For as long as I can remember, I've been arranging and rearranging furniture, painting and repainting my walls and meticulously assembling my belongings in different ways. I never understood why I did this until very recently in my life. My room as a child was reinvented on numerous occasions. From pink to purple, from purple to red then back to purple. Needless to say, my mother thought I was a little unstable. Fortunately for me, my grandfather was amused by my indecision and would repaint my walls with a huge smile on his face.
When I finally moved out of my parent's house and got my first apartment after college, decorating seemed like a feat I was unprepared for. Everything ended up being beige or tan or brownish with some peach highlights and I never understood why that point in my life felt so blah! Now I do. C'mon! Beige and tan? What was I thinking? Sure, it's nice sometimes but my whole apartment? It had no pop, no personality. There wasn't any warmth or element of comfort. It was just blah on more blah...which was fitting at the time come to think of it.
A few years later, I got married. We moved into a townhouse and it was my first big project that I felt capable of decorating. However, I still lacked the finesse I possess now. The only color combination that made any sense to my naïve sense of style was blue and pink! Boy and girl, Male and Female. I suppose I thought since I was finally living with a man this was the only way I could express both of us in the house. While I do think it looked a little silly now, it was certainly a start.
I don't blame the decorating, but it's definitely ironic considering I ended up getting a divorce. Now, this was a very difficult time in my life. I had two daughters and we continued to live in the house I had bought with my ex-husband. Well--it certainly couldn't look the same if I was to keep my sanity. So, in what I believe now to be an effort to reclaim my power as a woman, the entire house became a pink sanctuary. The walls were pink, the doors were darker pink, the wall paper was some sort of pinky mix with pathetic highlights of blue and green. Literally, the house looked like something made out of cotton candy. Pink plates, pink utensils, pink television, it was a little excessive to say the least. While this choice is a little embarrassing now, my point is--they way I surrounded myself was irrevocably connected to the way I was feeling and vice versa.
With nowhere to go but up, my taste began to evolve. I met someone special, my kids liked him. So I bought a yellow couch. It was a small step for me, a huge step for my home's well-being. In the wake of the couch, came a few wooden blinds, a new comforter and a new wood finish for my armoire and cocktail table. I was slowly reinventing myself once again. Then came the catalogues. I signed up to receive any and all catalogues that pertained to decorating. They became my personal bibles. I poured over them constantly, strangely invigorated by what I saw on the pages. I found myself looking for ways to mimic what I saw on the pages but for me it became sort of a game. I could search and find things that invoked the same feelings but I would only purchase them if they were a fraction of the cost. I not only learned where and what to buy but how to buy cheap. It was very exciting. The day that I stepped into Home Goods I found salvation!
