Room With a View

This Saturday, Cowboy and I industriously decided to pressure wash the siding of our house and clean all of its windows inside and out. We get so much rain and, hence, moss up here that the annual clean keeps everything looking fresh.

My job was the windows. I made it entirely around the outside of the house and halfway through the inside until I had to go into “the room.”

“The room” used to be my office/project room. When we first moved in, I jokingly referred to it as the “baby’s room.” This was before we even started trying. I did it mostly to freak Cowboy out every now and then. I can be such a bitch sometimes.

In one of the first weekends of pregnancy #1, I relocated the antique pine table that serves as my desk & sewing table and all of my belongings into the guest room. So now “the room” sits empty with the exception of an ironing board and a Shaker rocker just waiting to be used for its intended purpose. After 6 years in our house, nearly every room is complete with the exception of “the room.” It has white walls, off-white berber carpet, white wooden blinds. It looks like a jar of mayonnaise.

I avoid going into the room at all costs now.

My therapist thinks I should get it ready for habitation. “You’re going to have a baby in that room at some point, whether you have one or adopt,” she rationalizes. She thinks this will get me in a frame of mind to welcome a child into my life. Seriously. I know she doesn’t mean it this way, but I interpret that as I have had two miscarriages because I am not fully ready to have a child in my life. As if.

I don’t know how I feel about decorating “the room.” This is weird for me because I LOVE decorating: planning and pulling together fabrics and finding just the right furniture pieces and simple but meaningful accessories. I even have a few pieces I am saving for “the room”: a vintage French school flashcard of ducks with the word “duck” in various languages, a Shaker coat rack on which I can imagine a tiny little sweater and a quilt that my grandmother’s grandmother made when I was born. I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t decorated “the room” in my mind at some point nearly every weekend. For months, if not years.

But I can’t bring myself to act on it.

It feels weird in some kind of if-you-build-it-they-will-come sort of way. But then, I don't want to jinx us.

Anyway, back to the windows. So I went into “the room.” Washed the window and stared out at its lush, green view. I started feeling sad. I didn’t want to be washing windows. It was a beautiful Saturday and I wanted to be playing on a blanket in my yard with a baby.

I cried for the rest of the time I washed the windows in my house.

Then the sadness went away.

I just want to have a reason to decorate “the room."