My breath stopped, my brain scrambled, and my heart sank. I was sure I’d lose my biggest contract. There I was, mid-sentence, explaining the fairness principle in dealmaking to a large manufacturer’s negotiation team, when my 4-year-old son sprang out from behind a partition, leaped onto the stage, and boldly declared that I was wrong.
I had hidden him offstage with a ream of paper and a box of crayons. He promised not to come out until I was done, yet there he stood, green crayon in hand.
Luckily, my client thought it was adorable. But that kind of thing happened almost daily in my life as an entrepreneurial single mom.
I made my son my business partner
As a newly single mom, I couldn’t afford childcare, so like it or not, my son was my constant companion until the age of 12. He slept in a little nest under my desk, went to networking events, sat in on sales calls, and attended all my workshops.
He cried with me when I lost deals and high-fived me when I landed contracts. We were a team.
I had heard that “kids need to be kids” and that stability is crucial. I assumed that dragging my son into the business world unfairly robbed him of a healthy childhood.
When he was 3, I made the worst decision of my life
A corporate training contract took me to Southeast Asia for two months when my son was only 3. I had no idea what it would be like, so I left him with my mom.
To the horror of my heart, after two weeks of separation, my son wouldn’t take my calls, wouldn’t open my letters, and started calling my mother “mom.”
When I finally got home and held my arms open for a running embrace, he ran away and told me that his grandmother was “mom.” I thought I’d failed as a mother. I had prioritized my work over him.
I then moved him across the world
When a client offered to set up a company for me in Kuala Lumpur and Singapore, I moved there with my son.
Although nannies are cheap there, I didn’t want anyone else influencing my son, so I continued bringing him everywhere with me. He attended leadership, sales, and personal development training and events such as fire walks, ropes courses, and team-building retreats. I also thankfully enrolled him in a Montessori school.
He was fully immersed in Malaysian culture. He spoke in a thick Malaysian accent. I thought I had ruined his ability to ever fit in at an American school.
Thankfully, I was wrong
It took less than two days after landing at LAX for him to become a bona fide Southern Californian. The Malaysian accent vanished, and Valley talk appeared. He easily fit in at public school.
The value of his early exposure to the real world quickly became apparent. A front-row seat to tough decisions, failed deals, and life pivots — along with hundreds of hours of leadership and self-development content — built something in him I couldn’t have engineered intentionally.
He is now married to a wonderful woman and has given me a beautiful 7-year-old granddaughter. He is hardworking, resourceful, optimistic, and actively preparing for an AI-driven future. He recently moved his family to Minnesota in the middle of winter because the always-nice weather and easy living of Southern California weren’t going to teach his daughter resilience.
He’s giving her an “abnormal” childhood on purpose. That tells me everything.