Noticing My Patterns

I caught myself criticizing my home the other day.

In all honesty, it's not an unusual occurrence.

I live in a double-wide and I feel self-conscious about this fact sometimes. Our double-wide, like all double-wide's, is a long rectangle. It's difficult to furnish and feel comfortable in rooms that are long and rectangular. They're just the wrong shape for living. The washing machine and dryer take up most of the space that is also used as an entry into the house, meaning that clean clothes inevitably end up falling onto a very dirty floor and that floor is always dirty, even right after I clean it because shoes are dirty. The kitchen cupboards and counters and drawers are not a standard size. Actually, everything is double-wide sized.

I could go on and on about what I hate about this house.

• The ugly mauve flower print on the kitchen walls.
• The cramped bathroom.
• The ugly stripe pattern on the bathroom walls.
• The walls themselves, which are little more than glorified cardboard.
• The way you can hear everything that happens no matter where you are in the house.
• The fact that the bathrooms share walls with community rooms (and as stated before, you can hear everything.)
• The lack of artistic creativity in the space itself. 

The list is never-ending.

I've heard that wherever you spent the pandemic will be a place that you hate after the pandemic. I have no doubt this is true for some people. Maybe a lot of people. For me, I started hating this house a long time ago. Did it start when I became more homebound?

The house was great when we moved in. We had one child; she was one year old. The space felt huge. We added child number two shortly after moving in. It still felt plenty spacious for our new family.

But I was alone. I didn't have many friends. I had to drive at least 20 minutes to get anywhere populated. We didn't have any family nearby. My husband was always at work. It was a lonely and hard time and that's when I first started feeling like I lived in a prison.

But I could remedy that. I could leave and go somewhere else, if only for a couple of hours. We went out almost every day when the kids were little.

And then I got sick.

Yes. It was definitely when my health fell apart that the loathing really started to sink in.

A little while after noticing my criticisms, I was looking at myself in the bathroom mirror while I washed my hands. I noticed my brain start to pick apart my body. And it dawned on me, I am not at home anywhere; not in my house nor my body. I criticize the way I look every time I glance at the mirror. I've got a list of things I hate about my body just like I do for my house. But I guess noticing my attitude about these things is the first step toward changing them.

So now I am asking myself, what does it look like to love the homes I live in?