My maternal grandmother, the eldest girl in a family of thirteen, was born and raised on land that was originally in Mexico. Land doesn’t move, but lines on a map do. Thus through no fault or effort of their own, a Mexican, Spanish-speaking family became American. My great-grandfather’s ideas were not exactly modern or consistent with American values. He believed that girls had no need to go to school since they were just going to grow up and get married. So my grandmother stayed home and became her mother’s helper. Growing up on the family farm, my grandmother learned, barely, how to write her name, to read. She did learn how to make everything from candles to soap to cloth to bread. She learned how to cook and clean and sew and knit and embroider and crochet.

She didn't teach me any of those things. I learned the basics of cooking and sewing in school; an “aunt” taught me basic knitting. I eventually settled down in my twenties, and started on my own to learn how to keep a house and care for a family. Many of my friends from school, as well as my children’s aunts, were also settling down into domesticity and having babies around that time; it happened to be an era when the images on television were mostly of stay-at-home white mothers raising nice children in perfect homes. So we shared the same bizarre experience, in those cramped little inner-city apartments and houses, of living the ideal suburban life. We painted walls, we hung cheap pictures, we potted violets, we bought each other pretty guest towels and Princess House crystal candlestick holders, you know, for those chic dinner parties, or entertaining the boss and his wife over cocktails (mine are still in the boxes, gathering dust). We made casseroles and Jell-O mold salads, attending each other’s baby showers, and having Tupperware parties, when we barely had the money to cover the utilities. Hardly any of us slept on a decent mattress but we had lace curtains in the kitchen window and quilted placemats on the table, we watched soap operas and talk shows while we cooked cheap roasts and heated canned creamed corn on stoves shined with Formula 409. The men in that pretty picture turned out to be worthless and idiotic and brutal, nothing out of those Betty Crocker cookbooks could change that, or our circumstances; that’s a story for another day. But during that strange sojourn in the land of Brady, when we were trying to master the skills of keeping a beautiful, sparkling clean house and preparing elaborate meals for the incoherent ungrateful ugly brutes and the babies we were determined to keep from becoming their demonic spawn, we enthusiastically helped each other along in our delusional quest for domestic perfection. One by one, through drugs, divorce, disgust, or just plain exhaustion, we snapped. The laundry piled up, the dishes went unwashed, the beds unmade. We began to feed our kids fast food, and we went back to school, took jobs, entered therapy, moved away, fell apart.

My grandmother could cook you up a storm without a recipe. She could cut out and sew anything with a pattern made from newspaper. But she had no taste, none, in furnishing a home. A cheap, garish mishmash of turquoise-, gold-, pink-painted walls, plastic curtains, linoleum “area rugs,” vinyl tablecloths, battered dressers covered with Contact paper, different color sheets thrown over sofas, were what passed for interior design in my childhood home. When I was a kid, the thing I wanted most was a dollhouse. I never got one. I would make my own houses from cardboard boxes, would color paper with Crayolas and cut and fold the paper into pieces of furniture. In that world, things looked pretty. Things matched.

Growing up, the reading material in my house was my grandfather’s newspaper, my grandmother’s screaming Mexican tabloids, her prayer books and the church bulletins. I went to the library every day after school, to talk to the clerk there, and to check out books I would take home to read. Besides regular books, I liked books and magazines that were full of pictures of stylishly designed rooms. When I finally had a place of my own, I wanted more than anything, more even than functionality, to make my home look pleasing to my eye. In my young house-and-mother days, I began to subscribe to house decorating magazines, and lay them on my coffee table. Sad maybe, but I didn’t see it that way then. All I ever saw was beauty, what I felt was inspiration. Hope.

I learned stuff from those magazines, and from television shows like This Old House. I learned how to fix broken doors and replace sink handles. I learned how to lay flooring and change light fixtures. Once the beast was out of the house and I didn’t have to consider its opinions anymore, I put what I had learned about design freely to use. I had learned how to identify elements in pictures that I liked and I learned how to imitate them. I learned how to shop for pieces at second-hand stores. I learned to scout yard sales, and I learned how to bargain. I learned how to make slipcovers and throw pillows with fabric off the discount tables. I learned how to make shelves with wood and brackets and paint from Home Depot. I learned when it was worth it to stand in line at 5 in the morning at IKEA. I didn’t know that I had learned, or how much I had learned, until people would walk in my home and stop dead and look around and say, Wow, this is nice.

Well, I am pleased they like it. But I’m more pleased that I like it. There are times I look around a room I just finished fixing up and go, Not bad. Not bad at all.