A Room of One's Own Redux...

I have linked the title  to The K...... No Longer Silent, Kass's blog, because her entry inspired this one. (Yes, another long, wordy ramble that took me somewhere I did not foresee...)

For the ten years of my marriage I had no space of my own, let alone a room.  I had a little t.v. cart on which I had one of those early word processors that my dad gave me because he knew I loved to write. Let's try for a little background color here on the situation of my marriage, since it would be really easy to blame my family, my husband, my back--anyone or anything.  The truth is,  I opted for the lack of privacy sometimes. In fact, I hid from myself in it all. What? Wait a second, this cannot be. I must have someone else to blame. Scratch that.  It's all Mark's fault. Yes. Of course. Let's blame the ex!

Not that I was every particularly traditional in my choices. I got married in a body cast, wore a red dress and said my vows in front of my folks' fireplace. Mom's brother had given her an American eagle which she placed over it, though she HATED having it there. She didn't want to hurt his feelings. Most of the time, however, an obnoxiously bold white sign with a chain hung from the bird's neck and read, "Don't just sit there; nag your husband."

I had to take it down and HIDE the damned thing on my wedding morning, since my dad or brothers kept putting it there.  So. I had on my bright red dress over the body cast, which gave me the svelte figure of a linebacker, and I had the Pacabel "Canon" playing. (Back then, it wasn't everyone's choice.) I managed to walk down the stairs without tripping or having a leg collapse, and got to Dad, by the front door.  Unfortunately, the nextdoor neighbor's were painting their house to a boom box, and my Dad stepped out and screamed, "Shut up. There's a Gawdamned wedding going on!" Perhaps I should have known. My favorite pictures were one of Jessie looking up at my sister, Mark and I gazing into one another's eyes, and Jason looking away from us all to look out the window at our neighbors.

I spilled a bloody Mary all over the only woman in white and was shut off for the rest of the day. BEST wedding in history, and I remember every moment, but... (wait for it. A point is coming. Really. .. or not.)

My husband and I opted to have four kids come to our apartment for the wedding night. I was in a body cast, so let's just leave it at that.  Besides which, I love kids and I loved having people over.  I was not sure about my being married. I had also lost my engagement garnet in the backyard, so I was wondering whether I'd done the right thing.  I thought perhaps it was an omen, though I had not lost my wedding ring, so... Yet I wondered whether I'd married for the right reasons and whether I loved Mark enough.  I had made so many mistakes before, and I wanted to be right in this case. I SO wanted to be right.  Yet inside I freaked at losing that ring and by the time we got home, I was genuinely scared. When in doubt, I hide among people. I do not have to feign happiness if I am among people I treasure, so the fear dissipated with the laughter of children.


Close quarters also helped in this.

We turned our two bedroom apartment into a three bedroom apartment because the dining alcove was so big that putting up some tall bookshelves as a wall left my son with a 10 x 11 foot room of his own.  The seven foot desk was in Mark's and my room so we could both work at it together, only somehow his schoolwork took over the whole space.  And naturally he needed quiet to correct papers at night. Then his mom had a "nervous breakdown" and we had his dad for three weeks--three days after the wedding. So all day I was with his dad, a lovely man, but one who had had a massive stroke the day Mark went to Nam, and was left needing care for the rest of his life. Jessie claimed the living room.  I had the dining table which was in the living room where the only t.v. was located. And starting that first week, Mark started coming home from school at around five--he was part of the union negotiating team.  Starting that first week of our marriage, he opted out.

Forget about a room of my own. I went from being single and a free spirit to a body-casted married woman with two children and a father-in-law to care for.And a husband who was not there.

They say that if you REALLY want to write, you write. And I did write at first, with many interruptions. I was recuperating from my seven week stint in the hospital at that time and was scheduled for more surgery in a month after my father-in-law left.  My sister gave me A Room of One's Own. I did not read it so much as inhale it.  Then a friend gave me Journal of a Solitude and I knew that I was in trouble.  I highlighted these books and underlined passages. I felt they were my friends, not books.  During the day I had to rest up to take care of child-rearing business in the afternoons because the kids' mom, on her nights, didn't come until close to six or later.  I was the go-to parent. I did the carting and the listening and the homework helping and the dinner-fixing.  Usually, by the time I sat down to write, vapidity filled my brain.  Somehow I gave up.

And it seemed to me, when I spoke to my friends, they all agreed--nothing much had changed for women since Virginia Woolf's time. None of us had an office, though one had a sewing room. A couple of us wondered whether this had been our mistake. Had we asked for a "craft room" or a sewing place, perhaps someone would have seen validity. Before I was married, my husband loved it that I wrote. Afterward, not so much...  He wanted me to wear my blouses buttoned up to the neck, and my soul as well.

