*Originally published in Idaho Falls Magazine
Small business ownership is so much fun! There, I said it. I will be the first to tell
anyone that small business ownership is hard and terrifying and incredibly stressful at
times, but I can also confidently say it is incredibly rewarding. Rarely have I met a small
business owner operating a business model she or he dislikes. It is almost as though
most of us have a passion for something that we work to build a marketable business
model out of. For me, that passion is community. What a weird product to monetize,
huh?
East Idaho Moms was founded in 2018 as Idaho Falls Moms Blog and we were
excited to connect with other moms in the area and share our personal stories of
motherhood. Very quickly, IFMB became a safe place to share our hearts and we all
leaned into our vulnerabilities in order to let readers of the blog know that their
experiences that felt isolating were, in fact, common experiences in motherhood.
Over the years, we have morphed from a blog into a full community. We host a
book club and monthly weekend playdate as well as weekly playdates as an opportunity
to bring moms together. In 2019, I took over ownership of the blog transitioning from
executive team member to sole owner and our mission statement shifted from providing
a “positive voice of motherhood” to an “honest voice of motherhood.”
I believe there is power in sharing honest experiences in the hopes that it will
reach someone who might have previously felt completely alone. I cannot say how often
our readers express that they thought they were all alone in motherhood and I am
humbled by the opportunity to let them know they don’t have to be anymore.
While our official mission is to connect mothers in Eastern Idaho, our unofficial
one is, “Bring back the village.” We’ve all heard that it takes a village to raise a child, but
as we move forward with this digital era, that village seems to shrink smaller and
smaller until we are all surrounded by perfectly curated Instagram feeds and highlight
reels that feed into the mom guilt and shame culture. Here at East Idaho Moms, we are
passionate about ending that guilt and shame by providing a voice that says, “It’s not
just you.” We want to share REAL motherhood experiences from the horrors of potty
training to the devastating loss of a pregnancy or the difficulty of explaining divorce to a
child. Parenthood is not all butterflies and rainbows and our current mom culture
displays the good and pretty and filtered while often hiding the imperfections that make
us all human.
What we need more of in our current motherhood community is humanity.
Compassion. Kindness. Understanding. Let’s reach out to each other and create the
community we wish we had.
Twice in the past year, I have read about leaders and people I admire building
the communities they themselves wish they had been a part of and I realized that’s
exactly what we are building with East Idaho Moms. We are building the village and
putting in the foundational work to create a more open, loving, honest community of
mothers who can look past differences and focus on the sole task of raising the future
generation.
We are new moms, boy moms, girl moms, experienced moms, working moms,
non-religious moms, stay-at-home-moms, LGBTQ+ moms. We are crunchy moms and
single moms and expecting moms and moms of many and moms of onlies. We are
adoptive moms and adopted moms and surrogate moms and religious moms and
tattooed moms and married moms. We are white and black and hispanic and everything
in between. Republican, Democratic, liberal and conservative. We are old and youngand growing every day.
We are mothers and, at East Idaho Moms, THAT is the focus.
Won’t you join us to build our village?
