I used to care about what my home looked like. In my Single Girl and then Young Couple days I had thoughtfully-placed pictures on the walls, candles arranged on the coffee table, perfect pillows plumped up beside the matching blanket strewn strategically across the couch. It is possible I cared too much.
My in-laws came for a visit once, and when it was determined that the television would be difficult for all of us to view at a perfect angle, my father-in-law jumped up and hauled the couch across the living room to make it parallel to the TV. He was being helpful, he thought. Considerate. I left the room crying. I learned from that family relations debacle, and started putting tape on the floor to mark where the couch and chair and rug were positioned, should they happen to get nudged (or bulldozed) out of place again. Two babies later, the only things stuck to my floors now are animal stickers and raisins. I have let go. But methinks Mommy might have gone just a touch too far in the opposite direction.
Our king-sized bed is now in our living room. The relocation was intended as a brief experiment to see if one year-old Henry would sleep if Mommy and her boobies slept elsewhere. He would. But now we like our Really Big Bedroom. It’s been a month.
There are toy farms and grocery carts and massive dump trucks spread from room to room, but the kids aren’t really to blame for the appearance of our home. I’m just taking a pass on caring for a little while. I would like my husband’s shirts to hang to dry from somewhere other than our wall sconces, but he’ll remove them eventually. I would like proper black-out curtains in Henry’s room instead of the blanket-and-pillows combo we currently use to block out the sun at naptime, but not reeeeaally caring actually feels quite freeing, considering how appalled I would once have been by that ghetto solution. I would like area rugs, pictures hanging on the wall, a less we-just-moved-in look to our home. But this is easier right now.
There is no scrubbing kitty fur balls out of the carpet. There's only one plant for Henry to go digging in. There's space in the master bedroom for a huge alphabet play mat, which would have to be abbreviated if we had something inconvenient in there like a bed.
So I let go of my home decorating standards a little bit. I look forward to a time when beds will be in bedrooms again, little treasures will return to the shelves, and I can go back to buying House and Home magazine without feeling painfully inadequate. But I think letting go is a pretty good lesson to be mastering in the meantime. Holding on tight is good for children, not for chachkas.
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