Sometime after they moved into the house upstate, she went on a trip, she forgets where now, but she was away and her husband decided to surprise her by painting the bedroom. They had talked about painting it, they’d planned to paint it, she just didn’t know he was going to paint it that particular weekend. The bedroom needed painting, and he was good at picking paint colors, and she had told him she wanted a pale pink, like paler than a pale eggshell pink, but pink, and he found a nice pink like this, and had the idea to do some type of wall treatment, a sort of thing where it looked like textured wallpaper, and he showed her the samples of what the textured paint would look like and she said sure. She liked to think of herself as pretty agreeable about décor choices because he had nice taste, and their taste lined up in many ways.
Would she maybe have been more risky with a bright paint color here or a bold fabric pattern on a chair there, if it were all up to her, sure, but they had a lot of nice art, and their sofa was blue, and she periodically made them a new quilt for their bed, which usually had many colors, and he loved her extremely not-perfect quilts with the seams that never quite lined up because she’s not her mom and she’s only going to rip out a mistake so many times (or more like no times). She brought her perfectionist game to other losing battles. The house wasn’t lacking for color and she could work with a taupe wall here or there. But he wanted to give her a pink bedroom, and you have to love a guy for that.
And then she came home and only two of the walls were actually painted, that in itself wasn’t a problem, or not at that point anyway, the problem was that it didn’t look like the picture, and her initial response was definitely not the right one, probably something like Oh, and he had tried to prep her by saying he’d worked really hard on it but wasn’t sure it had come out how he wanted, and It’s okay if you’re not crazy about it, and she wasn’t crazy about it, she didn’t hate it, but she didn’t love it, at that moment it looked to her like fancy wallpaper that hadn’t been lined up quite right, and it was that thing where you know someone’s worked hard on something and you don’t want to hurt their feelings but you’re also not used to what you’re seeing and so you say something, you say the worst possible thing.
Didn’t you say you wanted our house to look like it could be in a magazine?
She made him cry.
Then they both cried.
Then they talked it through.
A lot of times when they talked things through it turned out to be about her mother. This particular time her mother was probably not involved. For all we know his mother was involved, or no one’s mother was involved. Her husband wanted to do a nice thing for her, and he had ideas about having done so much work on the house already, some ideas we may revisit later, and it turns out that no matter how much gratitude you might feel and/or regularly express to your husband for all the ways he’s rehabbed your home, it can all be completely offset by Didn’t you say you wanted our house to look like it could be in a magazine? Later she grows to like the treatment, but the other two walls never do get painted.