People love to romanticize small business ownership as if it’s some magical lifestyle where you sip coffee, answer one email, and then spend the rest of the day doing whatever you please. That fantasy must be nice. It just has very little to do with reality.
Running a daycare center was not a flexible little side adventure. It was a full-scale operational circus with regulations, staffing issues, safety concerns, parent communication, scheduling chaos, and a building that seemed to wait for the worst possible moment to have a problem. My business was open 70 hours a week, and somehow people still assumed that because I was the owner, I had more freedom than everyone else. In truth, I had less.
When you own a business, especially one involving children, you are not “setting your own hours” in the way people imagine. You are setting your life on fire and then trying to manage the flames with a clipboard. The state required my physical presence for at least 30 hours a week, and they could show up whenever they wanted.... which meant I couldn’t just pop in when convenient and vanish when I felt like it. I had to be there. Constantly. Reliably. Legally.
And that was only one piece of it. There were parent conferences to schedule, staff issues to handle, emergencies in the building to solve, and summer planning that involved creating more than 60 straight days of activities to keep children engaged, safe, and happy. That alone could drain a person’s soul. Coming up with one fun activity is easy. Coming up with 2.5 months’ worth while managing everything else is a level of exhaustion people do not appreciate nearly enough.
Then there were the weekends, which were supposedly my time off. In theory, lovely. In reality, they were often interrupted by Sunday morning calls from staff members calling out sick, forcing me to find coverage at the last minute or negotiate with a teenager who suddenly discovered they had other plans. Nothing says “restful weekend” quite like solving a staffing crisis before you’ve finished your first cup of coffee on your day off.
What made it worse was the assumption from other people that I should be available for whatever they needed, whenever they needed it, because I “owned my own business.” As if that meant I was sitting around with endless free time, waiting to be summoned. Apparently, some people hear “business owner” and picture “woman of leisure.” No. I was working six, often seven, days a week, carrying the weight of an entire operation on my back, and being treated as though my schedule was the easiest one in the room.
That misunderstanding gets old fast. Owning a business does not mean you are free. It often means your responsibilities follow you everywhere. You are the backup plan, the crisis manager, the decision-maker, and the person who gets blamed when things go sideways. It can be rewarding, yes. But it is also relentless, and people who have never done it often underestimate the physical, emotional, and mental load.
So yes, I am absolutely thrilled to have that chapter behind me. I am 61 years old, I have common sense, a life of my own, and boundaries that were hard-earned. I do not miss the constant pressure, the endless interruptions, or the myth that I was somehow more available because I was self-employed. If anything, retirement gave me back something business ownership never did: actual control over my time.
And honestly, my only regret is simple. I should have retired sooner.
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