Sarah McLaughlin: On working with your hands and not wasting time
Advice from a maker of jewelry and metal goods
Meet our next creator, Sarah McLaughlin:
Sarah McLaughlin
Age: 41*
Kids: Norman, 4; Romy, 6 months
Location: Washington, D.C.
Vocation: Designer, wax worker, maker of jewelry and metal goods
Business: Sarah Cecelia Jewelry & Metal Goods
*Ages at time of interview
I’m always in awe of people who can make actual things with their actual hands. (My craftiness starts and ends with cocktails.) I’m fully aware that when the apocalypse comes, I’ll be enduring a slow, starving death because moving commas around and telling a writer that they’re using “beg the question” incorrectly sure as hell won’t put dinner on the table anymore. I’ll be lying in the fetal position chewing on a red pen while Sarah, this week’s creator, will be forging an animal trap out of metal so her family can be fat and happy. (And good for her! Her kind deserves to win the evolution tournament.)
After that I hope she’ll go make herself a crown because she’ll most likely have gathered everyone into a new, better, post-apocalyptic community, and she’ll deserve a goddamn crown. Because, aside from being handy, Sarah is ORGANIZED. And good organization can be a game-changer for busy women. She makes systems, she implements systems, and she doesn’t take shit.
(While Sarah’s not taking shit, she’s making gorgeous metal jewelry and home goods. There is a 15% sale on her site, Sarah Cecelia, through Sunday. And she’ll be adding some new pieces later in the week. Don’t forgot your moms…)
Sarah’s husband told her that if she talked to me she was going to “scare these women.” She responded, “They need to be scared. As mothers, we’re not doing each other any favors by pretending that it’s all fabulous and easy.”
I found Sarah to be less scary and more inspiring, especially when she talked about how she’s learned to make the most of her time. And time is what mothers need. Just give us some time, and watch what we can do.
Now, Sarah, in her own words…
On returning to making things:
I think it was about a month before I went down to the basement and soldered some earrings, and it felt amazing.
I was so tired by the end of the pregnancy, and my joints were really swollen, and it was actually really hard to work the last few months. After a few hours, my knuckles would swell, and it’s all that pregnancy bullshit that happens to you. So it felt really good to work and not feel that fatigue.
After the birth of my second kid, I’m definitely less stressed about whether or not it’s going to be fine. I put a lot more pressure on myself when Norman was born. In hindsight, I should have been more patient with myself, more patient with him. You have your entire working life as a parent to figure out how to make it work. You don’t have to figure it out in the first six weeks.
That being said, I’m happiest when I’m not 24-hour momming it. I’m really grumpy if it’s a week where I didn’t get to do hardly any work. Being busy with my hands is what makes me feel like a person.
On not wasting time on bullshit:
I think I’ve become used to working in these abbreviated chunks. It’s a matter of redefining time. Before I get Norman into quiet time and Romy into her nap, I get everything I need taken care of so I’m not wasting any time doing bullshit. I don’t want to use precious nap time doing a spreadsheet or something stupid like that. I get everything squared away so the second the clock starts, I’m just barreling through and doing as much as I can.
There are things that I do include Norman in. He does all the stickers on the packages. When it was holiday season, he sat with me at the dining room table while Romy was napping. And I was packing orders and he was putting stickers on them. That kid knows his way around a sticker. He’s very deliberate in his stickering. And you know what, whatever, if it looks silly, it’s a sticker. I’m not that exacting on that part of it.
On her creative wellspring:
Work makes work for me. The more I’m working, the more I think about new things to make. If I’m not working, my brain’s not doing that. The only effect of having kids is that I have less time to get down to business and work. My brain’s not clicking on in that same way. It’s something that I know a lot of handmade people go through. It’s always the holiday season when you get all these ideas for new products that you want to make that you have no time to make. And that’s the time of year that I’m furiously writing down notes and rough sketches in my sketchbook so I don’t forget them.
On treating yourself like a human being:
In Becoming, Michelle Obama [editor’s note: Michelle, if you’re reading this, CALL ME. I’ll be waiting by the phone.] talks a lot about when the girls were little and she noticed that Barack was always getting to the gym and always taking care of the things that he needed to do. And she was like, “Wait, why am I not at the gym?” She wasn’t making herself a priority in the way that he was making himself a priority. So I’ve done a little bit more of informing my husband of what I’m going to be doing. Not having a conversation of, “I would like to do this, is that cool?” Women and mothers tend to not make themselves the priority in the way that husbands and fathers do in a traditional heteronormative household. I’ve been more straightforward with him: This is what I need to do right now, and you need to take care of things.
I definitely get the benefit of being married to a divorce lawyer because I think he has an awareness of what not to say. But he still sometimes says something.
I remember when I was pregnant with Romy, I was meeting up with a friend for a walk. I was leaving around 10 and Nick asked me, “What do you want me to do with the boy for lunch?” And I was like, “What? I don’t give a shit. There’s a kitchen full of food. Figure it out. Do I ask you every day before you go to work what I should feed Norman for lunch?”
On valuing unpaid labor:
I have a lot of freedom in that it’s not like we rely on my business to pay the mortgage. Although it pays for things. But I have friends who are single parents or are the head of the household, and they are in a different pressure cooker that I’m not. I do want to acknowledge that I’m fortunate to have a partner.
But if you take the amount I make and add how much day care would cost—that’s a decent salary. Take that money and add $30,000.
Thank you, Sarah, for sharing your story!
*Interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Enjoyed reading this, and I shared the learning curve of figuring out how much I can actually get done during my daughter's awake time and how I draw a hard line during naptime that I work in my studio -- I don't do chores or things for the house (90% success rate I think, but still took a minute to get everyone (including myself) to understand that I would not be putting my artwork last on my to do list).