My own room

I miss my bedroom, the one that I had when I lived with my parents, before I graduated college.  It had posters of sea fantasies.  It had cardboard waves of perfect teal that took me an hour or two to cut out with tiny, dull student scissors.  The sheet set was motley colored with blues, greens, teals, and a little pink that I fell in love with enough to say something to my mom who had been trying for over a frustrating year to get me to pick something.   I had a used student desk that someone had painted bright teal and then did a black dry brush technique on it to make it a dark teal.  My mom hated it.  She also hated the green metal daybed with metal vines that I picked out my first summer home from college when my old canopy bed finally collapsed in exhaustion.  It was my room with my personality with the homemade Greek gods chart and the glow in the dark star charts. 

It was mine.  It was where I went to study, to read, to watch the Simpsons.  It was where I went to pray and meditate.  It was where I went to cry and yell at God.  It was where I went to sing to my favorite songs, to pretend I was a some one else, to imagine being grown up and in love.  It was where I could drop the armor and be me.  And now I don’t have that.

Every room in this house and in the last house was a combined effort.  The master bedroom has furniture we picked out together with his clothes strewn across the room.  The boys’ room is their room.  The office is a clutter of books but mainly it’s His office with my stuff.  The combo room is just that.  It’s boys toys, a DVD collection, his grandma’s old loveseat, my parent’s old dinette table, a yard sale find of a chair, and my huge cherry hope chest.  The only room that seems entirely mine is the kitchen; while I enjoy baking, cooking, crafting, it’s not mine in the way my bedroom as a kid was mine.

I’ve learned that if I want to be goofy and silly, I can always be that way in front of the boys.  They love that their mommy breaks out in random song.  They think it’s hilarious that I do random dances.  They adore it when I Kung Fu dance with them or battle swords or play cars or invent new games.  They think I’m a card.  I’m sure I only have a few more years before my cute craziness becomes an embarrassment.

But where do I go for quiet reflection?  Where do I go to talk to God?  Where do I go to cry, to be angry at this fate of economic stress?  Where do I go to let my guard down and be weak?  Where do I go to put down my armor and be me?

So yesterday, I nearly lost it.  It wasn’t the temper tantrums or the referring of the Master Monkey staff fighting.  (It seemed like a good idea when I found them at the dollar store.)  It wasn’t the workbook page fighting.  (Though I now believe any mother who decides to home school is either a saint with patience to spare or just plain CrAzY.)  It wasn’t the whining, the yelling, the playing, the regular mommy stuff.  It was that and the thought of all those bills and all those financial responsibilities and the struggling business and the hits that keep coming financially speaking and that in the end we did it to ourselves like every other American.  And I HATE not being able to fix things.  I HATE feeling like an idiot.  I HATE feeling helpless. 

So where could I go to give into the misery so that I could bounce back and be the good mommy?  No where.  I crawled into bed and threw the covers over my head and let silent tears roll down my cheeks, praying to God just to hold on to these worries, these burdens until bedtime, and then I’ll pick them up and deal with them.  But right now, God, I need to be Mommy, and that means having my head in the game, not worrying about things I can’t control.

And you know what?  That’s what happened.  I shook off the covers and the tears, washed my face, and grabbed a plastic sword.

But in the end, I still need to find a place of my own.

 

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