by Jen Hatmaker
6. Decide you’re okay with being chubby. Feel philosophical about this. Society doesn’t get to tell you how to look. You’ll intentionally keep these pounds on because you are NOT GOVERNED BY THE MAN.
7. Pour glass of wine.
8. Brag about exercise to husband. Oversell the distance/ weight/duration/reps.
9. Vow to never do any of it again.
HOW TO RUIN YOUR TODDLER’S LIFE
1. Pour him one-eighth of an inch less milk than his brother in a see-through cup.
Programming Note: If this doesn’t work, accidentally break his cookie in half as you lift it off the cookie sheet. Because broken cookies don’t taste the same! If these fail, give him the wrong kind of cheese or socks with weird seams. This should effectively destroy his happiness.
HOW TO RUIN YOUR TEENAGER’S LIFE
1. Breathe.
2. Don’t buy her a car even though she really wants one but forgot to save any of her money like you told her to four years ago. (You could stop effectively at this step, but continue through the manual if teen resentment wears off.)
3. Say no to Senior Skip Day, even when he has proof, and even when that proof is a screenshot of an iPhone note typed up and shared by someone named hottiexoxo with instructions to spread the word “on the low.” Your teen cannot understand your problem with hottiexoxo. You are the “most paranoid mom ever.”
4. Keep breathing. This assaults the teen psyche more than you might imagine.
5. Give advice on a problem teen is having. Realize you know nothing, understand nothing, have nothing to offer, have no experience, no clue, and no chill. You’re just an old lady who makes dinner.
6. Smile anyway and toast the hubs for making it this far, and dream about all the places you’ll go when the nest is empty.
HOW TO GET YOUR HUSBAND TO FIX THAT THING HE’S BEEN SAYING FOR THREE MONTHS THAT HE’D FIX
1. Tell him it’s fine if he doesn’t know how to fix it.
2. Watch him fix it.
Programming Note: If this tried-and-true method fails, start getting estimates from professionals. As a last resort, start the project yourself. Even just pick up a hammer and walk in the general direction of the broken thing. This should effectively catapult your husband off the couch and into disgruntled service: “I said I would do it!”
HOW TO HELP YOUR MIDDLE SCHOOLER WITH MATH HOMEWORK
1. Have your child go to the kitchen table and set out her homework.
2. Slip up to the bathroom. Look in the mirror and say, “I got this. Eighth-grade geometry is not my bully.”
3. Take several deep breaths like you learned while pregnant with this child in Lamaze class, because geometry may not be your bully but your eighth-grade daughter definitely is.
4. Calmly approach the kitchen table and sit with your child. Smile. Do not spook the middle schooler. Do not make any sudden movements. Say breezily, “So what are you working on?” (Knowing full well you are about thirty-five minutes from doing the worksheet yourself, because, God love her, this girl just can’t do math.)
5. Spend the next thirty-four minutes trying to explain the worksheets while mentally compiling a list of future jobs that don’t require math skills.
6. At minute thirty-five, let your frazzled, despondent child get some ice cream while you rewrite some of her answers so she will at least get a C-.
7. Math homework done!
Programming Note: If you are equally confused about the geometry homework, outsource to Dad, big brother or sister (bribe with cash), smart neighbor, Grandma or Grandpa, before-school tutoring, YouTube, or Google. You are good at other things. Continue to feel good about self.
HOW TO GO SWIMSUIT SHOPPING THREE MONTHS POSTPARTUM
1. Gather as many “figure-flattering” swimsuits as possible.
2. Hastily try them on. Look in the mirror, but only through squinted eyes to soften the blow. Wear sunglasses if this helps.
3. Realize the form-fitting material reveals every lump and bump you received as parting gifts from your pregnancy. Have confused feelings about the underside of your butt. What exactly has happened back there? Something has gone wrong. Some stuff is out of place.
4. Put all the swimsuits back.
5. Weep a little.
6. Eat some Cadbury mini eggs.
7. Wear an old suit to the pool, because you deserve that water even though your nipples are still the size of silver dollar pancakes and your belly skin is like Laffy Taffy. Whatever, haters (“haters” being the swimsuits). Your body gave birth to a human being, and if it wants to go to the pool, it will go in all its glory.
