Home Décor Obsession!

I have a confession to make.  It is the first of many to come, I believe.  So, here it goes: since my marriage this past June, I have been totally obsessed with home décor.  I think I have some sort of illness, which I’ll call HDO, or Home Décor Obsession.  Every spare second I get I’m standing around in my apartment envisioning all of the many things I would do with it if I had the money, along with the many things I’m going to do with the gorgeous mansion I’ll have once I’m rich (because that’s totally going to happen on the salary of a substitute teacher and a Red Cross employee).  You probably don’t think this is a big deal.  In fact, you might think it’s normal.  What you don’t understand is that caring about how my living space looks is something entirely foreign to me.  Let me explain why.

                For some reason that is still inexplicable to me, I was an extreme feminist during my earliest childhood.  This might not be strange for a child whose parents are feminists, but I had absolutely no one in my life pushing me towards this.  My family was very conservative.  My mom did all the cooking, cleaning, and child-rearing, and my dad went to work.  Not only this, but I was taught that this was the only correct way to run a household.  My pastor-father still preaches from the pulpit, to this day, that the man is the head of the house.  No matter how many times he makes the joke that the woman is “the neck that turns the head,” he truly believes this to be the case.  In my later childhood and adolescence, my desire to obliterate gender roles came from actually thinking about these claims coupled with a healthy dose of flat-out rebellion, but I don’t really understand how or why I was so adamant about changing them up at such an early age.  At any rate, I was, and despite my good intentions I couldn’t help but succumb to the irrationality and over-enthusiasm of childhood.  Even in kindergarten I was arguing with boys (and some girls) about the fact that girls could do anything (and more!) that boys could do, and proudly stated that I hated cooking, cleaning, and anything even remotely related to being “housewifey.”  I vowed never to become one, or to be interested in the things that such a woman would care about.  This continued all the way through my late teenage years and early adulthood.  I swore off cooking, kept my room in a state of perpetual chaos, and laughed at the girls with their perfect pastel-colored rooms, home-made dishes, and ambitions to be stay-at-home moms.

                And then something strange happened.  My boyfriend and I started to think seriously about getting married.  We had been planning to get married since we were 16, but it wasn’t until about five years later when we began to understand the gravity of such plans and actually started thinking about the practicalities.  Suddenly I was thinking about places to live.  And kids.  And awful things like, gasp, chores.  I realized that I didn’t have the slightest clue about how to cook a meal or keep a room clean.  Luckily my boyfriend-turned-husband has always been an amazing cook and knows how to clean, but I knew that I was going to have to do my share.  It was only fair.  The crazy childhood feminist inside me screamed at the thought of ever having to cook a meal ever, but the rational and fair feminist inside me knew that splitting the work as close to 50/50 as possible was the way to go.  So I started learning how to cook.  And I cleaned my room.  And then I started thinking about ways to make a room not just clean, but also nice-looking.  Despite my dad’s comments that I was becoming “domesticated” (he deliberately used that word to annoy me, which is actually kind of funny now), I had to admit to myself that I kind of liked having a room where I could see the floor, and I actually really liked the thought of making a room beautiful.  I didn’t (and still don’t) really like cooking, but you take the good with the bad.

                So now I spend my days Googling decorating ideas and following home décor blogs and thinking about how a space can be utilized.  I think this newfound love for decorating, or at least thinking about decorating, has taught me a valuable lesson (not to get all moralizing on you).  I’ve learned that loving areas of marriage traditionally dominated by women doesn’t have to mean that I’m somehow giving in to the patriarchy, just like it doesn’t mean that I’m a stereotypical woman if I walk outside wearing pink.  My husband and I split the cooking (and I’ve actually discovered that I’m a pretty decent baker), I do most of the cleaning because he works more hours (he did all of the cleaning during my brief stint in grad school before he got his new job), and I’m the one who cares about the décor (and have subsequently contracted HDO).  Do people come over and automatically assume I do the decorating?  Yup.  Do I validate them when I confirm that I do?  Maybe.  But as long as I’m doing things I like because I like them, and not because it is expected of me by society as a woman, then that’s fine with me.

                

I leave you with awesome pictures of awesomeness and home décor inspiration.