(I’ve started and deleted and restarted this post at least ten different ways.)
Since moving into this house, we’ve played musical rooms countless times. We move furniture and change paint colors, and just when we think something fits, our lives shift again. I appreciate our flexibility and hate the process. I feel like we have plenty of space but a completely impractical layout for almost any configuration of our family’s needs, and my frustration grows each time something requires us to change a space I like.
Our home office recently underwent such a change.
We knew we wanted a home office when we were looking for a new home. Ryan loved having one in the old house, until that became Dylan’s room, although he hardly ever slept there. When we moved in, he painted it dark green and moved in his oversized desk. I carved out my own space in it between built-in cabinets, though the shelf felt too high or too short or not big enough for what I wanted.
During one of our rounds of Change the Room, I took over the office. The kids were in school. I worked pretty steadily from home doing social media and content creation. I wanted to write more. Ryan drove to work each day, a typical but annoying commute in our suburban sprawl of a neighborhood. We agreed that I would use the space more than he would.
The deep green became my favorite shade of aqua, and I chose curtains with flowers, a rug with a pattern I liked more than anyone else.
Quickly, it became my favorite room in the house — and then things shifted again.
I joined the PTA and said yes and yes and yes to all sorts of things that pulled me away from my writing oasis. I published, then stalled, then spent more time talking about writing than actually writing. I began to see the cracks in the social media work I was doing.
I got a part-time job at a preschool and kept saying yes to everything but my desk.
The pandemic began. We all worked from home, schooled from home, danced from home, karate-d from home, baked bread and played board games and laughed and annoyed the crap out of each other from home. I tried to write and journaled instead. Tried to write and meditated. Tried to write and ate chips and cried and wondered if we would ever leave the house again.
And I did.
But Ryan didn’t.
Though he goes into the office occasionally now, the great majority of his work is done from our house. For a while, he bounced between the couch and his oversized desk, which lived in the living room, and the kitchen table. Some days he would go in my office and close the door.
(You know where this is going.)
So, once again, the rooms in our house shifted like a kaleidoscope, and the office is his office once again.
The paint remains the same, absorbing the light in delicious ways in the late morning hours, but it’s no longer my space. My things don’t fill the shelves, and my hopes don’t get to live in air there any longer.
It makes sense, logically, but it feels heavy all the same. It feels, some days, that moving my desk through that door meant giving up the hope of writing. I wish I could say I’ve moved past that, that I’ve managed to make progress without a physical “room of one’s own.” Truthfully, though, I’m not sure I can say that. I’m not sure exactly where writing and I stand right now, and it feels like we’re circling each other, without anywhere to land, because of all the yeses I’ve allowed myself to say the last few years.
Saying no, though, is hard.
Instead, I’ll walk by the office and regret that it’s no longer mine.
