18 Summers Full of Life
Balancing Provision and Presence Through Online Business
Several years ago, I heard about the concept of “18 Summers”. And what that refers to is the amount of Summers that we’re gifted to spend with our children.
Summer is usually seen as the time of our life when we get to spend more quality time with our children. The majority of children out there are sent to school, and they have some holidays throughout the year, but many parents’ lives are spent rushing around rather than being present.
Summer is (hopefully) the time when we get an extended period to enjoy our children. In Australia, Summer is also Christmas time. My memories of Summer involve barbecues, playing in the pool, and having relatives visit from the United Kingdom (who always found it so strange that it was so hot!). That might also sound odd to you if you live in the Northern Hemisphere, where Summer is the middle of the year. For me, Summer is a time of connection, relaxation, and rehabilitation. And for most people around the world, it's a time of being with our family.
When I heard this concept of 18 Summers, it floored me because I didn't realise how little quality time we get with family. And it's a very different concept once you become a parent.
I didn’t live at home for a long time with my parents. Once I turned 18, I was right out of there. I got a full-time job and bought my own home, and I grew up thinking that a parent’s goal was to get the children out of home as soon as possible, so they could finally be free and live their lives.
I always thought a parent’s responsibility ended when their kids became adults. I know now that’s the exception to the rule.
When I met my husband, Brendan, his mum had a very different idea and wanted to keep him at home for as long as possible. She was happy to keep feeding, clothing, and sheltering him for as long as it took for him to get on his feet. She was also happy to do the same for me. And it wasn't until I became a mother myself that I truly understood this desire.
I want to savour every single day with my daughter. She is such a dream to me. My freedom isn’t reliant on kicking her out of my home. I don't want to send her way to be raised by other humans, to grow without me—even as an adult. I want to grow old with her. Though I am raising her, she’s also raising me.
She still sleeps in my bed with me. I'm still breastfeeding her. And we have an amazing bond. Old school parents would say I “spoil” her. But what millennial parents know that their parents didn’t is that creating a secure attachment with our children; comforting them when they need us and being emotionally available for them is what allows them to become independent, confident beings as they grow. My daughter is a testament to this research.
I remember talking to one of my friends when their child, Zac was one. Brendan and I used to visit his parents, Michael and Lisa regularly when he was little and they couldn't understand why we went to visit them as we didn’t have kids ourselves. We enjoyed their company and loved hanging out with little Zac. They had similar family values to us, breastfeeding, co-sleeping, and holding space for big feelings as they arose.
I remember saying to them once, why don't you just put him in another room to sleep? Michael did a double take and said to me, “I want him to be with us as long as possible, I don’t care if he’s still sleeping with us when he’s ten”. I could not understand that at all. Now I completely grasp it.
In my role as an Online Business Mentor, I work with many unconventional parents who think and live out of the box. They’re non-mainstream, like me. (If you're reading this, you're probably one of them.) 😉
They’re usually freethinkers, homeschoolers, world-schoolers, unschoolers, RV families, the medically ostracised, gentle parents, conscious parents, cycle-breakers, biohackers, alternative health practitioners, homesteaders, preppers, and permaculture nerds. And they all have one thing in common: they’re committed to becoming the best that they can be. To learn who they are meant to be.
They want to live a life outside the system and reach out to us to build an online business that allows them to provide for their family and maximise those 18 Summers that we get to spend with our kids.
Our goal in working with unconventional parents is to help them build freedom-based businesses. Not businesses that trap them in a cage.
We want them to buy back their fun, their family and their freedom. And it usually takes about five to ten hours a week to do this.
Disturbingly, what we've learned is that the average human has at least 16 hours a week that they waste scrolling on social media apps. And if you take your phone right now and look at your screen time statistics, you may be shocked at the amount of time that you are idly scrolling on social media. This is the time that our community applies towards creating freedom for themselves, rather than looking at funny reels, ruminating on what's wrong with the world, or falling down a doom scroll hole that sucks the life out of them.
