It was March when they asked me to leave. For three months I lingered in an odd sort of grace period, ferrying the kids to and from school, absorbing the loss of my business and taking the "break" folks assured me I deserved. For a time, I broke well. I was buoyed along in the rote carpool parade of Menlo Park mornings, powerless but for the daily decisions regarding lunch meats and yoga pants.
Then June came, my sons graduated to first and fourth grade, and it got scary. Summer. They were home all day, every day. I tried to feel lucky: to never have an outburst over childish backtalk, claims of boredom or pompous attempts to overrule my food selections. ("Mom? I thought I already asked you not to buy this gross wheat bread?") But sometimes I yelled. A lot of times I was ashamed. I had failed, and my company was dead. I was angry at my investors, angry at myself. But my children were with me.
I told myself I should be happy: home with my two inventive boys who needed red meat and dirt and Band-Aids, and were not yet old enough to sext. They wanted to be with me. I should have been flattened with gratitude. But I wanted to go to work. "Mommy, let's play Monopoly," they said, and "Do we really have to go to the pool?" The answers were no (the brutal monotony of the game destroyed any enthusiasm) and yes. I had been home for months. Yes, we had to go to the damned pool. Or I did.
We didn't. Instead, we fought over bread types and board games, they resisted leaving the house, and I was desperate and miserable.
At the time, I thought it meant I was a bad person, a failure as a mother. Where were the violent-green grass, fun-filled vacation and guiltless togetherness I had often coveted from afar? Where was the joy? Only much later did it occur to me that my grief and struggle were necessary and temporary—that I had completed a long, four-year pursuit; suffered a loss; and then graduated back home.
I say "graduated back home" because in losing my company I gained what I had wanted. It did not come the way I had hoped, nor did it fit what I had imagined it might be. But summer passed, then three seasons, and finally, the following June, the crisis itself. It took a while, because this is part of grieving the loss of one's identity.
They say that grief does not change you; it reveals you. I did not absolve myself of blame for the way the business went, but when the kids returned to school, I began to write about it. Slowly, through narrative—this new work—I began to appreciate each phase of my start-up, its shutdown and my homecoming.
It is summer again, and the boys and I go swimming. We also ride skateboards, seek the best slice of pizza, read books to each other and argue over sunscreen application. Sometimes I say yes, I'll play Monopoly. I still hate the game, but I love talking with my sons. Soon enough, they will be gone. Sometimes they ask me, too early in the morning, if we can get out of the house and go to the pool. Often I say no: I need to finish what I'm working on. But eventually we go. We race each other in freestyle, then lie back and eat Popsicles, spent in the sun. Already, I miss them. This is part of the luck of failure. Through loss I have found the greatest gain.
Sarah Eisner, MS '98, a recovering entrepreneur and a Bay Area native, is working on a memoir.
