The Magnolia Story(47)
It was perfect just the way it was.
I realized that my determination to make things perfect meant I was chasing an empty obsession all day long. Nothing was ever going to be perfect the way I had envisioned it in the past. Did I want to keep spending my energy on that effort, or did I want to step out of that obsession and to enjoy my kids, maybe allowing myself to get messy right along with them in the process?
I chose the latter—and that made all the difference.
This revelation was so much more than a lightbulb turning on in my head. I felt as if a hundred pounds got lifted off my shoulders that afternoon. I remember sitting there on that sofa going, “Holy cow. I can breathe.”
It all came down to a mind shift in which I asked myself, “What am I going for in life?” Was it to achieve somebody else’s idea of what a perfect home should look like? Or was it to live fully in the perfection of the home and family I have?
My revelation wouldn’t mean that I would never clean my house again. It wouldn’t even keep me from throwing that slipcover in the washing machine—eventually. My kids do tend to play better and act better in a clean environment, and Chip appreciates a clean home too. My family inspires me to want to keep our home clean for them, and I personally can’t think straight in an environment that’s too cluttered. And yet the time I spend with my kids is worth far more than the time I spend cleaning.
Right then and there, I made up my mind to stop cleaning the house during the day. If that meant I had to stay up an extra forty-five minutes at night doing dishes or cleaning up the living room after the kids were in bed, then so be it. I also vowed to set up better storage systems and to teach the kids that everything had a place. But I wasn’t going to obsess about any of that. Not anymore.
That day changed me. It really did. And I quickly found that my shift in mind-set had a positive effect on our life together. Now when someone spills a glass of milk, I don’t worry so much about the mess. Instead, I try to focus on my relationship with the one who spilled the milk.
I still have my bad days, believe me, when I see that milk for the mess that it is and I yell, “Oh, come on!” I get mad. I’m not perfect. But I recognize now that yelling is always the lesser of two options. The better option is to use that moment to teach them, “Well, you know what? I did that when I was a kid too. We all make mistakes.” Followed by, “How about you help me clean this up?”
What I’ve found is that something as common as spilled milk can turn into a rich moment with my kids. And for years my misguided perfectionism robbed both them and me of those moments. And I can’t help but wonder how many other moments I robbed from my kids and from my husband while trying to attain some vision of a perfect home that I was never going to attain anyway.
Before my slipcover revelation, I never allowed the kids to paint or do projects on my dining-room table because it was my “favorite table.” Today, not only do I let them do their projects there, but I’m the one who instigates it. “Okay, we’re going to paint, kids!” Why? Because I replaced that “perfect” table with one that’s all scuffed up and only gets better looking with age.
I also tried to set aside various spots throughout that home where my kids were expected to make a mess: in their living room, on that table I just mentioned, I even carved out a spot in the kitchen where they could cook and have fun experimenting with food. That way I could be prepared, which means I wouldn’t overreact. And that in turn meant my kids could be kids, and I could be a better mom. It was all connected.
The funny thing to me is that whenever we had people step foot into our house after that, they seemed more wowed by it than any other house I’d designed or lived in—including the 1920s dream house in Castle Heights.
That got me thinking about the pressure we women and moms are all under these days. It seems as if the standards are so much higher than they were just a few years ago, mainly because of what we see whenever we look on the Internet.
It used to require some effort to feel like an inferior mom and wife. A woman would have to go to a newsstand and spend six dollars on a magazine to see the current societal standard of “What my family and home are supposed to look like.” Now it just shows up on social media everywhere you look, and it always seems to be picture-perfect. That’s all anyone seems to post—perfect pictures of perfect families enjoying perfect moments.
Along with that, I think everyone’s expectations of themselves have gotten so much higher. I mean, honestly, as a stay-at-home mom, every time I had a moment to open Facebook or Pinterest I would walk away thinking, I’m not doing enough. And then I’d start second-guessing myself. I think that’s what I started to overcome with those revelations in my own home.
It’s funny that these revelatory moments of mine happened on couches in two different houses, and I wonder why that is. But I don’t have to wonder about the results of those moments.
Shortly after I sat on the couch at the Castle Heights house and really noticed for the first time that I wasn’t happy, even though I’d worked so hard to make everything look perfect, I had a conversation with a friend of mine. I was exhausted all of the time, and I said to this friend: “I feel like I’m just surviving at this point. I’m not thriving.”
Once I was in the Carriage Square house and embracing the laughter and messiness of my kids and not cleaning all day long, I realized that it was up to me to flip that switch from surviving to thriving. It was just a mental shift, a readjustment in my way of thinking—like seeing my kids’ fingerprints as kind of cute instead of a miserable mess.