There’s this thing called scruffy hospitality, where you invite your friends over, you don’t pick up your house, everyone brings a leftover dish or some cheese and crackers and you just hang out and enjoy each other. That’s the way to live life. 

Scruffy Hospitality is all about being real and authentic. It’s about sharing your life with your friends, mess and all, and that leads to intimacy and vulnerability and true connections. 

We’re so used to seeing houses staged on social media or faces with filters, we don’t even recognize what’s real anymore. That’s the thing about real life, you can’t live it with a filter placed on it. We all have wrinkles and cellulite and uneven skin tones. We have kids who make messes and have animals who shed. 

Pinterest and Instagram have ruined entertaining because we think things need to be perfect to be worthwhile. But the best things in life are messy. The best days are the ones where the kids come home and need to strip before entering the house. Those are the days you know they had the most fun. I’ve never told my kids to worry about their clothes. I want them sliding on their knees in the grass. I want them dirty and tired and scratched up at the end of the day.  

This hangs in my laundry room as a reminder to us all. My kids know they will never be scolded for ripped or dirty clothes. We celebrate them. 

The concept of scruffy hospitality really resonates with me because I was conditioned to always have my environment look perfect. Yes, I do better when things are clean. It helps keep my brain at peace. But there are times when that’s just not a priority and I’ve learned to be okay with it. It used to be hard for me to have others see my house messy. Growing up in my house, that just wasn’t done. Eventually, I came to realize these were my self-paradigms at work. As I grew more comfortable in my own skin, I began to realize that it’s okay to have people over when my house is messy. I got tired of stressing about the house before people came over. It made hosting events a chore rather than a relaxing get together with friends. 

I realized having a nice house doesn’t mean having a house that looks like we don’t live there. I would rather invite people into my messy life and share an okay meal and good company than stress about the house and menu and not even enjoy myself. 

Our homes are meant to be lived in. Our bodies are meant to be lived in. Trying to put a filter over everything takes away the beauty of spontaneity and living in the moment. When we give ourselves grace, when we let go of perfection, we claim freedom and with that freedom comes a different self-confidence. It’s a self-confidence that can’t be knocked down by a messy house or a bad photo; it’s a self-confidence that comes from being okay with who you are and with the life you’re living. Life is messy. Life with kids is very messy. But if we’re always worried about the mess, we’ll never enjoy the moment

SHARE