The walls we paint and the songs we sing
Between the Mystical & the Mess: May 2023
Hello,
Here are my May ponderings from Between the Mystical & the Mess: Letters from the intersection of family, faith and authenticity. Deciding to write these more personal essays on a monthly basis feels like a helpful, vulnerable challenge and it’ll be interesting to see how this journey evolves. So read on for words that emerged while I painted our hallway.
As always, thanks for reading, and I’d love to hear from you either in the comments or in reply to the email. I have allowed myself the self-indugence of creating an accompanying playlist to this post, which you’ll find here.
Debbie
For the introductory post to this series see here…
The handle is cold in my hand as I note the dusty crevices of the white door. I attempt to stash that task away to return to. Here I’m re-entering the space where I’m not my own, tugged and trailed around the rooms. There’s no pause on the threshold, instead I’m magnetically pulled inwards back to the chaos. The key shoogles, the door opens to the smell of the shoe rack, the sight of school clothes strewn on the stairs and the cheer of my team welcoming me back. The leaving, the returning, the continuing, it is not simple, but it is mine. This imperfect door is ours to go out and return through. Home.1
Last month all four children went for a sleepover with their grandparents. Our second child-free overnight since becoming parents. Well, third if you count that night I was in the hospital waiting for the twins’ birth, and the big boys had a sleepover, but Paul and I weren’t even under the same roof, so no we don’t count it. There was no romantic getaway on this occasion, instead we painted our hallway blissfully uninterrupted.
After an embarrassing number of trips to B&Q for testers, I eventually discovered Mint Macaroon at the back of our cupboard and it was just right. I taped the edges as Paul measured the border on the wall, one of us upstairs, the other downstairs. We belted out the words to the Hamilton soundtrack and then Paul put on ‘Daily Mix 6’ headlined by The Killers' ‘Mr Brightside’2. The songs evolved magically to Regina Spector, Ben Folds, Ingrid Michaelson, Coldplay - music we listened to 15 years ago when we first got together. Spotify, how did you know?!
In the meditative painting, I sang and my thoughts flowed with the music to the memories.
The starting beats of 1234 by Feist land like a subtle alarm, a song almost ruined by having it as my ringtone.
Discovering Ingrid Michaelson in my student flat on the top floor of a tenement, in the early days of dating Paul. We later danced to The Way I Am for our first song at our wedding (partly because it’s mercifully short).
Regina Spektor on the 500 Days of Summer soundtrack: Paul and I watched it separately during our long-distance Glasgow-London days. It was a treat to see her live with Laura at the O2 Academy.
I remembered painting our house in South Africa with rollers on rakes. We mixed our own colours and MaNgwepe laughed saying ‘we don’t even know what to call that colour’.
We moved here into our Glasgow home 10 days before my due date with Micah so I couldn’t help with the painting. It felt like catching up to paint the hallway now, some quality time for the house and I. Our home serves us well, and doesn’t receive an abundance of care in return.
I found unexpected tears on my cheeks during Ingrid Michaelson’s ‘Can’t Help Falling in Love With You’. There’s been a lot of life in these years, a lot of change, many tins of paint. We’ve shifted individually and together, there’s been exhaustion and the low rumbles of life’s challenges.
This house has been our home for over 5 years, we know we’d benefit from more space in the future and have found ourselves stuck circling whether to move or improve. It's an ongoing messy discernment but this is where we are now. And it restored me to take some care of these ‘Good Bones’3 - “This place could be beautiful, // right? You could make this place beautiful.”
Life can be a journey, as we often say but what if life is a house? A home built brick by brick by our moments, experiences, choices and relationships. It’s imperfect, with dusty doors and more clutter than I’d like. There are uncertainties, and yet, painting the hallway felt like an uncomplicated investment into now, this life, these days. In a day of painting and singing we chose one another, this home and this life once again.
I wrote this in response to a prompt ‘I opened the door’ with my lovely writing group.
A song that will always belong to Freshers’ Week 2005.
From Maggie Smith’s gorgeous poem Good Bones