A Room of My Own
Virginia Woolf knew that every woman needs a room of her own and she wasn’t even a mother. Woolf contended that in order to write, a woman needs a room of her own away from the distractions of domestic life: the husband, the housework. She was absolutely right–domestic distractions are the main reason I have been working on the same novel for six years. The husband, the housework, and in my case, the kids are all distractions from not just the creative life but to simple sanity. I contend that every woman, writer or not, needs a room of her own just to keep her sanity. (This too was something Woolf knew.)
If a woman is single and lives alone, her home is her own. A married woman without kids may easily be able to carve out a space in her home for herself. However, a woman with children at home knows that a room of her own is damn near impossible.
We hear a lot of talk about “man caves,” a place where men can watch sports and whatnot, but where’s the mom’s retreat? Surely, not the bathroom! The minute a woman gives birth, even the bathroom is no longer a sacred place of privacy. I’ve recently tried to decide which is more humiliating: going to the bathroom in front of the dog or in front of a child. While the child, if given a choice, will usually keep his or her distance, a dog tends to stick its nose right in your lap and sniff appreciatively. One the other hand, a dog’s sniff is more subtle than a child unabashedly announcing, “Mommy, you stink!”
Therefore, any room of her own that a mother has must have its own bathroom. This bathroom must have a jacuzzi tub and a knock and sound proof door where no one is allowed to stand and whine, “When will you be done in there?” (Husbands included!)
My room should not contain anything as distracting as a TV. (Although this would be wonderful. I love nothing more on the rare occasions that I am alone in a hotel room to order room service and lay in bed watching a NCIS marathon.) While it would be wonderful to watch whatever I wanted, uninterrupted, the point of my room would be to have peace and to write. The writing would be incredibly important. (I’m currently writing the rough draft of this post sitting on the edge of my bed as my family eats dinner without me.) I have a friend who very Jane Austen-like writes at the kitchen table while her children occupy themselves with crafts or homework; oh how I envy her ability to write among her family. While I think the writing would be the most important thing, perhaps my need to write alone in the quiet make the peace my own room would afford me the most important thing. This would be a place where no one could shout my name over and over and over and over (you get the picture) just as I’ve sat down to ____________. “Mom, mom, mom, mom. . .” It’s like a small, annoying dog barking at me. (I have one of those too.) There’d be no one accusing me of not doing whatever urgent thing they wanted done. I would be failing no one. I could simply sit and stare if I wanted because no one would be there to interrupt. I could even have a good cry if I wanted without anyone rolling her eyes that “mom is at it again” or no one asking, “What’s your problem?”
My room would miraculously stay clean (servants? elves? fairies?)–it would need no dusting, vacuuming, or straitening. Nothing here to make me feel guilty or overwhelmed. Of course, there would have to be books. Books that I could read to the end without someone interrupting me just as I get to the last page. Once I tried for an hour to read the last page of a book–trust me, by then the effect is gone.
But the most important thing would be the writing. What marvelous things could I produce if only for one hour a week I could be alone in a room of my own? I do have an office at the university, but it is filled with the distractions of my teaching: papers to grade, research to read, lessons to plan. . . Plus, the chair isn’t comfortable and the lighting isn’t good. A room of my own filled with only thing things that I need to feed my creative mind so that I could fill the pages of a book is what I need; it’s what Virginia Woolf would want from me.
To paraphrase Woolf, mothers and fiction remain, so far as I am concerned, unsolved problems.
March 12, 2013 3:32 pm 1 Comment
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By Mom, March 13, 2013 @ 7:41 pm
And even after all the above, I do know you would not give up one minute of your time with those “rug rats” as Daddy would have called them — for that perfect room. I am so incredibly proud of you, the Mom, the Teacher, the Woman and the Wife.