The first Sunday in May marks Mother's Day in Hello's home country, New Zealand. For this Mother's Day, Hello Co-Founder and mum, Robyn, shares her story on motherhood and why she and fellow-mum, Mary, started The Hello Cup.
Being a mother isn’t something that comes naturally to me. Once my son came home and asked why I’d put a box of matches in his lunchbox (I’d mistook them for Sunmaid raisins); another time he came home and asked in the same perplexed tone why I’d put a cockroach in his lunchbox. It’s fair to say I wasn’t blessed with the domestic goddess gene.
When I was younger I never spent much time thinking about motherhood or whether it was something I wanted to embark on. However, it happened, and today I’m lucky enough to be mum to two fantastic kids - an 18 year old girl and a 12 year old boy.
It’s probably fair to say the opposite is true for my co-founder, Mary. She’d talked about wanting kids since I first met her when we were 11 years old. Today she’s a mother to three gorgeous girls (aged 5, 15 and 19) and, to date, hasn’t put a single cockroach in their lunchboxes. In fact, she even gives Nigella a run for her money and makes fancy things like Melting Moments from scratch.
When you become a parent you naturally want the best for your children. You also start thinking about things you want them to have that would have helped you when you were growing up.
The Hello Cup was started for that very reason. Mary and I wanted our girls to have better options to manage their periods.
Dealing with periods at school was no fun at all for me. The trauma of bleeding through my school uniform or getting my period without warning and not having any supplies and having to create makeshift pads from folded loo paper are still pretty vivid memories many (many, many) years later. If I’d had a menstrual cup back then, my school ‘periods’ would have been so much easier to manage.
At The Hello Cup we believe menstrual cups and other good-quality reusable period products are the way of the future. They’re better than the single-use products we grew up with - they’re more comfortable, they are easy to use, they save money and they are better for the environment.
So while I’ve had a lot of parenting fails over the years, starting The Hello Cup with my amazing best friend and super mother Mary, has been a win - not just for our children but hopefully for everyone who has a period.
