The House with a Flag

Everyone knows it. The cutest house in the neighborhood. The perfectly manicured lawn, the wide front porch, the red brick, the freshly painted white woodwork, and flowers that seem to be in bloom year round. It’s the house with a mom, a dad, 2.5 children and a dog. And, it’s the house with a flag. The flag is always in season and seems to be perfectly blowing in the breeze even on a calm day. This is the house I wanted when I was growing up. I dreamed of it.

My home was happy when I was a child, but it was a happy chaos. With two working parents and three active children, there was always somewhere to go or something to be done. We had a wondrous line of pets from guinea pigs to chinchillas, from stray mutts we took in to two outdoor cats. We never had the perfectly groomed dog that obeyed commands and was the neighborhood favorite. And we never had the calm and serenity that the house with the flag seemed to offer. I knew people that lived in those houses. I was friends with them. But I wasn’t them. I promised myself that one day I would live in the house with a flag.

My husband thought I was crazy. (No surprise there.) When we were house hunting, at the top of my must have list was a flagpole. While it didn’t make logical sense, I just knew that if I could have that flagpole, I could have the calm and ordered life that I was sure came with it. I could be the have it all together mom whose children dressed in matching clothes and behaved perfectly, and who had fresh baked cookies always ready for company and we would be happy. If only I could have the house with a flag. And then we bought one.

I had the white wood and red brick house. It had a front porch and a two car garage. It had a backyard with a swingset and we had a sweet, albeit large, dog. I changed the flag with the seasons. And then we had two daughters. Two wonderful, beautiful, wild and woolly children. Two children with their own ideas of what the word “fashionable” means. Two children that love getting dirty and stomping in puddles and have a fine disregard for brushing hair. I was consumed with the job of motherhood and was loving every (well, mostly every) minute of it. I continued to change the flags out with the seasons, but the life inside the house didn’t mirror the calm of the outside.

Driving by the house in Spring, you would see gorgeous daylillies in bloom, knockout roses to die for and a perfectly arranged flag with “Welcome Spring” written on it surrounded by colorful birds. Inside the house, you would likely find last night’s dishes still in the sink, a toddler running around naked, beds unmade, a dog needing to be walked, and clean but not yet folded laundry in a pile on the couch. It didn’t seem to matter how many times I changed the flag outside, it didn’t translate to calm and peace inside the house. It made me start to wonder what was really going on inside those houses of my childhood. Maybe they weren’t perfect inside either. This realization made me start to reorder my life. I still changed out the flags on a regular basis, but they no longer served to represent an unattainable perfection for me. I started to embrace the chaos that was my life.

I reveled in driving the crazy carpool schedules from school to dance to basketball. Little girls will say so much if you take the time to listen. I enjoyed the minivan that I swore I’d never drive. I got to the dishes in the sink when I had time, but didn’t stress over them when I could be on the floor playing with my girls. We moved a few years ago into another house that has a flagpole. Over the years I have added to my assortment of flags. I enjoy changing them out. I have one for each season, a Thanksgiving flag, a Christmas flag, an American flag, and more. My husband still thinks this is a little bit crazy, but living in the house with a flag means so much more to me now.

As a child, that house was a symbol of calm and order and perfection that I longed to have. Now, the flag is just a small window into our world. When I don’t change out the Christmas flag until after New Years’ Day, you know we are enjoying our time together. When the Summer gardenias flag is up through October, it just means that we are trying to hang on to our Summer memories a little longer before welcoming Fall. I’m thankful I have great neighbors that don’t seem to mind the flag doesn’t always coincide with the season. I still love that I live in the house with a flag, but the life we have built inside that house is so much more than I ever dreamed of as a child. And realizing that perfection on the outside is not indicative of happiness inside is a lesson I am trying to teach our daughters before they grow up and get their own houses with flags.