By: Trevor Marshallsea
When it comes to home décor, you can be one of two things: Someone who’s serious about home décor, or a parent to small children.
The two go together like corn flakes and beer. Bring your baby home from hospital, grow it for a while, and watch your previously stylish and carefully maintained home furnishings – including purchases like walls and ceilings –slide into what insurers might call “a ceaseless pit of abnormal wear and tear.”
Instead, you really should take an 18-year lease on some furniture, then get your real stuff back when your kid flees the by-then very soiled nest.
The human life cycle can be charted by the type of stains on your expensive sofa. First comes drool, then “mushed teething rusk,” then solids (of all kinds), then “sticky finger marks” (and their companion “candy wrappers stuffed down the back”). The list progresses up to that rite-of-passage element some parents of teenagers return to after a relaxing weekend away – alcohol.
A toddler, of course, doesn’t know it’s not right to leave a mark on a sofa. We’re talking about someone who thinks it’s OK to poop in his pants. The imported fabric on your new three-seater won’t be his concern when he’s looking for a place to throw up.
When our kids were toddlers, we rented a furnished apartment and were relieved to find a beautiful pale leather couch. Food stains, barf and liquids wiped off with ease. Oh, but didn’t the ball point pen stand out! I immediately started paying our two-year-old pocket money, just so I could withhold it to pay for the damage.
Probably, then, the smartest home décor tip for parents would be to deck out your home with busy patterns. Amongst our collection of Chinese rugs, we put the busiest-looking one under the dining table. It still looks great; it’s just that its pattern has changed – a lot.
Unfortunately, our walls do not have a busy pattern on them. At least at first they didn’t. Now they’re white, with bits of gray and brown on them. These bits take the form of children’s footmarks above the couch (since when was it a good idea to sit upside-down?) or shoe marks. There’s even a shoe mark on the ceiling. When you see things like that, the best reaction is to simply give up.
One day, our kids were banished to the master bedroom while the adults watched some important football. Unknown to us, they took several “gel monsters” which, it turned out, stuck extremely well to the ceiling. You can still see their multi-colored remnants now, which give sessions of marital pillow talk a sort of comforting “indoor play center” feel.
This issue gets complicated when you’re a stay-at-home dad. Usually, we’ve invested less emotion into home décor than our wives, at a factor of around zero percent. I did once hold some pretentions in this area until I learned a couple of things most husbands learn:
1. A husband can umm and aah about home furnishings all he likes, but it doesn’t really matter what he thinks. I learned this soon after the stuff purchased during my bachelor days, tastefully I thought, was “rearranged” – into a dumpster. I once heard it perfectly expressed when one Ikea trolley-pusher’s wife held up two cushions and asked, “What do you think?” Surprised, the man said: “Oh honey, I gave up thinking what I think years ago.”
2. If you can learn to say three little words that mean so much, life as a husband improves drastically. These words are “I don’t care.” You say them when your better half asks you to blow a Saturday afternoon looking at cushion covers, or something else uninteresting. My wife latterly revealed the reason for the request was not for my input, but to keep her company. But what sort of company is a grumpy man anyway?
We don’t want to live like slobs, mind you. The point is we trust our wives’ judgment, secure in the knowledge that ours doesn’t count. Trouble is, when that judgment is compromised – by, say, a mouthful of beetroot – the stay-at-home dad is the one who gets yelled at, just because it happened on our watch! Far more sensible to just yell at the kid, I say. They usually take it in their stride, before tripping and spilling something on the rug.
//Trevor Marshallsea was a foreign correspondent in Beijing in the 1990s and returned a decade later. This time around he stays at home to raise the kids. Read more of his domestic adventures at www.tigerfather.com.
