Clashing Styles
I like a cozy, comfortable, warm, inviting home. For me, that means adding colors and textures, favorite objects and art {regardless of any monetary value}, family mementos, well-loved books and often used items. I like creating interesting and inspiring and relaxing spaces. For me, this means everything has a place and is situated just so; not formal, but organized.
My children like a loud, messy, comfy, disorganized, piles of this and that kind of home. They accomplish this look each day by getting out as many toys, books, pillows, blankets, costumes, papers, balls, toy weapons, crayons and miscellaneous items as they possibly can and scattering them throughout our home.
My husband can live quite comfortably in this way without ever even noticing the piles of this and that and mounds of pillows and stuffed animals and a mixture of legos, blocks and super heroes stretching from the living room to the kitchen and back through the dining room into the hall and venturing into each room from that point.
Can you see how our two styles differ?
In these past 6 years of having children I have come to reconcile the differences and live with a few precious breakables in place and arranged out of reach of rowdy children, giant dog tails and slinking cats; I have embraced my style and theirs, as best I could; and I have continued to strive for a warm, inviting, colorful home.
Fantastical Illusions
During the winter holiday season, I like to "deck my halls" with festive items; some breakable, some delicate, some old, some new. Each year it has been easier to decorate and not worry that a little one was going to go along behind me and undecorate or break or destroy my holiday landscape.
For some reason, this season I've read a number of magazines aimed at women who like to design/decorate their homes. And I have come to the conclusion that these magazines are just as noxious as the fashion magazines that air brush bodies and faces and distort our sense of what a healthy, normal body looks like.
Let me explain.
These magazines have lots of great ideas from designers, which we can accept as being perfect, pie-in-the-sky, absolutely beautiful, regardless of whether they are practical or not. But these home magazines also feature {real} families, supposedly just like us, the readers.
And this is where it gets dangerous.
We are told these families are just every day, All-American types, living down on the farm {giant ranch} or in a suburb {the best neighborhood in the metro area} in a nice, not too small, but not huge {million dollar} home, decorated by the wifey {and her interior designer whom Siri is on a first name basis with, based on the number of calls she has placed for the wife}.Bitter? Just a bit.
Let me explain.
It's a hard act to follow! The articles and photos make it look like vintage silk covered chairs can easily co-exist with little Jr. and his art supplies and formal dining {in the formal dining room} with fine china, crystal and an intricately designed, draping, cascading, shiny, sparkling breakable centerpiece is a piece of cake with five kids 8 and under.
The articles describe the antique ornaments, each one lovely preserved for five generations, shipped over box by box during World War II; or how the wife created each sparkly bauble for the tree in her spare time.
The photos show mom and dad, happily baking 25 dozen cookies for the homeless with their squeaky clean, monogrammed-apron-wearing kidlets in their 2000 square foot kitchen full of top-of-the-line appliances and technology. The article points out how difficult it was for the family to live without a kitchen during the recent renovation.
Real World
Their décor is spot-on; the home is pristine, in the photos, but I'd like to know what it looks like right this very second. I'd like to know if little Jr. is usually banished from the formal living and dining rooms; I'd like to know if they dump the baskets of clean laundry on a bed or a couch until there's time to fold it; I'd like to know if the kids are really that squeaky clean and Gap Kids ad worthy all the time; I'd like to know if someone else put up the tree and decorated it and the rest of the house while the family was out doing whatever it is that families like that do.
I know it's just a magazine, but truth be told that is the kind of house I'd like to live in. Hey, that's the kind of life I'd like to live; clean, pretty, organized and close to perfect, at least by the looks of it.
The reality is, no one {that I know of} lives in that kind of home on a daily basis. Life is dirty and messy and busy and complicated and rushed and the tree ornaments do not always compliment the colors in the drapes in a way that is intended to bring out the subtle colors in the rug. That's just life....as I know it.
The Scoop
With that said, I do take inspiration from many of the projects and designs in these very magazines; some I even attempted to do this holiday season. And I do feel a tinge of jealously when peering into their seemingly beautiful, immaculate, perfect homes and lives.
But living in that kind of home would mean no dogs or cats, no kid art hung on the walls, no elaborate and strangely large spy traps built in the living room and no hanging up "Baby's 1st Christmas" ornaments just because it wasn't the right color scheme for this year's tree. So, I'll take messy and chaotic with a touch of class and style. Over and out....
Anna
