lipstick on a pig, and other metaphors of home

Tax day--also the day the appraiser came by to depress us with how little our home is worth. I have been sick all week, and yet cleaned all day for three days, trying to make our little shack look like a half-million bucks ("like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic," as a dear, insightful friend put it). Before the appraiser got here, I was looking around feeling pleased with our house (Hey, the bed looks really nice); after he left I broke down and cried, seeing everything through his eyes (Hey, there's a bed in the living room). Ok, I was also really tired and it was the let-down from so many days of high-energy activity. But still.

I much prefer walking around just noticing the good things, and appreciating the aspects of our home that please the eye or nourish the soul: the velvety brown redwood walls, the warm white rafters, the sexy smooth soapstone, the trees trees trees out every window.

But the appraiser's visit was a reminder of why we don't invite people over. It is really hard for most people to look past the size and condition of our house and get comfortable. D's parents definitely fall into this last category; the title of this post refers to D's mom's opinion of the period-appropriate Restoration Hardware light we installed over the kitchen table. So please do not be offended if I have not invited you over--it is out of consideration for you, who might be used to things afforded to you by the average American home, like sofas and bedrooms and elbow room and a door on the bathroom.

And to those few of you who not only don't mind but actually see some of the positive things about our house--thank you.

Anyway, just as I have been struggling with what to think and feel about my home the past few days, God once again proved He is here, and active, and cares--giving me this, out of the blue:

Until a few years ago, I'd always lived in a new house. But I'd always wanted to live in an old house. I thought of myself as an old-house person, a person who appreciates character over perfection, who likes the bumps and bruises of an old home. So when we moved to Grand Rapids, we bought an old house, an English Tudor built in 1920 with a Hobbit-house sloping roof. I fell in love with it. It has arched doorways and hardwood floors and funny little corners and built-in cabinets. We moved in and started fixing it up, painting and putting in new outlets and new fixtures.

And then I went over to a friend's house--a new house. I was overcome with jealousy over her new house, not because it was fancy or big, but because the toilets didn't run, and none of the windows were painted shut, and none of the doorknobs get stuck. . . .

I was so jealous of my friend's new house that when I got back to my house, all I could see were the imperfections, the fixer-upper things that were not yet fixed up. The floors are uneven and the tiles are cracked and the drawers squeak and the radiators clank. We have both bats and mice. The basement smells funny, and I just found some big pieces of the basement ceiling on the floor. I'm not a contractor, but I don't think that's a good sign.

I think of myself as an old-house girl, but I guess there's still a lot of new house in me. I want to love the imperfections, but in a weak moment, I want central air and granite countertops so bad I can't take it. Some of it, unfortunately, is about what other people think. I'm fairly certain that our house is the bad house in the neighborhood, and that our neighbors are whispering to each other disapprovingly every time they drive by. . . .

The person having a problem with the house, clearly, is me. And it's not about the house. It's about me. I can't handle any more things that are not quite right in my life, because I feel like that's all I've got. I feel like every single part of my life has bumps and bruises and broken pieces.

I want to be all shiny and new, all put together, and I just can't get there. The things I try to forget don't go away, and I'm a lot like my old house, cracked and mismatched and patched over.

On my worst days, I start to believe that what God wants is perfection. That God is a new-house God. That everything has to work just right, with no cracks in the plaster and no loose tiles. That I need to be completely fixed up. I always think that God's kind of people are squeaky-clean people whose garages don't leak, but really a lot of the people God uses to do amazing things are people who don't necessarily have it all together. A lot of the best stories in the Bible, the ones where God does sacred, magical things through people, have a cast of characters with kind of shady pasts, some serious fixer-uppers.

On my very best days, as an act of solidarity with my house, since we're both kind of odd, mismatched, screwed-up things, I practice letting it be an old not-fixed-up house, while I practive being a not-fixed-up person. I wear my ugly pants, the saggy yellow terry-cloth ones with the permanently dirty hems, and I walk around my house, looking at all the things that I should fix someday, but I don't fix them just yet, and I imagine God noticing all the things about me that should get fixed up one day, and loving me anyway and being okay with the mess for the time being.

I practice believing that, bottom line, God loves me as-is, even if I never do get my act together. I put my hand on the plaster wall, nubbly and textured, and I think thankful thoughts about the walls. Then I put my hand on the floor, and I think thankful thoughts about the floor, even though it's scratched and ridged and you can see where one of my black heels lost its little cap and the metal part left tiny round divots in the floor, over and over, like confetti stamped into the wood. I imagine that God does that to me, puts his hand on my head, on my heart, on my savage insecurities, and as he does it, he thinks thankful thoughts about me.

In my best moments, when I calm down and listen closely, God says, "I didn't ask you to become new and improved today. That wasn't the goal. You were broken down and strange yesterday, and you still are today, and the only one freaked out about it is you."

I sometimes hate this house for not being what I want it to be, and I sometimes hate myself for not being that either. But little by little, my funny old broken down house is teaching me that good enough is good enough. Maybe in six months we'll take the home-improvement next step, whatever that might be, and maybe we won't, but my house will keep me warm and dry until then, and I'll try to be kind and gentle to my house and to myself in the meantime.

Chapter/Essay entitled "Old House," from the book "Cold Tangerines," by Shauna Niequist


I'm still pretty sure my house is worse than her house, though.

But I remember the feeling when we first walked into this house--the absolute very last MLS listing we put off seeing for so long because it looked so terrible in the little photo from the curb, the photo that earned it the nickname "the shack." As in, "Ok, fine, since we have looked at every single house in two counties that we could afford and that meets our basic needs with no success, let's go take a look at the shack." But when the realtor opened the door and I stepped in, my eyes immediately went to the (smoke stained dingy yellowish white) vaulted ceiling rafters and my first thought was "Oooooooh, this has potential!" It was rank with cat pee and cigarette smoke. The bedroom ceiling and behind the curtains looked like the mother-spider lair from "Arachnaphobia." It had a half-bedroom, and no interior doors.

And we liked it. And after we bought it, and unearthed and refinished the redwood floors, and re-painted the ceiling, and started its renewal and moved in. . . we still liked it. We had peace in it, and about it. We elected to have two more children while in it. And, honestly, that is just plain nuts. We should not be content, we should not be comfortable. A family of six in 550 square feet?! And yet, the more crazy it is, the more reasons there are why we should not be happy with the house, just make me all the more convinced that our peace and happiness is coming from beyond our human expectations and understandings. They are gifts from God, as is this tiny, pitiful house.

So, like the writer, I love my house and forgive it for its condition and limitation.

But I am not going to be as patient with the fix-it-up schedule!