Everyone at my house wants his own room tonight. We’ve all decided it’s so much easier to shut a door than share space. We’re fed up with each others’ sounds, with the way we hurl our bodies about, with our various plans and projects. In fact, if we could, we’d live in five little houses surrounded by palisades, perhaps not even in the same neighborhood.
My daughters show every adult who visits us their lack of doors. It’s an American version of the Indian beggar waving his stump. “Look at my infirmity, my lack. Take pity. Toss me a coin.” Except in this case they’re holding out for a $100,000 handout, which is what it would cost to remodel according to their specifications.
When we bought this house, we were just three—a mother, a father, and a ten-month-old. We weren’t thinking of the future, of the two more kids to come, of all of them growing and clamoring for more space. We were only thinking of how many zeroes were on the bank paperwork and how that down payment check was the biggest one we’d ever written.
My eldest daughter has taken to visiting open houses. She brings us real estate flyers and tells me which room will be hers. Even after the houses she covets have been sold, she will pass them and say, “That’s my house.”
I’ve come to dread sleepovers—the ones away just as much as the ones here at home. The ones here mean extra negotiation for space to play “in private,” space for some to stay up late while others try to sleep. The ones away mean days of hearing how much space other people have—extra bathrooms, finished basements, decks, gamerooms. My son recently went on a play date at a house so large that he got lost when his young host ran off to his bedroom without telling him how to follow.
It does no good to trot out the grandparents’ experience in Namibia, where they regularly saw 14 people living in a single room. Suffering and contentment are relative. My kids will compare themselves with what they know is possible in their own realm.
It also does no good to explain how dad and I have made a tradeoff—work we enjoy, work which gives us time to do the activities that we love, but which pays poorly. That is our choice, not theirs. For me to say, “When you pick a career you can decide for yourself if you’d rather work more and earn more in exchange for more space,” just frustrates them. It refers to events that are too far away, far enough away to seem impossible. All they know is that this night, they feel crammed cheek by jowl like animals in a farm truck.
Nor does it help to warn them about mental noise, which can follow one to the most spacious and secluded of living arrangements. Now they imagine that the agitation that they feel is due to someone else being always underfoot: Dad is trying to concentrate on an on-line rated game of GO, while I’m trying to write pithy thoughts, while one daughter is trying to engage a friend in imaginative play set in Victorian times, while another is grooving to her latest U-Tube find, while my son is hurling playmobils about in his latest war game. Yet in unshared space, there may still be mental chatter—agitation about being alone, about not feeling connected, about not knowing what to do with oneself. The stillness might feel empty in the same way it does, surprising us all, when one or the other of us has gone off with a friend or relative for more than twenty-four hours. We thought we’d feel relieved, but instead, we’ve the powerful sense of someone missing. The quiet and lack of friction scare us. We worry the missing person has died.
I hope that there’s more learning that comes from this friction-full existence. I know that when all three kids have a night when they’re in a groove, playing the same game, or independently occupied, and their sounds are orchestrated or purposeful, I feel a sense of triumph. The same holds when there are extra kids here for a sleepover, and everyone is finally still. I feel that this is an achievement on par with Gibbon’s Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire. Somehow, I managed that.
Most nights, none of us want this learning. We just want to be alone. We can’t even slam any doors because only two of our rooms have doors to slam. Instead, we practice creating what actors call “the fourth wall.” We practice being like river stones and allowing the noise and clamor to hurtle over us like water. We try not to let our frustration become physical or to say anything so hurtful that it feels physical. This is the space we have, so we have to make it work. We have no choice.
On nights like this, I try to remind myself what I have said to my kids so many times. The most important space is the space is the space inside our heads. That’s as big or as small as we make it, as riled or as calm, as contented or as jealous. The most necessary remodel is always the one within.
