My mom has trouble remembering things these days and gets a little confused sometimes, but she comes *alive* when I pull up to a weeding project like the one we did the other week. She’d pointed them out to me every time we drove into her neighborhood, so I grabbed her one morning and told her we were heading out. She was in her glory and was a fastidious worker. Every time after that, when we drove into the neighborhood I pointed out where the weeds had been. You can’t tell, I told her, but it looks so much better.
Same thing when I got back and I weeded my own yard for a good chunk of the morning and later looked back on my work. It was hard to see what had happened because there were so many still lurking in every garden box. But what you couldn’t see were the weeds that were no longer there. There were blank spots, small clearings where they used to be. And I reframed my morning’s work: my success was found in the absence, the lack of weeds.
My daughter explained a concept to me recently, “A common catch phrase in the design world is that good design is invisible. I think that good mothering is the same way. It’s like you hardly notice because you can only really tell by the lack of trauma, trust issues, unhealthy habits, etc.”
I’ve just had that idea sitting in the back of my mind as I think about the dishes that aren’t in the sink or the dirt that’s not on the cabinets or the laundry that’s not piled in the basket. No one knows the work that’s gone on behind the scenes to get to that point, but we all know how conscientiously we strive to create that kind of lack.
We’ve been remodeling our yard and home for the past 8.5 years. And it’s truly still an average house, for real. But because we know how much effort and time has gone into it and how many issues and problems we’ve dealt with, we so appreciate where we are. No one can see how far we’ve come because so many things are no longer issues: the weird siding we’ve replaced, the dying trees we took out, the strange electrical socket placements we had smoothed over, the ugly 80s laminate we tore out, the rotting kitchen cabinets we got rid of. So it looks like a regular house, absolutely nothing special. Yet Todd and I love it more than anyone because we can visualize the changes we’ve made in our heads.
I just can’t help but think of so many things we’re all doing that no one sees, that have no “products” as results, where the success really is a lack of something. It could be dirt that’s been swept away, old condiments purged from the fridge, piles of papers that have been sorted, grease on the grill that’s been abated, overgrown grape vines that have been clipped, a child who’s been given attention and love and care, or a marriage that’s been nurtured and prioritized. You can’t see any of it. So even though there’s precious little to show for all we put into parts and pieces of our lives, I love the idea that in some ways good design—whether that’s a yard or a relationship or a home—can be invisible.
