I used to spend so much time on the Internet looking at the ways my future house could be — would be, I promised myself.  The perfect wallpaper, the perfect grey walls, the perfect nursery decor, the perfect big farm table for the dining room.  I had the concept of the cozy kind of home I wanted to inhabit, I just hadn’t been able to formulate it quite right.  Years went by, filled with moving for jobs, infertility struggles, finally having a longed-for baby, the daily grind, and I still had my perfect home ideas.

Flash forward to now, where we have our own home, we have a toddler, we have a yard with longed-for garden beds, and suddenly I find myself looking around our home and realizing — this is it.  We have the cozy little house we always wanted, and what’s making it cozy isn’t the perfect wallpaper (still unpurchased, perhaps doomed to forever languish on my to-buy list), the perfect grey walls (painting is such an abomination of a chore, and the walls are preeeetty close to what I would have picked if I had been the one deciding instead of the previous owners).  What’s making it cozy is the way in which we’re living in it, together.

Everywhere there are framed photos.  Everywhere there’s fake felt food from my daughter’s toy kitchen.  Everywhere there are DUPLO blocks, rainbow and cheerful and horrific to step on.  Everywhere there are stacks of picture books.  Everywhere there are traces of quilting projects in progress, cotton threads sticking to surfaces like gum to a shoe.  It’s not a disaster zone by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s not Spartan either.  And I think I finally get it.

The home I was daydreaming about when I would save pictures of dream nurseries and perfect kitchens wasn’t the home I really wanted to live in.  Living is messy, living is imperfect.  Our home isn’t about the walls, the wallpaper, even the big dining room table.  Our home is about the people we invite to fill the chairs around that table.  Our home is cozy because of the love in the photographs, not the perfection of the photo gallery grid that climbs up the stairs.  Our not-perfect home is perfectly cozy because of the picture books we snuggle up to read together on the couch, which doesn’t perfectly match the living room wall color.  Our home is perfect because we’re living our imperfect lives in it, together.  Our home is perfect because at night, my daughter will grab my and my husband’s hands and ask that we stand in a circle, toes all aligned, so she can exclaim, “We’re a family!”

If that’s not perfect, I don’t know what is.  Turns out the most perfect thing is the most invisible, that space in the middle of our little circle, holding us together — perfectly.  Call it love, call it togetherness, whatever it is — that’s what makes our home perfect, in all its imperfections.