In 1928
Virginia Woolf gave a series of lectures addressing, in part, the struggle that
women face in having the space necessary to be creative, and more particularly,
to be writers. I read the published
version for the first time as a young woman, and though I recognized her ideas
as valid, I did not have any sense of their truth. Being the only girl in my family, I had a
room of my own. Even as a married woman
I had ample space to retreat from life to ruminate. I had always had the physical and temporal space,
and consequently the mental space, to work out my issues, to process my
experiences and to transmute emotion into some form of art.
It wasn’t
until I became a mother that I fully understood what it meant to need “a room
of one’s own.” As a pregnant woman I
gave up my body to grow another. As a
mother of a newborn I gave up my arms and my breast for the wellbeing and
security of my child. As the mother of a
toddler, I gave up all of my attention and the orderliness of my
environment. I gave up the right to
sparse meals at odd hours so that my family could have structure and regular
nutrition. The list goes on and on. As a result I lost my sense of self, I
struggled to resolve my problems and integrate my experiences. I stopped writing consistently and only sporadically
engaged in creative therapies.
Everything mental and emotional stacked up until I was too overwhelmed
to see clearly the way back to my own sanity. What I wanted and needed was a room of my own.
There is
something magical about private space.
Just as community space is important to our identity, so is private
space. In it—whether it be temporal or
physical—we have the freedom to explore our uniqueness and our commonalities. For a mother, “a room of one’s own” is the
luxury of holding a thought in your head long enough to see where it takes you,
the blessing of quiet and a deep breath, the wholly delicious sense of oneself
as having meaning outside of our functions as parents.
Virginia
Woolf was writing in a time when homes were smaller and family members crowded
bed chambers and shuffled through common areas all day long. She wrote in an era when staying up late or
taking a walk was the primary means of getting alone time. I find myself doing these things a century
later to catch my breath, to feel my life slow down. Still I long for a space that is mine, a
retreat for my mind, body and soul.
My daughters
each have rooms of their own, but I, like most married women, share a bedroom
with my husband. Unlike me though, he
has his office, and often a hotel room when he travels, to himself. I am left with shared space. I have this grand plan to buy a nice garden
shed and set it up in the backyard as a workshop, a mom/writer’s cave. I keep shopping for them and I’ve found a few
that I like. My leading favorite is one
from Costco (see below), but I have to build it from a kit, which means waiting
until the weather is warmer and drier.
It is something to look forward to.
The other option is to move to a different house with an extra room, but
I don’t really want to leave my neighborhood and move my entire household if a
shed will do the trick. I guess I’ll
keep looking and hoping until the weather perks up a bit. Who knows, maybe I’ll have a room of my own
once again before too long.