What I've done with my time is used it intentionally to create freedom in my life. And I help others to do the same.
One of the things that frustrates Brendan and me is that parents feel they have to decide to either provide for their family or be present with them. And when you make that choice, everybody loses.
If you choose to provide for your family, but not be present with them, you lose out on those 18 Summers. You'll miss the milestones and the moments that are so precious and that you can never get back.
Sometimes I scroll through photos of the last three years of my daughter's life. It has gone so fast. And I've spent every single day with her. It's so easy to forget how much each of those precious moments with her filled my heart with such joy.
My heart aches for the parents who haven't had the same gift, and who have been hoodwinked into being away from their child out of necessity to provide for them. They’ve been robbed of the gift of being present with their children in all of those precious moments of their lives.
I want more families to decide to have it all, rather than choosing between providing or being present.
On the other side of the spectrum lie the parents who ARE present with their kids, but aren’t able to provide the way they want to for them. This usually results in families becoming “No families”.
As in, the kids will say, “Hey Mum, can we go to the waterpark on the weekend?” “Hey mum, can we go to the movies?” “Hey Mum, can you buy me this awesome Steiner fairy mushroom?”
And mum and dad say, “I'm sorry, honey. We don't have the money this week.” Or, “Maybe I can get it for your birthday.”
One of my friends, a mum in her fifties, Brooke, is also in the same business community we're in. She's an unschooler, a truth-teller, and a conscious parenting coach. She spent most of the early years of her children's lives telling them, “No.” They couldn't have what they wanted. She was present with them every day, but she couldn't provide for them too.
Yes, they had a roof over their head. Yes, they had food on the table. Yes, they were emotionally provided for. But their family was a “No family”. Today, Brooke has changed all that. But sadly, there are a lot of families out there who haven’t. Which is why I’m on a mission to change that.
What we do inside of our business community is expand the possibilities.
We start to dream again. So many of us have had our world shrunk down. We’re just going through the motions. We forget what we want. Sometimes we don't even allow ourselves to want anything. And I was that person too.
Back in, 2014-2015, Brendan and I did an exercise to look at the unconscious beliefs that were running the show for each of us. And this is a cool exercise that you might like to do.
You grab a pad of Post-it notes and a pen.
You sit down with your partner. Close your eyes. You think about all of the things that you want in life, and you write them down individually on different Post-it notes and stick them on the wall in front of you.
You each do this, writing as many things as you can. You put them on the wall. And then you sit back and look at all the things that you want.
Then what you do is, you look at each of the things that you do want, and you connect with the voice in your head that tells you why you can't have that.
If you said you’d like a boat, maybe the voice in your head tells you that only pretentious people have boats. Or that you could never afford a boat. Or that only rich people have boats. Whatever that voice says, you write it down without censoring yourself.
And you pop all of those notes on the wall next to the other notes. What you're left with is all the things you want and all the things that are stopping you from having what you want.
What I realised when doing this exercise was that I had a belief that “anything that wasn't directly related to my survival was excessive”.
When we did this exercise, we lived in the front room of Brendan's parents' house. We couldn't afford rent. We were building a global activist and educational movement. We were giving so much of ourselves to the world and yet we had nothing ourselves. All of our focus was on the external world, trying to make it better, while our life was in flames. 🚒
One of the things that fuelled our situation was this belief that “anything that wasn't directly related to my survival was excessive.“
Exposing, re-patterning, and rewiring that belief has been a decade-long journey—I'm still discovering new layers of the onion. 🧅
My current focus is all about expansion. Realising that I do deserve what I want in life. I get to think and dream bigger. And so do you.
Especially as parents, we learn to give to others instead of ourselves. And more so as mothers, we learn to self-sacrifice and abandon ourselves. This is a theme that exists within many mothers that I speak with, including myself.
And this is also why Brendan and I are so passionate about giving parents more freedom. Because when we can get out of survival mode, life’s infinitely richer.
