Bare walls, nothing breakable, and furniture that could take a beating were my home requirements until a couple of years ago. Raising 4 boys in a home will require you to place all of your interior design dreams on the highest shelf of your closet with a promise to “visit later – like in 20 years.” 

It was only 2 years ago that I decided to buy a couple of breakable decor pieces that are magically still intact on our living room shelves. And in a particularly bold move, one evening in 2021 I asked my husband to put up a photo collage on our living room wall. It is beautiful and magical and makes me happy but it was also a reminder that we have officially completed and left behind a beautiful part of our lives; raising babies. 

Over the past couple of years I’ve added a little more here and a little more there, all with a stern warning to the kids to please not throw balls in the house, please don’t touch and please just let mommy have a couple of nice things. (Yes, cue the T-Swift song) 

And so far so good, there have only been a couple of victims along the way.

But why am I sharing this rather mundane sequence of events with you? Because over the years of motherhood, I’ve learned a few things and one of them is to make your house a home, not a magazine spread. 

The Pinterest/Social Media world that we live in has opened our eyes to things we never noticed before. Those of you who are my age (36) probably don’t ever remember paying that much attention to people’s houses growing up. Mostly because many of them probably looked the same, or at least they did here in the Midwest.

There was probably a lot of knick-knacks, mismatched furniture, fruit and duck decor, wallpaper borders, floral curtains, touch lamps (what an invention), and a variety of colors and patterns. It’s not that we didn’t notice if a house was decorated nicely or in a different tax bracket it just didn’t cross our minds that one design was necessarily better than the other. 

It’s the same with beauty standards now. I never realized that my lips were just of normal size until I saw everyone getting lip filler. For the first time in my life, I was looking in the mirror wondering if others thought my lips were too small or too thin or not voluptuous.

I’m not proud of that particular moment but these moments have taught me a lot and it speaks to the power of the content and images we are absorbing every single day.

Now we see these perfectly curated homes EVERYWHERE. They’re void of color, perfectly matched, the furniture is placed like something straight off a showroom floor and everything is light and bright and just begging for post-pasta toddler hands to take hold. The front yards are landscaped per the overall assigned aesthetic and even the pool floats are color-coordinated with the inside of the house.

It looks like a magazine, but I often wonder if it feels like a museum.

Don’t get me wrong, I LOVE nice and beautiful things. I’m a Pisces sun and Taurus moon so beautiful, luxurious, soft, and fun items are my love language. I love a coordinated look and some beautiful color palettes – but I also want things to feel like home. I want there to be things that tell a story. My story, our story. I want there to be things in my home that matter so much, my kids fight over them after I’m gone (in a nice way of course).

I don’t ever want my kids to say, “I grew up in the most beautiful home on the block,” instead of, “My home was messy but full of love”

Now I don’t love clutter, but a little bit of organized chaos is actually good for my ADHD brain. I don’t want a giant mess or an explosion of a million colors because it tends to cause visual anxiety for me and overstimulation but I don’t want monochrome, lifeless, and bland either. 

There are 6 of us under one roof (5 of the male variety) so perfection and cleanliness is never going to happen right now in the stage of life we are in. We are all realistic about that, which takes the pressure off. 

I think things can be beautiful, I love me a good couch pillow, a color-coordinated bookshelf, and copious amounts of plants – but what I don’t love is sterile and perfect. I don’t love the “look at me” energy that seems to radiate out of these lifeless homes built around trying to forge a brand or audience online or impress the neighbors.. 

Our homes are our safe space, at least they are supposed to be and I think everyone should decorate them and fill them in the way they love – but it is interesting to me that much like all of our faces, our homes are all starting to look the same too. Everything is beige and white, everything is monochrome and minimalist. Gone are the random vacation souvenirs and thrift store knick-knacks that each told a story and held decades of memories. Those are now thrown in a drawer and the spines of fake books that contain blank pages are instead placed on the shelf because the color matches the accent colors perfectly.

And it makes me kind of sad.

So I guess I just wanted to say there is value in creating a home that feels like it’s been lived in. That’s a little messy, a little chaotic. That is filled with things you really love because they bring you joy, not because they match your color scheme. I encourage you to keep the things that have marker smears from your kids’ artwork, the stain on the chair you sat in every night reading to your toddler, or the dirty handprint on the wall where your kid sits for dinner. Those little blips that life was lived there, fill the space with echoes of happiness. 

A little life in your home shows that you and your family are truly living. You’d be surprised how empty you feel when it’s all cleaned up, painted over, switched out. Yes, memories live in our hearts but sometimes the gentle reminder of a moment in time is healing, is perfect, is exactly what we need.

So don’t be scared to be different. Don’t worry if you’re home doesn’t match what you see on social media. Don’t go into debt trying to keep up.

Create for you. 

Create for your family. 

Create because you’re alive and you have the privilege to do so.

You are more than a beige aesthetic.

You are not messy because you like wild, eclectic pieces.

You are not less than because you defy every style palette and instead mix and match things from everything.

In today’s world, we need color. We need joy. We need happy. The simplest place to start creating that is in your home. 

You are perfect and you deserve to live in a space that reflects who you are so go forth and be a little chaotic. I promise you might just find you actually like it.