Programming Note: If sanity is important to you, simply execute steps 6 and 7 and be done with it.
Home is the nicest word there is.1
— LAURA INGALLS WILDER
CHAPTER 7
IT’S JUST PAINT
Maybe the most absurd day of my life was getting an e-mail from an executive at HGTV asking if I would consider developing a show around our family. Y’all, I howled. What in the actual? Mind you, the catalyst for this proposition was a blog I wrote about being a very, very, incredibly terrible end-of-school mom, which landed me on The Today Show for a scant four-minute segment in which, trying to appear breezy, I miscalculated the height of the chair and air-leaned on the arm with my elbow. Delightfully, I also wasn’t wearing panties, because I usually manage eight out of every ten given details and packing underwear missed the cut. It is very hard to do everything expected of adulthood, and I appreciate your understanding. But back to HGTV.
My mediocrity was finally paying off!
After sending in a very professional video, which my then fifteen-year-old captured on his iPhone, we found ourselves filming a “sizzle” a mere two weeks later (I will set fancy TV words in quotes so we can build our insider vernacular). After being dubbed “the sound bite queen” because of my fluency in sarcasm, the sizzle passed muster, a whole production crew moved to Austin, and we bought a 1908 farmhouse and set out to renovate it during eight episodes of an original show called My Big Family Renovation.
Obviously, this was the moment I hired a trainer and stopped eating. Do not come at me with “girl power” or “be confident in the body you have” or some such nonsense. If you would like to star in eight hours of high-definition national television content in the body you have, be my guest, gentle reader. But I was unprepared to display my muffin top and FUA (Flabby Upper Arms) on the network of homes and gardens next to their other teeny little hosts and “talent.” No thank you, sirs. I didn’t want to be “that chubby one who has a million kids and thinks she’s funny.” Motivating factors in finally dropping ten pounds: health, life longevity, energy level, strength? Meh. A simple case of extreme vanity on television? Get me my dumbbells.
Our living arrangements during the renovation were dismal enough to bring even Laura Bush to paint the universe with expletives. Brandon and I lived in a room off the garage, our three boys lived in a filthy camper in the backyard, and the two girls stayed in whatever room in the house wasn’t under construction. Of course, the house had no electricity, no heat, and no power, and we started filming in October during what turned out to be the coldest winter in memory. A subscriber to homemade organic food, I fed my children Pop-Tarts every solitary morning for four straight months, which obviously contributed to my general feeling of well-being and competency. We had nowhere to cook, nowhere to be, nowhere to sit down, and one shower. We were dirty, cold, malnourished people who smelled like sawdust and hunger.
I am frequently asked how Brandon and I managed to renovate an entire house in these conditions for six months without forfeiting our marriage, and my answer is simple: If you are interested in tackling a major construction project with your spouse, I suggest you do it on HGTV. Do you know what forces you to behave? Cameras. GoPros. Producers. Microphones. It’s like magic! You decide not to act like a lunatic and instead appear patient and lovely and not at all over it at 11:22 p.m. when you
are still filming that day’s “reveal.” You smile sweetly at your spouse instead of, for example, barking your actual feelings like, “Do I look like I want to strip another room of popcorn ceilings? Does my face communicate that this is a thing I want to include in my life plan?”
Nope. On camera, you are darling, witty, patient. Your children are not getting on your last blessed nerve while they “help paint” (make it stop). You haven’t been able to feel your frozen feet for twenty-three straight days, but you are easygoing about it because you are precious. Your “OTFs” to camera (“on the flies,” which we sometimes called WTFs because we need a savior) are smiley, relaxed: “Today we hit a bit of a snag with the plumbing, but we’ve called in the experts and hope to be back on track in no time!” That is on camera; the cursing and despair is off. While mic’d, your husband never once yells, “You are acting like the Blair Witch!” and instead says, “We’ll figure it out, babe.” In other words, we filmed a fictional rom-com, and we hope you enjoyed our show.
