End of an era….I didn’t realize

(written 7/2/09)

This morning as I heard Adam leave the bedroom, I didn’t want to move or open my eyes.  I was a sandwich.  On one side Rosie was sleeping, her body completely relaxed and folded into mine.  On the other side, John had climbed in and pressed in tight.  Not tangled in with his limbs like Rosie, but in a full body press.

While I might have imagined in the past that this would feel oppressive, it isn’t.  Not at all.  More like breathing in flowers in the spring or tasting your first summer tomatoes straight off the vine.  Completely delicious.  So I laid there and enjoyed  drinking it in, the natural way that your children’s bodies are connected to and familiar with your own.

As Adam was still partly in the room, the thought floated through my mind, “So much of what is important to me is right here, right now. I am so fortunate.”

Meanwhile, both kids were in camp this week. This is the only week of the summer that they are both gone.  I knew I had to pick my project because there are so many things I could have tackled.  Lately I’ve noticed that the kids’ rooms really weren’t their rooms.  Makes it easy for visitors.  They were more of adult guest rooms with some baby toys and books that the kids had long outgrown.  The box of outgrown clothes was overflowing.  You have to wonder — have I looked, really looked, at this space recently?  I had picked up the bedspread from Rosie’s room in PEI in 1997, the year I met Adam.

So the project I took on for the week was to straighten out their rooms, and turn them into a place that belonged to them, not to us.  Not to our storage needs.  I started with sorting out clothes, toys, old stuff.  Did I really find a diaper genie in Rosie’s room?  (Yes.)  I looked around, did some purchasing.  A friend, Avalyn came to visit and agreed to help.

Then this morning, when they were both gone, Avalyn and I went to work, going as fast as we could.  We got rid of the old toys, put together furniture, unrolled rugs, made beds with new bedspreads.  Rosie LOVES pink and purple, along with “all the colors of the world,” but really pink and purple are “it.”  John has recently come into his own — he can pick off varied pitches in baseball and shoot hoops with our eleven-year-old neighbor in the backyard. He LOVES sports.  Anything with a ball.

So Rosie’s room is pink.  She has a new bookshelf the shape of a little house, and a pink satiny bedspread.  I can’t describe it here and give it justice, but now it’s a little girl’s room, complete with a frilly lamp that has a heart shaped jewel on the end of the chain.  She came home from pincess ballet camp, and I told her to close her eyes.  She came in her room, and when she opened her eyes she couldn’t believe it.  Joy exploded on her face, but she turned and buried her head in my neck in disbelief, like an adult entering a surprise party.  She spent the next three hours searching the house for everything important to her so that she could get her room set up.

John came home later.  His room had already been fun, complete with a small trampoline and some drums.  So the transformation was less dramatic.  But when he saw his new sports bedspread and lamp, he couldn’t stop touching the balls on the bedspread.  His space.  Aaaahh.

For the past few years, we’ve lived a little like a family in the developing world, all piled together.  Rosie has always slept in our room.  John has slept in there for the past two years.  Even Samson.  Makes lots of room for guests, but out recent vacation opened the door for them to sleep in their own space.  I was hoping that this change would introduce the concept of them spending time in their own rooms, and maybe within the next year we could get them in there to sleep.

But it’s gone faster than we thought.

“I want to sleep in here tonight,” Rosie said, arms stretched wide across her satiny pink bedspread.

“Great,” I said.

In the midst of her set-up, Rosie came downstairs.  “Maybe if Sweet Doggie goes in my room with me, it won’t be scary.”  John saw a picture of a mummy two years ago.  He’s been scared to be in a room alone since.  It hasn’t fully rubbed off on Rosie, but the fear concept is there.

“Well,” I said, “maybe now that your room is all yours and is so special, maybe you could just decide that it’s a safe place.  Maybe you could decide it’s the safest place in the whole world — your place!  And you could go there to feel safe if something scares you.  Would that work?”

“Yeah,” she said, running back upstairs with another toy.

So bedtime comes.  Instead of all four of us piling into our bed to read, Adam and I each take a child to their own room.  They proudly turn on their lamps.  When it’s time to sleep, they each want to give it a try.

My  morning started sandwiched between my children, their warmth filling my heart.  Now they are both tucked in and sleeping deeply in their own rooms.  Didn’t realize what I was doing as I rushed to  screw together the particle board before they got home.  As I’ve said before in this blog, precious things end without notice.  So I guess all of us piled in reading and tangled up sleeping is ending.  Something new will start. I wonder what it will be.

(Well, it didn’t stick….more to come.)

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