It is raining a coldish, shivery spring rain. I am sitting here at the computer in my “office”--the room which I still call ‘C----‘s room’--by the window, listening to the rain pouring down the downspout against the brick outer wall of our townhome and onto the ground.
In fact, I am consciously calling this room by that name, that is: the room of my youngest child, and I stop myself when I find myself beginning to say ‘my office’ when I refer to it either to friends, or even to my husband.
I know I wrote sometime back that I am metamorphosing as a mother; that I am beginning to accept my children as adults, as well as my role as grandmother to my grandkids. But that is not the whole truth, only just…most of it.
There is still a small part of me that does not want to make that final, emotional leap out of the past and into the future by calling the room in which my youngest daughter spent a very small fraction of her life, actually—she was here in this townhome where we have lived now for six and a half years, for all of six short months—by its new name in its new incarnation: “My Office”.
Even though I knew when she left home that the chances of her returning permanently, if she succeeded in her three years of high school overseas (which she did) and then in the army were slim-to-none, I kept referring to her bedroom as “C----‘s room”. It strangely gave me a kind of hope, that my little girl would some day come back home to her mama, and I would ‘have’ her again, to care for and love, right here; the irony being, of course, that for years she just couldn’t wait to leave home. She used to joke (only half in jest) that the first chance she gets she’ll file for ‘emancipated teenager’ status and high-tail it outa here!
And then, in 2004, it happened—she got her big chance to fulfill her wish: we, out of the blue, (of course, nothing is
really out of the blue, is it) learned about a special program of high school overseas, then army service and attaining citizenship, called the
Na’aleh program, which was completely paid for
by the Jewish Agency for those students who qualified.
This was just a few months after we had sold our house, had lived in a friend’s basement for four months while looking for work (both my husband and I had been laid off within months of each other), and moved into our rental townhome.
So six months after moving in, during which time we had to fly to New York for batteries of tests and evaluations by psychologists to see if she had ‘what it takes’ to live away from home (boy, did
they not have a clue)—she had barely made the room her own, personalizing it with Harry Potter posters, pictures of various
hunk celebrities cut from magazines and a quote from Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream on her door—when she left for
Israel that August. We had only moved in the February before…
She has been living overseas almost six years now and is currently a combat commander and staff sergeant at the tail end of her active duty army service. After her sister (older by less than two years) left the house for college, I figured she—both girls actually--would come back for visits (in fact our youngest only returned three times in six years) and besides, my old computer was still downstairs in the family room/husband’s office, because, well, that was just where this family’s ‘offices’ were, as my husband was then working from home, telecommuting.
I don’t remember exactly when my ‘office policy’ changed. I think it was one year ago, maybe one-and-a-half, that I decided to relocate up three flights of stairs to C----‘s room Well, actually it was my husband who decided. He said that he couldn’t concentrate on work when I was downstairs, asking him questions all the time (I mean, he is my built-in tech support).
For a while, I tried rationalizing with myself by thinking that of the two girls (psychologically, to me, still at home)--my middlest and my youngest--the middle one was ‘merely’ in college, albeit overseas. She’d come back for the summers if we could scrounge up the money for it, whereas the youngest was already starting her army service, becoming a citizen, and wouldn’t be back for on a permanent basis; so based on that notion I made the decision to leave my middle daughter’s room intact, more or less. And besides, it still had her waterbed in it (read on).
Therefore I chose the youngest one’s room for change, thinking that I could actually, well, do it. It also had other advantages (I said to myself): I could place my computer table against the wall, and being left-handed, put my desk under the window at a 90 degree angle to the left of the PC table so that I could write. We also had just recently sold her waterbed (she kept saying for years that we could sell it; but I hadn’t been able to bring myself to do it) and acquired a trundle bed from friends, which was perfect as an office couch or for overnight guests. Truthfully, no adults could sleep comfortably in that waterbed, let alone get out of it!
It took me a while, though, before I could bring myself to tear down most of the Harry Potter posters (those pics of the hunky celebrities was less of a problem), with her approval of course.
And she all the while kept insisting that she had moved out permanently—that it was “not her room anymore”, and we could do with it as we pleased. But deep down inside despite the rationalizations, I just couldn’t think of it as anything but her room.
I mean really, technically she is right-how is this her room anymore? There are only a few Harry Potter pictures left. Her dresser is empty, except for one bottom drawer with some stuff of hers I couldn’t bring myself to throw away.
However, the closet still has the clothes in it which she hadn’t taken with her. It has her hockey sticks, roller blades, amplifier, etc.—which are too expensive to ship when you’re going to be in a dorm in high school and then in the army. Her hamster cage—from when she brought the rat home from science lab so he wouldn’t be done away with during the summer of her first year in high school—is still here.
Either she will return ( I say to myself) after her army service is over for an extended break, or to find work, or to attend college in the States. Or we parents will pack up the house and move, taking all her stuff together with our decades-old junk in a lift. Whichever way it goes, her stuff is still hers—despite the fact that she insists we discard it all—and this is only a transitory state of affairs.
So here I am. Sitting on my cobalt-blue upholstered swivel desk chair at my PC, listening to the rain falling outside the window, in C---‘s room, where my office temporarily is.
That is how it is when you love someone. They are always still there. Oh, and by the way, we kept her Shakespeare quote. It’s still on the door.
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