To Do by Friday

Ever since I was a little girl, I wanted to be a stay at home mom. My own mom stayed home with me, and I thought it was the greatest job in the world. But once I got older and started working, a second dream crept in too. I wanted to run my own company. I wanted to be the one in charge. For years, I carried both of those dreams at once, never quite realizing they'd eventually collide into the same thing.

In 2011, I was a waitress, and I loved it. Then I got hit by a car. I broke my pelvis, broke my tailbone, and spent a long stretch in the hospital relearning how to walk. Once I recovered enough, I knew waitressing wasn't in the cards anymore, so I took a job at an insurance company. I loved it there too. I was good at the work, really good, the kind of good where I'd finish everything by noon and my boss would send me around to help everyone else who was days behind.

About a month into that job, in 2012, I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Some of the symptoms from the accident had never gone away, and there was no explanation for them until the MS diagnosis. From there, life became a cycle of flare ups, losing my vision, losing my ability to walk, searching for the right medication among dozens of options, all while still showing up to work.

Then I got pregnant with my son. I'd always been told that pregnancy was supposed to be the best nine months for someone with MS, that symptoms often ease up. That was not my experience at all. I became the sickest I had ever been, legally blind and in a wheelchair. What I didn't know at the time was that I likely also had hyperemesis gravidarum, a severe pregnancy sickness, but it went undiagnosed. My OB blamed the MS, my neurologist blamed the pregnancy, and between the two of them, nothing ever actually got treated. I just suffered through it for nine months.

On June 1st, 2016, I went on disability, my last day of any traditional job. I spent the rest of that pregnancy on bed rest while my husband worked to support us. When my son was born in 2017, my doctor made it official, I was permanently disabled and would never work again. In a strange way, that solved one of my two lifelong dreams for me. I was now, by necessity, a stay at home mom, and I loved it. I enrolled him part time at Miss Erin's playschool, just enough for both of us to get a little socialization, and life felt good.

In 2018, it became clear my marriage wasn't going to survive. I was suddenly facing the possibility of being both unable to work and unable to stay married, a genuinely terrifying spot to be in. Around that time, a friend posted on Facebook asking if anyone could help her boss at a small theater company, so I said, why not me. It turned into about five hours a week of admin work I could do with a baby on my hip.

When the marriage officially ended, I moved in with my parents, but I knew that couldn't last long, not while trying to parent my own son in my thirties under their roof. Five hours a week wasn't going to be enough to build a life on. I remember telling my acupuncturist, half joking, that maybe I could just work five hours a week for eight different companies and call it a full time job. She looked at me and said her own front desk person was leaving, would I want that job, remotely. That became client number two.

With that second client, I took a leap of faith. I found an apartment and told the landlord flat out, I don't have a job, but I have enough money, please trust me. He did. I lived there for five years and loved every second of it. I moved in on July 1st, 2021, and knew it was time to make this patchwork of clients into something real.

I was in therapy not long after, going through my never ending to-do lists like I always do. I had a bunch of them saved on my phone, "to do by next week," "to do by Thursday," "to do by Friday." My therapist and I got to the last one, and I mentioned one item on it, come up with a business name. She looked at me and said, I think you just did. byFriday. It was a nod to the old idea of a gal Friday, and also, a little bit, to Tony Stark's AI assistant in the Iron Man movies. I registered the name on July 29th, 2021, twenty nine days after I told my landlord to trust me. That was the birth of byFriday.