Our house doesn't always look like this

A plaque almost exactly like the one pictured above hung for many years in the basement of my childhood home.  My younger sister and I even memorized the saying and enjoyed reciting it repeatedly.  We grew up in a family with seven children.  With nine people living in a modest-sized house, things were always a bit busy and chaotic.  At the same time my parents were generous hosts, and always welcomed friends and relatives into our home.  People were always welcomed to come, relax and converse just as the plaque says.

I was thinking about this plaque lately and wishing I had one hanging inside the front door.  We've had a steady stream of visitors lately, many to come and see our five foster kittens and their mama.  As our friends enter the house, I always seem to mention something about "well, the house is sort of a mess."  Sometimes that's true.  And sometimes it's not, but I feel obligated to mutter something about its less than perfect state.  I don't think I actually worry about what people are going to think, but I seem to find safety in making an excuse for the current state of my house.  The truth is that I do clean my house on a somewhat regular schedule.  I do major cleanings when we are going to host book club or a meeting or a family event.  Despite my inclination to minimalism, we have a fair bit of stuff.  As people enter our house, one of the first rooms they see is our project room.  Since I have been homeschooling two or three of my children for the past seven years, our project room gets a lot of use and has a lot going on.  As it should be.  Just to be clear - I never, ever think that any of my friends are judging the state of my house.  I know that they aren't.  It's just my perfectionism that makes me say something.

My excuses about my house not being in tip-top shape remind me of a blog post that I read a few months ago.  I had followed a link from Facebook to read it.  The gist of the post was the author saying that if people expected her to spend hours cleaning her house before they visited, then she really didn't want to be friends with those people.  And she also didn't want her friends to feel they needed to do a major cleaning before she came over either.  I read it and thought it was nice.  The main point, to me, was let's cut each other some slack and not judge each other if we don't keep our homes in tip-top shape.  What was interesting was that people got all crazy in the comments.  It actually devolved into name-calling.  Yes, a lot of people agreed with the author and liked how she expressed the idea.  But a bunch of other people read into it - that she was saying it was okay to be a slob, or that it was okay to let your children be slobs and not teach them how to take care of their things and help with household tasks.  Which was not what the author said at all.  Then there were those who criticized the post because the author paired the post with a photograph of a living room that was not really messy at all.  I admit the thought crossed my mind - the photo looked more like a page out of a Pottery Barn catalog than like a messy room.  The furniture looked new and clean, the hardwood floors looked new or newly-refinished, the painted walls and woodwork looked perfect, and there were beautiful window treatments on the clean windows.  Contrast this with furniture that is well-worn or scattered with pet hair, hardwood floors that are old and worn or scratched, walls and woodwork in need of a fresh coat of paint, and mini-blinds (that don't work properly) on finger-printed windows.  What was "messy" about the room in the photo?  As I recall - a few scattered books, toys and games and maybe a blanket or a backpack on the floor.

It's all relative, though.  Some of us live in newer homes, others in older homes.  Some in big houses, others in small ones.  Some families spend a lot of time in their homes, other less so.  Some families have larger incomes, others have smaller.  Some people choose to spend resources on home decor, others choose to travel or use their resources elsewhere.  Someone's messy house might be another family's dream.  Thus one comment - "holy first world problems."  But of course the author of the blog post wasn't trying to address all those issues.  You'd need to write a whole book to cover that anyway.  What she was talking about was relationships and supporting each other rather than judging each other.

Which is why I need to drop my little "excuse this mess" bit when friends come over.  And instead remember the humor, playfulness and warm welcome expressed in the plaque:

Come in, sit down, relax, converse.  Our house doesn't always look like this.  Sometimes it's even worse.