Come on in

Full disclosure: This is a re-post from a few years ago, on a previous blog.

Enjoy.

 I meant to get the house dusted.

Or, at least, the places you see when you first walk into the house.

But….I didn’t.

I did get most of the post-vacation laundry done.

The groceries re-stocked in the fridge.

The counters in the kitchen wiped off.

But I didn’t get the dusting done.

And there were people coming over.

But it was okay.

Instead of bemoaning it, I wrote “Welcome!” in the dust on the hall table.

And you know what? I meant it.

Because the women who came through the door weren’t here to see how clean my house was.

They came with only the expectation of meeting with other women, of hearing and being heard, and of maybe having a good cup of coffee.

(Oh, and child care for their offspring for a couple of hours. Crucial to the above expectations–especially the “being heard” part.)

Although it didn’t require me to pick up my Swiffer duster, it did require me to lay down something else.

Opening my house to others sometimes requires laying down my own expectations of what that might look like.

What impression I think I need to make.

The (mostly self-imposed) pressure to have everything “just so”.

I ask myself: what feeling do I want people to walk away with?

That everything in my home was beautifully decorated and pristine and each item was artfully placed?

Or that it was a place where they felt welcome and comfortable–and listened to?

I love it when my house is totally clean, and everything is in its place, and it’s a place of beauty.

But if I only let others in–to my house, or to my life–when nothing is messy?

I will never let others in.

So I write “welcome” on my dusty table, in my messy life. And I mean it.

Come on in.

Let’s write on each other’s lives.