It’s a relief to not have to spend every minute of our waking life worrying about survival. That everpresent voice asking, where will we get money to put food on the table and a roof over our heads? Especially in today's climate of uncertain economic times.
Even if we not quite struggling, we’re still not as well off as our parents were. (Whilst many of our parents may not have been labelled as “well off” in their time, the comparison is mind-blowing. Nowadays, saving up a 20% deposit for a home would now take somebody on an average income around 11.5 years to save up that chunk of cash. For comparison, that deposit would have paid for an entire home in the eighties.)
This means for our generation, it's crucial to scrap the 2.5 kids and a picket fence “dream”, we were sold, and think outside the box to set ourselves up in a different way. To become financially free and also to attain freedom in other areas of life.
The business model we work with in our business community, Online Freedom Hackers, focuses on The Five Freedoms. And these Five Freedoms are financial freedom, location freedom, time freedom, creative freedom and family freedom. When we attain these Five Freedoms, we also create personal freedom.
It’s easy to get sucked into a life or a business where only one or a few of the Five Freedoms are fulfilled. Brendan and I spent more than a decade trying to find a business that would tick all the boxes that we needed to be free. When we were leading the activist movement I mentioned earlier, we were very fulfilled internally.
We felt like we were making a change in the world, and had a great community of 30,000 people who believed in us and supported us to do the work that we were doing in all ways except financially.
We had fulfilment, but we didn't have any money. We didn't have any freedom.
At the other end of the spectrum are people who have the money, but don't have fulfilment. They’re empty inside.
Case in point: me.
I worked for a decade in a casino job. When I started that job, I thought it was great. I'd arrive, eat some food from the canteen, pick up my uniform, talk to my friends, go upstairs, and deal cards for a little while. I got a break every hour and I didn't have to think about my work when I left 8 to 10 hours later.
For a long time, that fulfilled me. Until it didn't. Which was when I started looking online. My dad taught me about internet marketing and I started learning how to build a business. I started with a blog, then I trained in coaching, I was an affiliate marketer, I tried dropshipping and e-commerce, I dabbled in low-ticket multilevel marketing, and I started a podcast.
I did many things and none of them ticked all of those Five Freedoms. And that's true for most businesses. They ask us to choose what type of freedom is most important for us.
Perhaps they offer location freedom. We can work online from anywhere, but they don't pay us enough money to be free.
Or they pay us well, but they leave us no time because we're packing orders all the time or we're constantly on Zoom calls with clients.
Or they give us time freedom, but bore us stupid, don't fulfil us, or create any impact in the world.
This is why you'll hear Brendan and I scream from the rooftops about the necessity to have all Five Freedoms.
The business model that we recommend ticks all of The Five Freedoms.
So If you want to move from:
employee to entrepreneur
entrepreneur to paid entrepreneur.
hobbypreneur or burnt-out entrepreneur to freedompreneur…
We’d love to teach you how to build a leveraged online business with freedom front of mind.
The more you get to know me, you’ll begin to understand that freedom is my highest value. Because we can't be fulfilled if we don't have our freedom.
So aside from being a mother, aside from being someone who is uncovering her trauma, patterns, and wounding, I'm also an online business mentor.
And if you’re looking to shift how you work, and if you’re done with sacrificing your fun, your family, or your freedom, I would love to take you under my wing. The best way for me to do that is for you to watch my Masterclass, From 9 To Thrive. It will get you up to speed with the what, why, and how of everything we do, so you can free your family like we have.
One of the most beautiful parts of my “job” is uniting parents from all around the world, from all different walks of life, who all have one core vision:
To live a free life outside the System, to create healthy, happy families, and legacies that shift their family’s futures forever.
If you’re already to claim the same, I’d love to invite you to watch that masterclass. It's an hour-long commitment that you’ll probably spend just scrolling on social media anyway. 😉 And on the other side of it, you'll know if it’s right for you. you want to be a part of our community. We'd love to have you inside and help you start your Freedom Quest. 👣
Come and build your legacy with me.
Aimee
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