IN THIS VERY ROOM

Hmm, I've been posting quite a lot the past couple months. (For me.)

I was talking with my parents tonight about the redecorating and additions they are doing to the house. To my great sorrow they've torn out the spiral staircase that lead to our basement and don't intend to replace it. I mean, c'mon!!! How many kids can say they had a spiral staircase in their basement?? Although I'm not sure if it technically qualified as a spiral staircase since it didn't even make it a full 360 degrees around. I mean, it was only going down about 7 feet, so it only managed, oh, I dunno, 200 degrees or so.

My room, growing up, had pink wallpaper. With white flowers. Not that you could see it for most of my youth, because I collected posters. (Maybe because my room was pink flowers.) And I literally covered my walls in posters. I even rearranged my furniture so that my bed and my dresser were back to back in the middle of the room, not touching any walls, so that I could have more room for my posters. Also I just like rearranging my room. I prided myself on coming up with endless variations - no small feat, let me tell you, since the big corner desk with it's shelves all the way up to the ceiling was stuck in the same corner.

But anyway, over the years since leaving for college I have slowly taken some of the posters down, and the wallpaper is reappearing. But I haven't been able to quite make myself take them all down. (And not only because of the wallpaper, which everyone agrees has to go. It's days are numbered.) It's also because I like color. When I walk into that room, it's this explosion of life and color - but not so much in an assault on your sense type of way as it is it just feels really *alive*. I've always considered my room to be an expression of myself.

But I was talking with a friend recently who was discussing how his parents had redone his bedroom into a guest room, basically, but that they had tried to cater to his sensibilities by decorating it in an Asian style. And right then in the conversation it hit me, "You know, I'm really ready for that room to look different."

It's not a complete letting go of the past. I'm still not ready to turn it over to my parents, relinquish all claim to that room, and honestly say "I don't care what the heck happens to it." But I also recognize that I am not living there now, that my parents' lives are changing and the house is changing to accomodate them (for instance, there is a baby crib in my room now for the grandkids.)

And so I don't want all my posters up. I don't want to walk into that room and have it be basically the living dead. Because as it is, even though I've taken some stuff off the walls, it's a little piece of highschool frozen in time. It used to be I liked it that way - when I went home I was falling into all my old haunts, doing all the same things with all my old friends. But their lives have changed just as much as mine has in the past 6 years. We don't do the same things anymore when I go home. The dynamics are different. After all, they're doing things like marrying, having kids or at least a dog, buying houses and so on. That isn't a sad thing at all - I'm sure some will read it that way. It's happy - most of them are quite happy with their lives, and that's really great to see. And I'm happy with my life, so we're all just a bunch of happy people. (Yeah okay there's those pesky real world responsbilities, but I'm glossing here, okay? Let me gloss!)

My point is, I'm okay with how things have changed. And suddenly instead of being comforting, the idea of going home to that room, which is frozen in 1999, is just . . . limiting. My room has always been an expression of myself. And so somehow, I want that room to be an expression of the realities of my life as it is now.

Part of that reality is that it's not really my room anymore. It's the room where the babies sleep when they come. It's the only guest bedroom, since renovations are in progress. It's the second room in a house of a couple who's last kid has been out of the house for a few years now, and who have moved on to a new stage in their life, doing things like running for office and (yet again) redefining their business.

So it's weird . . . it's like . . . I don't want anyone to tell me I have to give up that room. (Even though some people have, rightly pointing out it's not mine yadda yadda.) I want to let go of my own free will, to say "Hey, I've moved past this." After all, my room has always been an expression of myself. This is possibly why I reacted very poorly when my sisters double teamed me telling me I needed to take my posters down. It's not that I disagree. But this is something so much more personal than just a room to me - it's about the possibility that I may never live near my family again, to cut down to the heart of it. That's why I've kept it frozen in time. So the best way I can think of to say I've moved on is to redecorate it myself - in accordance w/ what Mom and Dad want done with it.

So I offered to strip the wallpaper and redo the room while I'm home over the summer. For some reason just taking all my posters down doesn't satisfy me. I'm reluctant to take them down until Mom and Dad are ready to actually *do* something with the room (not just talk about doing something.) It would be so bare and forlorn and sad . . . like the shadow of myself or something, all lost and lonely. I'd rather just have the whole thing redone in one fell swoop. An new creation, instead of a shadow of the old.

Unfortunately, Mom and Dad are pretty preoccupied with afore mentioned major remodeling and building of additions. So they didn't jump at the idea of repapering the bedroom at the same time.

But maybe I can convince them.