Words Can't Bring Me Down

I'm hosting Bunco tonight and have been cleaning and food prepping this morning.  As I go around the house, I see our cozy home through the eyes of others.  We rent and are limited in what changes and decorating we can do.

The walls need a fresh coat of paint badly!  We actually put in a request last year to repaint ourselves to freshen it up, but our property manager never responded.  Most of the walls ust have the builder's primer paint on them.  So, when I've tried to clean the walls, the paint comes off.  Lots of marks on the walls make it looks run down and like we don't care.

The carpets, which have been here since the house was built 15 years ago, are worn and stained.  Our furniture is stained and chipped.  The decor includes a skeleton made out of stickers, epic faces drawn by B and homemade Math signs to assist B with his homeschool lessons.

The homes of the other ladies in the Bunco group look, to me, like decorating magazines.  These ladies have taste and know how to put things together and match color schemes.  They have themes and collections on display and I love walking through their beautiful, decluttered homes each month.

I'm walking around my 1st floor with a box under my arm, throwing everything that's on a surface into it and will store the box in the basement until after Bunco is over.  The hubs has to unplug the computer and take it up to our bedroom when he comes home from work because I need the desk to serve dinner off of.

As I clean and clear, I'm reciting in my head, "I don't care what they think of my house.  I don't care what they think of my stuff.  I'm sure at least some of them run around the house with a box under their arm before Bunco, too.  They all have kids!"

I decided to turn on some music to drown out the recitation in my head because it's not going to stop. When I turned the radio on, the first words that came out were, "I am beautiful, no matter what they say.  Words can't bring me down."  It was Beautiful by Christina Aguilera and it was exactly what I needed to hear right then.

I was bringing myself down with words in my head.  Nobody else was there looking disgustedly at my house or making comments.

I love the ring stains where B decided to paint with non-washable paint and put no newspaper underneath.  Looking at the chips on the desk where B ran his 1st pair of scissors to test how sharp they were brings a smile to my face, remembering how cute and small he was.  And although it's not pretty to look at old, dried food particles on the wall above the kitchen sink from a garbage disposal explosion a few years ago, the meal we had that night was fantastic.

My home is beautiful, no matter what I say, and I won't bring it down by dishonoring our memories.