The Art of Homemaking II

I have a friend who has four children.  She has a wonderful four bedroom weatherboard house.  Her kitchen opens out onto a patio and the garden is lush with her own vegetable patch and garden-beds.  She has an adjoining bungalow where the children play and a cubby house built by her husband.  When you go to my friend's house you sit and drink tea and eat biscuits that she's made.  It feels warm and inviting.  You notice (but you don't really care) the swarm of flies that circle above your heads because the doors and windows are always open.  There are rugs that probably haven't been taken outside and beaten in a decade.  There is always bits and pieces of broken toys, crayons, pencils and food lying about the floor.  The dishes are never done, the washing is never put away, the toilets never look clean and the beds are never made.  I love her house.  I would chew glass before living in her house. 

My house is ordered.  Everything is where "god" meant it to be (meaning, I seem to think that there is an ordained place for everything) and order my life accordingly.  My husband is neat.  We do the dishes the minute we finish eating.  There is never laundry lying about, broken toys or food bits.  There is no such thing as not being able to find anything in our house.  Nor, do you ever walk in and it looks like a bomb has hit it. All throughout the day I clean the house as I walk through it.  A a result, my house doesn't have the warm, relaxing feel that my friend's house has.  Instead, my house feels ordered, neat, predictable, secure and all of the things that I need and value in a house.  I never have to stress about somebody popping in.  I never feel unprepared for things.  Little takes me by surprise.  Errands are planned well in advance.  And I have running lists of things that need to be done.  Lastly, we de-clutter on a regular basis and give away what is not absolutely necessary.  That's our house.

Here are two different homes.  Neither is better than the other. But both have vastly different atmospheres and rhythms. It is important to discover what your home is like and what you are most comfortable with.  My friend and I each live in the type of home that we are most comfortable with but - listen to this:

My mother's house was messy.  She never cleaned.  She never had guests.  Clothes were strewn about the place.  Empty food packages were sitting on the bench for weeks before being taken out.  The garden was overgrown and was never tended. There were cobwebs just about everywhere you looked in this house. But there was nothing relaxing or warm about this chaos.  My mother didn't see herself reflected in the house she lived in. In fact, she felt stuck in a rut.  She had been living this way in this poky little house for twenty years whilst silently amassing a signficant amount of money from the business she ran.  You couldn't find a more incongruent example of living than my mother and her wealth and the place she lived in that didn't reflect who she was but, try as she might, she just could not get out of that rut.   Then she bought a new house. (The old one still sits in the state it was when she left it.)  In her new house she has minimalist furniture but there is still a lot of junk and little cleaning. Slowly, the new house is beginning to resemble the last.  Only, with the new house, there is no overgrown garden. Instead she has a little courtyard where she can sit and contemplate life - something she loves to do. 

My mother's home is one where she is always the temporary resident. There is always the potential of moving on because she never allows herself to feel too comfortable.  Her home is a place of transition - or that is how it is supposed to be.  It is a place where you sit and contemplate where you could be rather than where you are at.  In this place you don't invest in the style of the house, the furniture, pictures or any other comforting objects.  Everything is just a mismatch of little things picked up from life on the way.

The point of writing about these different houses is to juxtapose what a home can look like when you are creating the home you want and what one can look like when you are not creating the home you want. In fact, it amounts to the same thing.  The act of just living in the home without investing in it still gives it its character.  I look at my mother's house and see a lot of her in it.  She sees none of herself in it for she sees her self as existing on a far higher plain.  But that is the whole point.  Her house says: I exist for other things - far more ephemeral.

Once you have identified what your home is you might find that the home that you have created is less accidental than you think.  Notwithstanding this, you may also find that you feel that there are some areas that are not only accidental, but they are in stark contrast to the environment that you feel best reflects you.  You want a peaceful oasis outside but what you have, rather is a backyard strewn with toys, half finished outdoor jobs that your husband has put aside, dead flowers that haven't been tended and an empty pond with fish floating about the bottom (long having succumoned to the algae growing there).  It's not hard to imagine what you have to do to correct this.  "Working bee, working bee, working bee".  Put aside three weekends and turn that garden into the peaceful oasis that you want it to be.  Just do it. 

Keep a running list on your computer or on a little notebook of the areas around your home that you want to transform.  Remember always to respect the nature and rhythms of the home you have already created because they are there for a reason. They are you.  As you make your way through each of the items on your list, tick them off and feel a sense of achievement.  Involve the whole family in this.  Kids love working bees.  Husbands just don't have a choice because "if mama aint happy, aint nobody happy".  Make your list as long as you want it.  So there are a hundred things on your list.  Who cares?  Every journey of 1000 miles starts with one step.  Just keep plodding along and ticking the items off your list.  Continue to motivate yourself by re-writing or redescribing your home to yourself.  How has it changed in the last few weeks since you have been sinking your creative energies into it? 

Remember that home making is a work in progress.  No sooner have you finished your list but you look about you and find something else that you can do to best reflect who you and your family are. That is actually the fun of it.  Nobody stays the same forever and neither should your home.

To be continued...