When my family moved apartments a few summers ago, the first thing I did was call a junk removal company to haul away our cheaply upholstered black love seat. In our new place, the sun hits the hardwood floor in honeyed beams so rich, we could sip them from a spoon. Windows look out from every wall, their deep sills crowded with plants. This space deserved a carved mango wood coffee table just kissing the woven area rug and throw blankets draped just so across a custom linen sofa. The old bargain couch had to go.
Replacing it was the hard part.
For years, I loved a West Elm couch the way you love museum art: reverently, from a distance. My ideal model was an unaffordable two-piece chaise sectional, but I could swing the 92-inch standard sofa in a steel gray woven linen with the 47-inch seat depth. It was roughly the dimensions of a twin bed; as someone who will probably never know the luxury of having a guest bedroom, this felt as close as I could get. I ordered it an hour after I signed our new apartment’s lease.
I spent my children’s early years living in homes that were never wholly my own. I had my son at 21 and my daughter 15 months later. When they were little, their father constantly criticized the messes they made in our tiny New York apartment — toys scattered across the living room, bottles and blankets strewed over the kitchen counter and night stand. I tried to suit his standards, but my efforts were never enough. I left him when my kids were 2 and 3, moving us to a basement room in my mother’s split-level home in the suburbs outside Philadelphia. There, again, I could make no decisions over my space. Buying a new, adult couch in a space of my own felt monumental.
It wasn’t long after we moved in that the home I’d dreamed of for a decade was full of warmth and love and pet hair and a Roomba that ran at 1 p.m. on the dot. But the couch, which I’d envisioned would remain in a constant state of artful arrangement, was in a constant state of chaos.
It was not meant for two active teenagers and their revolving door of friends or for the puppy that grew from a 25-pound furry shark into a 150-pound bear with no concept of personal space. Then the cats came, preferring the upholstered armrests to their $139 scratching posts. Six months in, the sofa’s middle began to bow. Squished shoulder to shoulder on the bench cushion one night, we heard a splintering crack. All three of us ripped through the canvas and onto the frame. The split wood scratched my son’s thigh and left a gouge in the hardwood floor — a mark that is still there.
In this couch, I had envisioned I would find stability: physical proof that I’d made it, after years of toxic relationships, housing challenges and personal and professional backslides. It was, to my mind, evidence that I was a good mother, a label I’d been chasing all of my parenting years. But staring at the sunken cushion, I noticed a stain that was probably once something sticky and had collected so much lint that it was a deep dirty gray. The sofa suddenly looked cheap and sad — not evidence of my ability to provide a loving and comfortable home for my children but the remnants of a try-hard woman who would never live up to the things she aspired to be.
I’d been trying to impose a version of home that didn’t match my real life. My kids were 13 and 14 — still years from living on their own but close enough that I’d begun to glimpse the vacancy they would leave in my life and our apartment. Part of me was quietly planning for that future, envisioning the elegant living room I’d curate when late-night band practice and midnight microwave nachos weren’t part of my home’s day-to-day equation. The broken couch forced a question: What would it look like to shelve my ambitions and instead meet my family where we were?
The next day I called the junk removal company. Then I ran to Costco for toilet paper and came home with a sectional that we have come to affectionately refer to as the big girl.
The big girl violates every design principle I once held sacred and has swallowed the living room I had so carefully arranged. The polyester fabric does nothing to elevate our living space. The ottoman juts out so far and so wide, I had to move my beloved West Elm Savannah Rattan chair back two feet. It’s now squished into the corner of the room, blocking my path to the standing lamp — the room’s main source of lighting — so we’re resigned to leaving the lamp on all the time. My carved mango wood coffee table is wedged into the sectional’s U bend, lost amid gray microfiber bulk.
It refuses styling. Artfully arranged hand-woven throw blankets vanish into the cushions like offerings to the domestic furniture gods, and throw pillows are unnecessary; the couch came with eight of its own, and any extras fall to the floor in a tumbling defeat. The machine-washable covers shrug off spilled wine and pizza disasters with little more than an unzip and a quick wash cycle. At first, it felt a little bit like a trap: I’d admitted defeat and surrendered the life I wanted to a warehouse couch.
But in the time since bringing the big girl home, something has shifted. Our living room now wholly lives up to its name. Our dog fits her entire bulk on a single cushion, and I’m not worried about slobber or hair or whatever mess she happens to be trailing. The cats have turned one corner of the sofa into abstract art. No bother; I swap out the different sections, moving the more unsightly ones to the far corner. Every Sunday evening for the past five weeks, my teenagers and I sprawled across the sofa’s deep seat and binged “Sweet Tooth” and “The Pitt.” On a recent Saturday morning, I woke up and found my daughter and her two best friends tangled in blankets, sleeping until noon, the three of them filling up every available space on the couch — but only just.
This couch is not the couch of my dreams. It isn’t an investment piece or a statement about my taste. It’s a tool for living, a purely functional entity. Elegant as a shipping container, it absorbs muddy paws and sticky fingers without complaint.
There is liberation in furniture that needs no protection. People don’t ask if they can put their feet up. It’s clear everyone already has.
Elizabeth Austin is a writer working on a memoir about being a bad cancer mom.
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