ALL THE RAGE: A house project for dealing with hard feelings

Plus: The silly, the devastating, the helpful, and the maddening among this month's design stories.

Well, I’ve been sick with the Flu B for 18 days now, and I’m pretty angry about it. I’m especially angry at our teenager, who brought this thing home (yes, I know, these things happen), and who kept coughing all over us despite our protestations.

He coughed over the food we were having for dinner, over the table as we set it, in our faces when he came in for a hug, on our pillows when he came in for an late-night info dump. So much coughing, even though we had explained to him over and over again that we were vulnerable.

My husband is a healthcare worker and I have an autoimmune condition. So when he gets sick he has to “recover” faster and when I get sick it takes me more than a month to get better (maybe longer).

It’s been ugly.

It feels a bit like the pandemic, when the vulnerable shouted “I’m vulnerable!” and the healthy shouted “I don’t care!”

Now we are still sick and he is better and just went skiing and to the movies and vintage shopping and did you save me some dinner and can you drive me to school because I don’t feel like taking the bus?

This has been our regular pattern lately. We tell him something, he doesn’t listen, he keeps at it, stuff happens, and we all deal with the consequences.

It’s completely age-appropriate. He’s 15. He is in a space where he learns by doing and making mistakes, and often, the mistakes radiate throughout our household.

I am the net for a lot of these mistakes. It feels heavy. And I haven’t exactly been handling my reactiveness well. I’ve been a big ole baby about all of it. And even though I give myself a bit of a pep talk before every interaction with my son — my beloved son! — I am having a hard time over here as he becomes more independent and wants nothing to do with me. Unless I am serving his chaffeuring, eating, or laundry needs. There he is perfectly willing to take everything I have to give. It’s all so demoralizing.

Last night culminated in a giant blowup where he got on his phone during a conversation, gave me one-word answers, and basically sulked at any attempt to interact with him. Honestly, I was probably the same at his age (sans phone of course). I barely remember my mother from my high school years beyond the moments she told me to do this and not that (or whatever I was doing) and our visits to grandparents who were, you know, DYING.

Adam reminded me of a lesson we have to learn over and over again. The child is always the child, and the parent is always the parent.

The better me tells me I should be giving him all the grace a boy deserves, but I am tired and I have been sleeping sitting up for more than two weeks and I’m angry at him for growing up anyway.

This might be the longest intro ever to a house project, but in my feverish haze, I decided to make a gallery wall to help me deal with the whip-fast transition we are experiencing from little kids to big kids and my anger at a normal part of human development. I needed something visual to help me accept this instead of constantly be pushing back against it and feeling hurt and left behind and fired from a job I loved.

Our home has a little hallway where we built a mud closet, and so that seemed like a good place to display some family photos. We took down an old framed letterpress print my husband had illustrated and measured out room for six clipboards (like the kind you might use if you are that jerk silently taking notes on workers doing work).

Then I ordered some black and white prints of our family in various states of doing the things. They aren’t especially great prints. That’s not really the point.

They are just images of our boys running, my husband snuggling them, my husband and I dressed as a rainbow and a pot of gold for Halloween, one of me looking angry at the camera wearing my Cat Ladies for Kamala t-shirt.

This isn’t that beautiful way to do a gallery wall but the key for me is that the images can be switched out without much fanfare whenever the mood suits.

This way, I can have images of us closer to WHERE WE ARE NOW, and not spend all my time crying at the pictures of my kids as tiny humans who listened to me (really, he did!).

I wrote about this a bit in my book — how transformative it is to display recent pictures. I often put up pictures of people I am struggling to forgive. Every time I see the picture, I forgive them a little more. It’s a bit like exposure therapy. Eventually, the feeling dissipates and all that’s left is an abiding peace.

Ha! No, it’s more like I get over myself and we can all have fun again.

So here’s what I’m telling myself every time I pass this current iteration of a gallery wall:

“You, my child, are forgiven. I accept that there will be many more pictures of you now where your family is not in the frame. This is a beautiful moment.”

And to my picture I say this:

“You have crawled yourself out of hellish health holes far worse than this one. Also — you were the one who held him when he came home coughing.”

Some house design stories that caught my eye over the past month

• Dwell put out a story about a farm where the farmhouse is modern and the sheep are kept in check through a surprising space hack. Adorable!

• This House Beautiful story on making a vast home feel homey should be read by all designers. I’ve long felt that large homes lack the personality and coziness of smaller spaces, so it’s great to see writers investigating how it can be done differently.

• The Oregonian wrote a nice tribute to Bob Rummer, a mid-century builder who died last week at 97, leaving a giant mark on mid-century architecture in Portland.

• The New York Times published a hilarious and helpful story about how to make your couch more inviting. It’s basically about pillows, but way to write a click-baity headline!

• This Wendy Goodman piece for NYMag about John Derian’s natural fantasy driven home is just as fabulous as you might want.

• Kelli Lamb’s Instagram. Kelli is the Editor of Rue magazine and a kind person who blurbed my book. She lost her entire home in the L.A. fires and has been writing about her grief in her Instagram stories.

• I hate-read this Domino story by a writer who did up her entire home in checkerboard

• Similarly, I just about lost it when AD did a story on Alison Roman’s new nursery and it had some neutral checkerboard on the carpet. Whoever told me three months ago that this trend would go away better buy me coffee.

• Funny to see The Spruce take on the German habit of lüften, which is basically just opening your windows. 😂