We’ve all been there…
By: Meagan Morrow
Tags: Motherhood, Digital Marketing, Freelancers, Work From Home, Life

My name is Meagan. I am a stay at home mother to two beautiful, crazy, whirlwind kids that have me laughing, crying and tearing my hair out on a regular basis. For as long as I can remember I have wanted to be a mother. I had this beautiful image of this stay at home mom doing kids crafts every day, wearing aprons, always having fresh baked cookies, keeping a spotless house, etc. That’s not reality. My house is messy, my clothes are stained, I almost never have time to bake cookies and forget beautiful kids crafts. I’m lucky if I can get my children to sit still for more than five minutes!

And to make matters worse? Our finances were becoming an issue. Despite hubby working for 60 hours each week, we were struggling. Not because we were living outside of our means, but because we have a spending habit. We love to be able to go out and buy the things we want, go where we want (with kids) and so on. But we were falling farther and farther behind on our bills. Then we’d have a slow week and hubby wouldn’t get max hours at work and we’d end up even further behind. In fact, just recently, we were in danger of losing our home because we simply couldn’t afford to pay our mortgage. Something had to change.

I knew we needed more money coming in, and I couldn’t ask hubby to get a second job when he was already working 60 hour weeks, nor could we afford to put our children in childcare all day for me to go to work outside the home. We know. We looked. The way we put it, I would be working to pay for childcare for me to go to work to pay for childcare. That’s all I’d be able to make because I wasn’t qualified for really any jobs above a minimum wage level.

In addition to this issue, I felt horrible. I felt like I was failing my children, being unable to get them the very few things they asked for, being unable to help pay any of the bills, seeing my husband beaten down and broken when he’d get his paycheck and it would all just pour back out into bills. I had also worked up until my daughter was born and I missed that sense of accomplishment you feel when you bring in that paycheck at the end of the week.

So I decided to try something. I loved playing video games. It was my escape from a lot of the things going wrong in my life. I’d heard of many people finding fame and fortune through streaming the games they played and I decided to try this. And it was working! To an extent. I made it to affiliate status on Twitch, gained the ability to have subscribers, receive bits and was working my way toward being a Partner. But in the process, I was ignoring my children more and more. My daughter was in preschool at the time and I was up late streaming and oversleeping on mornings she had school. It got to the point where my husband, after receiving a call from my daughter’s teacher about absences, came home during his lunch break, ripped my computer off my desk, took his as well, and left again.

I had effectively lost EVERYTHING I had worked for up to this point. I felt miserable. I no longer had my outlet, I no longer had a source of ANY income, and I felt even WORSE about myself. I had become so addicted to video games and streaming, lacking the social interaction in my personal life, that I nearly divorced my husband over this. The problem was, I hadn’t worked in the “real world” in over 3 years by this point and if I were to leave my husband, not only would I have nowhere to live, I’d have no way to support myself. So my plan formed. I would find a way to make money. I researched on my phone, I looked things up, I scoured the internet for ways to make money from home that would still allow me to be a mother, that I could do in secret.

At some point, I realized I was being a better mother without the games. I was taking better care of my kids, my house (which is still a mess but not HALF as bad as it was), and myself. I realized just how bad my addiction had gotten and just how stuck I was. And with that realization came the realization that my husband wasn’t “punishing” me as I had originally felt. He was “pushing” me to better myself. Isn’t that what we’re supposed to do in a relationship? Push our partner to be a better version of themselves? Not change them, never change them. But help them reach the decision, the “aha” that they could be doing things better. And if I’m honest, streaming my game play wasn’t really helping financially anyways. Sure I made SOME money, but nowhere near what we needed to help catch up the overdue bills and enjoy our lives.

So I made a plan. I had already been researching, for a couple months by this point, how to make money from home. I just needed to take action on one of these opportunities I’d found. I still had the issue of deciding which way to turn, but after hearing a lot of good things about dropshipping, I started looking into a dropshipping business. I knew I needed to make money and this was advertised to me as a way to generate a revenue without having to spend money before making any. This is not true, by the way.

As I started to implement my plan, creating a Shopify store, looking for products to dropship, I realized rather quickly this would not be attainable for me. Every product I could find to put my name behind was one that would make me little to no money through dropshipping. And then I found it.

While researching more into dropshipping, I stumbled across a Kevin David video on youtube that offered a FREE course on becoming a funnel builder. I had no idea what a funnel was, nor who Russell Brunson was. I had never heard of Upwork, never done anything like this before in my LIFE. But I decided to give it a shot and signed up for the free course. I binged all of the videos and within 2–3 days had signed up for a free trial and started an account on Upwork.

In a matter of days from signing up for Upwork and a Clickfunnels trial account, I had my first client. I went from being a waste of space mom, a lackluster wife, and unable to help pay the bills to making my very first paycheck. And it was more than I had expected. I was finally making enough money for it to actually make a difference in our lives. We could finally afford to do things again and not just spend all of our money keeping the debt collectors away. I did it!

~Meagan Morrow

P.S. Want to read more about my beginning? Check back tomorrow for the next installment!