What I’ve found is that something as common as spilled milk can turn into a rich moment with my kids. And for years my misguided perfectionism robbed both them and me of those moments. And I can’t help but wonder how many other moments I robbed from my kids and from my husband while trying to attain some vision of a perfect home that I was never going to attain anyway.
Before my slipcover revelation, I never allowed the kids to paint or do projects on my dining-room table because it was my “favorite table.” Today, not only do I let them do their projects there, but I’m the one who instigates it. “Okay, we’re going to paint, kids!” Why? Because I replaced that “perfect” table with one that’s all scuffed up and only gets better looking with age.
I also tried to set aside various spots throughout that home where my kids were expected to make a mess: in their living room, on that table I just mentioned, I even carved out a spot in the kitchen where they could cook and have fun experimenting with food. That way I could be prepared, which means I wouldn’t overreact. And that in turn meant my kids could be kids, and I could be a better mom. It was all connected.
The funny thing to me is that whenever we had people step foot into our house after that, they seemed more wowed by it than any other house I’d designed or lived in—including the 1920s dream house in Castle Heights.
That got me thinking about the pressure we women and moms are all under these days. It seems as if the standards are so much higher than they were just a few years ago, mainly because of what we see whenever we look on the Internet.
It used to require some effort to feel like an inferior mom and wife. A woman would have to go to a newsstand and spend six dollars on a magazine to see the current societal standard of “What my family and home are supposed to look like.” Now it just shows up on social media everywhere you look, and it always seems to be picture-perfect. That’s all anyone seems to post—perfect pictures of perfect families enjoying perfect moments.
Along with that, I think everyone’s expectations of themselves have gotten so much higher. I mean, honestly, as a stay-at-home mom, every time I had a moment to open Facebook or Pinterest I would walk away thinking, I’m not doing enough. And then I’d start second-guessing myself. I think that’s what I started to overcome with those revelations in my own home.
It’s funny that these revelatory moments of mine happened on couches in two different houses, and I wonder why that is. But I don’t have to wonder about the results of those moments.
Shortly after I sat on the couch at the Castle Heights house and really noticed for the first time that I wasn’t happy, even though I’d worked so hard to make everything look perfect, I had a conversation with a friend of mine. I was exhausted all of the time, and I said to this friend: “I feel like I’m just surviving at this point. I’m not thriving.”
Once I was in the Carriage Square house and embracing the laughter and messiness of my kids and not cleaning all day long, I realized that it was up to me to flip that switch from surviving to thriving. It was just a mental shift, a readjustment in my way of thinking—like seeing my kids’ fingerprints as kind of cute instead of a miserable mess.
I actually made that particular mental shift right after I had my Carriage Square revelation. It happened instantly—just like that—right after I made the decision to enjoy my kids instead of obsessing over making everything perfect. I looked down at those fingerprints—I was still on the couch—and suddenly they looked completely different.
Then I got to thinking about the bigger picture: If I’m going to sit around and say I am “just surviving” every day, well, guess what? When a big wave comes along suddenly, I won’t be surviving—I’ll be drowning!
I mean, that’s life. Life is never predictable. Life is never really manageable. If your mind-set is always, “I’m just surviving,” it seems to me that would wind up being your mind-set for the rest of your life. You’d just get stuck in it.
So I finally flipped the switch in my mind. I said, “I have to choose to thrive, even in the pain. Even when it’s tough.” And it was tough. While I was coming to this conclusion, we were right in the middle of our whole financial mess. We’d managed to escape just under the wire through that God-given $100,000 check, but we were still in trouble.
The miracle of that breakthrough moment for me is that I didn’t really let our situation get to me. I didn’t wallow in it. I didn’t allow it to dictate my happiness. I was scared, sure. But for now at least, we had our house; we had our kids; we had our health; and we were living this beautiful life together. And I told myself, “I want to make all that count in this season, because otherwise it’s just going to be a waste.”
I didn’t want to look back at this experience and regret how I handled it. I wanted to say, win or lose, that we believed in love, that we had faith, and in essence we fought the good fight. I didn’t want to be found a quitter or a doubter. None of these things would have been helpful to Chip anyway. So even though I didn’t feel it some days, and even though I shed my fair share of tears, I woke up every day and told myself, “We can do this. God has not brought us this far to let us down now.” And I would tell Chip, “You got this. Most guys would collapse under this pressure, but you were built for this!”
This paradigm shift seemed to work, and I know Chip appreciated it. As a parent, as a wife, as a business owner, I simply decided: “I’m not going to survive anymore. I’m going to thrive.”
It wasn’t some big life-altering change that was difficult to achieve, either. It was instantaneous. I just realized that I had a choice to make in every moment, on every day, with every decision.
I made that choice, when the next glass of milk was spilled, to choose a thriving response rather than the surviving one. And I made that choice when another gigantic bill landed in our mailbox that day after the last of our $100,000 miracle was spent. Was I going to just survive this? Or was I going to get with my husband and think this through so we could overcome it together and thrive?
I still had my moments when I’d make the wrong choice and get all fed up and start fussing at the kids or Chip or start beating myself up over some mistake I’d made. But the more I kept asking myself that question—the more I focused on thriving—the shorter those “just surviving” moments seemed to last.
There was something in that low point with our business that drew Jo and me closer together. My usual optimism seemed to slip. I wasn’t sure we were going to find our way out of this one. But she took on this really positive attitude about everything that helped me get through it.
I always said, “When things come against us we can either turn on each other, or we can come together and turn on it.”
We almost started to reverse roles in that season, where she was the one telling me that it was all going to be all right and that even if it wasn’t, then that would be all right too. We were together, and our kids were good, and that was all that mattered. We were thriving—that was the way she put it.
I wasn’t sure I believed her, to be honest. I was terrified we were about to lose everything. But the irony of it all is that just as we hit a low point where I thought we might slip into bankruptcy any day, the local newspaper caught wind of what we were doing with our development and decided to do a front-page story about us: “What a neat thing you’re doing over on that side of town. You guys want to be in the paper?”