I’m in the process of sifting through almost 1,700 pages of journal entries from 2022–2025. I embarked on the journey in January of this year, after finishing a race of sorts: transitioning my designs from my hands, sewing one at a time, to a team in India.
Manju, Meera, Malo, Manju, and Aisha. My hand-drawn patterns, digitized. My love of fabrics evolving into sourcing handmade textiles in another country.
As I started reading, I took notes. I began a document titled “thesis,” with the idea of synthesizing the entries into usable lessons, and also remembering the wins of that four-year period.
When I set out to create a business, I wanted one that would allow me to be a wife and a mom alongside fashion design. It had to be an interruptible business model, which is absurd, and not something I was ever able to find in books on entrepreneurship. I had to feel it out, day by day, season by season.
Maybe motherhood taught me more than I realize about business. Before I became a mom, I was already very thoughtful about being as present as possible, and about having a business to catch me once the season of kids-at-home came to a close.
And then we brought home our bundle of joy. Eventually I picked up sewing again, but at the kitchen table, and with one ear to the ground, ready to drop my work to stay present with Olive.
Olive is a sophomore now. Today is the beginning of her fall break: seven school days in the middle of October.
I was awake early this morning thinking about what I needed to do. Manju is ready for the next skirt order. We’re out of elastic. The lead time—which has never been a thing before—is now eight weeks, and then it needs to be shipped to India.
But there’s a little French bakery in a town near us. Olive and I are planning a morning croissant and a trip to the consignment store nearby. We’ve been talking about it all week.
It’s such a familiar feeling: momentum in motherhood and business seeming to be at odds with one another, and my call, in the middle, is to remain as interruptible as possible.
Have you tried to book an appointment at my salon? 9–3, Tuesday through Friday. That’s a hard sell. Who can take off work and come those hours? The truth about being interruptible is that you have to be firm with boundaries. My yesses automatically make for no’s. When Olive has a day off, I take that day out of my Calendly. I tell my business to wait, to wait, to wait. Because I know there are more important things, and more fleeting things. Work will be there—and I need it to. I love it, and miss it when I’m away.
My “thesis” document is very long, mostly I've summarized all the little stories that filled those 1,700 pages. But if I had to come to a single conclusion on this, the day before my 22nd wedding anniversary, having had another sleepless night in a week-long string of them, needing to pop over to my spreadsheets to come up with a miracle elastic-free skirt order before enjoying a day with Olive, it would be that life is too much.
Dreams are too much. Building a business is too much. Parenting is too much. The things we want, the things we love, the things we are responsible for—they are all too much.
But when we choose to be interruptible, we give ourselves margin to breathe and recover. Like elastic, we are stretched, stretched, stretched all day, every day, and choosing to stop, for a baby snuggle, or a dandelion, or a moment of dressing before a big day, is the release of that stretched elastic. We are allowed to return to our original form.
Beauty is my obsession. It’s why I love fashion, it’s why I love Olive, it’s why I love making dinner and sitting around the table that was a wedding gift 22 years ago. Beauty is interruptibility. It’s agreeing to become less efficient, less distracted, to literally stop and smell the roses.
And we need more of it. As much as we can pack in. The windows down on a beautiful day, stopping to take a deep breath of fresh air and look at the sky when we’re taking the trash out, sipping our coffee and really tasting it, adding storied pieces to our closet and cherishing the days we get to wear art.
I design clothes that interrupt us. Pockets to let us rest, soft fabrics to let us exhale, gorgeous color and texture and pattern, to make us ooh and ahh. I'm not sure I'd have the same product, if it weren't for a lifetime of training in the art of remaining interruptible.