I’ll tell you what we loved: our crew. We spent more time with our producers and camera guys during those few months than with our own flesh and blood. It was incredibly refreshing to be outside of church work and ministry in a completely new space with people we grew to adore. We ate lunch around the table together every single day, and our conversations ran the gamut from our sound tech saying, “God seems like a real ass” to our cameraman Christopher confessing, “I cried so hard during The Pursuit of Happyness I had to leave the theater.” We had so many raw and interesting and truthful discussions, but we mostly laughed every day, all day. They adored our kids, took fantastic care of us, showed up positive and hilarious daily, and I cried my ever-loving eyes out during our “wrap party” as I tried to tell them what they’d meant to our family.
And now we get to live in this quirky, charming, lovely old farmhouse, and it is everything we ever dreamed of. I’ve come to realize exactly what the show was: a gift. That’s it, plain and simple. It was a gift to our marriage, our season of life, and our family. It has since been the scene of incalculable memories, gatherings, parties, and get-togethers. We’ve hosted three hundred women who helped launch my last book, nearly four hundred partners in our nonprofit (The Legacy Collective), backyard concerts, crawfish boils, Hays High School Varsity soccer team dinners, “Dinner for 10” through our church, a dozen supper clubs, ten thousand football watch parties, Halloween bashes, Christmas mornings, New Year’s brunches, church partner classes, Little League football parties, friends’ birthdays, Sweet Sixteen celebrations. It has been a joy and delight to throw open the doors of our old house and welcome in our neighbors and friends, our church and family.
There is nothing more meaningful, life-giving, or lovely than home.
Dear one, may I say something? It is not shallow or empty or frivolous to create a beautiful space to live in. It’s not silly, not vainglorious, not a waste of time and energy. It doesn’t make you superficial nor slide you down the godly scale. We spend the majority of our hours in our homes with our people. Creating beauty and nurture under your roof with colors that soothe, art that inspires, furniture that invites, and textures that thrill is a wonderful use of your small space on the planet.
I do not mean this in a trite, cliché way in the slightest: How could we imagine that a God who created wildflowers and waterfalls and pine trees and hummingbirds and warm sand and mountain ranges and tulips thinks beauty is nonsense? He made a gorgeous, over-the-top earth wild with colors and textures and breathtaking landscapes. And He loved it. He said it was good, so good. He made it for our pleasure as a testament to His character. He created a sensual, aesthetic, jaw-dropping world and asked us to enjoy it. If God decided to make his whole earth pretty, we can choose to make our little homes pretty without tension, guilt, or shame.
That’s when the fun starts! Design and decorating, making a house a home; this is supposed to be invigorating, not paralyzing. Let’s be very honest: we are not curing cancer here. As much as we shouldn’t undervalue beauty, we shouldn’t overthink it either. If your living room wall has the same five paint sample patches you “tested” there four years ago, you may be taking this too seriously. This is my motto when it comes to creating lovely spaces:
It’s just paint.
I use that for all things. “It’s just paint” also means: it’s just a stain, it’s just a finish, it’s just a bedspread, it’s just a print, it’s just a couch, it’s just a table, it’s just an old dresser, it’s just tile, it’s just hardware. Seriously, the consequences here are negligible. Don’t like the pulls you chose for your cabinets? Take them off and return them. There, I solved it. There is no such thing as a design emergency. There is no such thing as a decorating catastrophe. It’s just paint.
Once you lift the shroud of gravity, creating a beautiful home is fun. Like my friend Myquillyn Smith says in her book The Nesting Place, “It doesn’t have to be perfect to be beautiful.” Find colors and styles that make you feel alive and inspired and at home, and pull the trigger. Start small, start anywhere, start with one room, one corner, one piece. You want to try a funky feature wall? Grab a hammer. Want to give an old dresser a good sanding and a fresh coat of turquoise paint? Get a brush. Do your friends love neutral colors but you love red? “Currant Red” by Benjamin Moore will make your heart sing. If not a whole wall, an old chair, a console, a chandelier, a coffee table. It’s just paint.
