I stopped apologizing for the house

For about fifteen years the first full sentence out of my mouth when anybody came through the front door was an apology.

Sorry about the mess. Sorry, we have not done the hallway yet. Sorry, ignore the counter. Sorry about the dog. I would say it before they had their coat off, before they had looked at anything, sometimes before they were all the way through the door.

My friend Rosalind stayed over in February and on the second morning she said, do you know you have apologized to me eleven times since I got here. She had been counting. That is the sort of friend she is and it is why I keep her.

So I quit. Cold. And I want to tell you it felt freeing and it did not, it felt awful, it felt like standing there with my hands at my sides while somebody looked at my hallway. The urge to say it is physical. Four or five times I got the first syllable out and had to swallow the rest of it.

Here is what I noticed after a couple of months of not doing it. Nobody had ever been looking at the hallway. Not one person, not once, in fifteen years. What the apology was actually doing was telling people what to look at. I was walking guests around my own house pointing out every single thing I was ashamed of and then feeling exposed about it, which is a fairly efficient way to be miserable in your own home.

The other thing, and this one took me longer to admit, is that I was not really apologizing to them. I was getting out in front of a judgment I assumed was coming so that it would hurt less when it arrived. It never arrived. It has never once arrived. I have been bracing for fifteen years against a thing that has not happened.

The hallway is still not done, incidentally. We are not doing the hallway. I have made peace with the hallway.

Michelle