Along the road it seemed as if every ounce of creativity was drained in the business of eight surgeries, raising two stepchildren with my husband usually in our room and their mom coming as late as possible to pick them up.  I used to describe myself, by the third year of marriage as a panther in a tiny cage, locked in a crate in a closet in a room without windows.  (Why use the one word "trapped" when eighteen words will do?) By the sixth year of our marriage, my dad was diagnosed with terminal cancer. I was thirty-six.  When I was thirty-eight, both my dad and mom were dead, and I was in counseling for post-traumatic stress disorder due to memories of abuse from a sociopathic brother...

And on my second copies of both A Room ...  and Journal of a Solitude. Let's be clear, however; I was a lousy wife. That is the simple truth of it. I was a really good mom, but the wrong wife for Mark. The traditional role was alien to me, but I kept trying to learn the steps of a dance I did not like. And when it was too much, I rebelled by hurting him as badly as I could.  I tried to do better, but he never was a forgiving soul.  Doesn't excuse how he treated me or the way he chose to handle things, but marriages don't end just because of one person. There. And THAT is all the fairness I intend to extend toward him! Well. For now.

After Mom died nearly two years to the day after Dad, Mark and my sister hatched a plan that we could all buy a house together. It seemed a perfect plan. He was pretending that we were fine, but, as I later found out, it was pretense, part of a plan.  He was already looking.  Mark chose not to share with either of us that he was miserably unhappy with me. He decided that if we got a house--as he explained later, while informing me he was leaving me for his student teacher--that Jean Ellen would then be there to take care of me!

Anyway, we got a wonderful house, with a rec room downstairs for the kids who were of an age to be away from us, a real dining room, and an extra bedroom for a study. At long last I would have a peaceful place to write. Not just my own, but I had already chosen a desk for me, a space in the room for my stuff.

Nope, true to Virginia Woolf's prototype of the household, Mark claimed the room for his study. He put his clothes in the closet and his recliner in my corner and some weights under the window.  Lo and behold, my office was, once again, the dining room! The pathway between the rec room and the kitchen, from the front door to the bedrooms and the rec room, the room off of which was the deck. The center of the home was my room. Nothing changed, I thought.

On the contrary, I had changed. I had overseen all the caretaking of my mother and father in their last months, despite a ninth operation six weeks before Dad died. I had done all the work to find and finance our home, overseen the moves of both my apartment and my sister's, and overseen all the contracting work for my sister's in-law space.  I had been trying to get everyone's focus onto the growing eating disorder of Jessica.

I was angry, and found my voice.

I wrote with chaos all around me. I wrote as my husband made excuses to be gone. I wrote through my daughter's mushrooming eating disorder and alcoholism. I wrote while waiting for my son to appear with his friends at about 3:00 a.m., shutting off the light when I heard them stumbling to the downstairs rec room and I'd lay in wait for the inevitable raid of the fridge and simply say, "Boo!" and laugh as they scattered.

I wrote. I wrote the pain, the fear, the frustration at asking my husband the hard questions only to have him lie to me.  I wrote about my fear for my daughter's life and the frustration of having her mom and dad tell me I looked for -isms under every rock. "I outgrew it," her mom said.

"No, you didn't. Since I've been part of the family, you have tried four different types of all-out changes of diet, and told me that you threw up when you overate!"

"Well, I'm here, so she'll be fine."

I wrote out my screaming to God to save my child. I wrote out my screaming to God WHY?

I wrote to forget, to record, to figure things out. I began a novel when Mark left. When he left, Jessica and Jay were both away at school at first.  And I wrote in the dining room still, the center of my home, my big echoing, empty home. I wrote when my daughter was in treatment but lived with me, when I knew she was not going to listen. I wrote when they finally told her that Mark was not her father, that she was conceived in an alcoholic blackout.

I wrote.

When her mother sat that day they told her, when she sat, rocking back and forth in the middle of my living room floor and Jason called me and said, "I can't find Mom, but you're the one who will tell the truth, is dad really my dad or do I have some other dad, too?"

I wrote and I wrote.  There in the center of my house, I wrote, with all those rooms from which to choose, I chose to stay in the hub. And I wrote when the funeral was over, when the children had all gone on with their lives, but my daughter's light was out, I wrote. I stopped the novel because her voice took over, but I wrote nonetheless. The poet emerged instead.  I simply wrote.

And I learned about my own journal of a solitude and found my room at last.

The room of my own is inside my soul.  I wrote to save my life.

And here I sit. And I write.