Go with what you love, not necessarily what you see on design shows or in your neighbor’s house. Pay attention to what grabs your eye and what you are consistently drawn toward. My style is random and possibly invented: I favor a bit of “old barn” crossbred with some industrial elements, super mismatched furniture, cluttered oversized wall features, and enough color to make Joanna Gaines cry all the tears in Waco. I prefer mostly old things but some new, and I like everything to feel cozy, overstuffed, textured, warm. I want to tuck my friends into my comfy too-big-for-the-room sectional with mugs of coffee and cover their laps with crocheted blankets while I play Johnny Cash on my old record player. Somehow that sentence explains my design style.
You do you here. There are no rules. I used to believe there were, that you could pick only one style, one direction, and all the ancillary design elements were in subjugation. I thought vibrant could never pair with neutral, cottage could never mix with contemporary, and if it wouldn’t be professionally grouped in a furniture store, it was not allowed.
But that is nonsense. If you like a bit of traditional, pops of rustic, and this one show-stopping midcentury modern piece, girl, do that thing. My favorite rooms are those that feel collected, not purchased all at once as a matchy, matchy package. That old lantern you found at a flea market and painted green? Hang that bad boy over your dining room table. That gorgeous vintage wallpaper you hung on one wall? I’ve fainted. A beautiful, textural cowhide rug under your super-modern coffee table? Yes, yes, yes, all day long. I painted some old deer horns turquoise and hung them inside an empty frame; my end tables are an old tree stump and an antique wire chicken basket, because I am the boss of my own house. The only rule is that you love it and it makes you happy when you look at it. That is the only guideline to obey.
None of this has to be expensive or fancy. There is no end to what you can create out of what you already have, what you thrift, what you reclaim, what you pull out of someone’s dumpster or off the side of the road (I have done these exact creepy things). Paint is cheap and changes everything from an end table to kitchen cabinets to an entire room. Make an informal co-op of fifteen friends and swap furniture; one girl’s tired headboard is another girl’s treasure. Craigslist has pages of stuff for free or next to nothing if you’ll just go haul it off. And don’t forget the age-old trick of simply rearranging a room, which will cost you nothing except some grunt work and between two and six arguments with your husband.
And let this be said: the biggest waste of nonrefundable years is closing your home to guests because it is
not “pretty enough” (could also insert: big enough, new enough, clean enough, stylish enough, good enough). Let me address any possible objection about my ability to open my house with confidence because it was professionally renovated: Brandon and I have piled people into every home we’ve ever lived in, including apartments, duplexes, tract homes jammed with little kid crap, one home with no downstairs bathroom, one home with no insulation or dishwasher, two homes with no central air, and a dozen homes still stocked with our parents’ old furniture. If we delayed hospitality until we had a fully decorated home, we would have made our first friends two years ago. And even now, our old house is little and only a few folks can fit inside, so we basically spend all our friend time in the yard sitting in eleven-dollar chairs from Academy Sports + Outdoor.
Making your home pretty is nice, but making it nourishing is holy. Sister, paint that chair or hang that mirror, sure, but for the love, don’t wait until everything is done before putting on a pot of chili and inviting new friends over for football. Your neighbor wants to belong far more than she wants to be impressed. Some of my favorite memories involve walking into a girlfriend’s messy house, stepping over the mountain of shoes in her entryway, accepting a glass of Pinot in a plastic Mardi Gras cup, and grabbing a knife to help chop carrots. It isn’t the picture-perfect feature wall that makes me want to come back; it is the friendship, the warmth, the easy welcome, the laughter.
Home is the scene of so much love and happiness, community and pot roasts. It is where you invite people in and say, “You are so welcome in this place.” It is the reel our children will replay in memory the leather chair you read in, the farmhouse table you shared, the braided rug where you played eleventybillion games of Chutes and Ladders. It is your little corner of earth, entirely yours to make lovely. In a world increasingly dominated by fear and violence and isolation and loneliness, you can claim restoration under your small roof, where people are nurtured and loved and fed and embraced, where God reigns and hope is spoken, and where everything from the walls to your books to the conversations communicate the sentiment penned by Julian of Norwich in the fourteenth century: