I feel about my flabby belly the same way I do about middle age itself. Sometimes I own it with pride and other times I’m like, can’t you go into hiding for awhile? You know, so I can blend in with those youthful thirtysomethings and make this whole over-40 thing look beautiful, graceful and easy? Better yet, can’t this over-40 thing BE beautiful, graceful and easy?

Spoiler not spoiler….no. 

I can’t prettify life. But! I can prettify my house. I think.

You might say I don’t have a designer’s vision. 

My approach to decor has been like picking out one piece of a puzzle, then another piece from another puzzle, then another, repeated for twenty years. Aka, I have a long history of buying small things I like with no idea of how they fit together. Combine that with a large number of items that people either generously handed down or gifted to me, and you’ve got a functional but scattershot home decor look going on. 

Another feeder of my ‘eclectic’ style is that I feel sorry for unwanted objects. Like our crooked Christmas tree that we found all by itself in the field, surrounded by a line of stumps from other trees that had already found homes. The tree expressed no gratitude for having been chosen but it did dump about a pound of needles on the carpet every day. I mean, most things dumped on the carpet DON’T smell good, so at least there’s that. 

Related to my bizarre tendency to imagine that objects have feelings (I know you loved me, sheddy little Christmas tree),  I see the value in so many things, which makes them harder to get rid of. I can IMAGINE the day we use that wok, organize our high school pictures or put together alllll the artwork our child has saved into volumes of scrapbooks. And, and, what if we need it someday??

Which of course, is related to money. Oh God, money. I get heart palpitations just thinking about something like purchasing a sofa. You’d think I experienced an unexpected, nasty job loss, which of course I did.

But the biggest reason-slash-excuse of all – I never thought the details of my home environment were important. Making our home cozy, inviting and neat never made my priority list of what I wanted to do and it wasn’t something I *had* to do….so I just didn’t. I told myself decorating was shallow – all about the external, done to impress. Aiming for Instagram perfect. Which I have little to zero chance of ever hitting, so why even try?

Well. The inside of my house makes my brain hurt, that’s why. 

As I write this, I am looking at a cat-shredded couch, a cabinet covered in stickers, a shoebox overflowing with artwork and a carpet with stains. A teetering tower of board games, a side table cluttered with markers and cups and remotes, and windows decorated with “removable” holiday stickers that have been there for at least a year. 

It’s not squalor. The floor is (almost) free of toys, the sofas are decked with pretty pillows and some of my favorite pictures are in beautiful frames are on the walls. Nothing is (very) dirty or unhygienic. But it is cluttered, with no style to speak of. Bad enough that I was embarrassed recently to have people over, even though the “people” were nine year olds coming for a sleepover who cared about nothing but eating junk food and staying up all night. 

But put the junk food-craving nine year olds aside, – at least, put aside the ones who don’t live here. Put aside the friend who dropped by unexpectedly after Christmas and took in the organized functional clutter that is our kitchen. Put aside anyone who’s not the three of us in our little fam.

It matters for us to live in a place that feels good. Yeah, I could try and fail to pull a Marie Kondo-slash-Joanna Gaines. That’s not why I’m doing this. I’m doing it for me, and for us to have a home environment that lifts us up instead of stresses us out. 

It’s like the pressure to be thin. There is no real point in trying to look good for other people who may or may not give you approval. You’re the one who lives in your body every single moment of your precious, irreplaceable life. 

If your resolution is to get healthier, I think that’s great, as long as you’re doing it for you. 

My resolution is to make our house an environment that makes me, and my family, feel good.