Effortless Effervescence

I’m ashamed to say that I’ve never read anything by Virginia Woolf. I have read the biography her nephew Quentin Bell wrote (and I have to applaud him for being so brutally honest about his parents’ eccentricities). I’ve seen The Hours more times than I can count, and read the book once. I’ve even read Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf and seen the movie. (Dear Elizabeth Taylor: I LOVE YOU.) So I suppose you could say I’m a Virginia Woolf fangirl - I mean, she fascinates me - except I haven’t read anything she’s written. This is wrong.

Still, there is one truth that Virginia wrote about that I believe wholeheartedly: every woman needs a room of her own. When I was a child, my mother would sit at the dining room table to write letters and pay bills with the living room television blaring in the background. My brother and I would cluster around her, crowd her, whining for something to eat, one of us complaining that the other had done something unjust, rifling through her papers, upsetting her balance. Sometimes she would just scold us for disturbing her, other times she would be undone by her frustration. And who could blame her? She wanted just a small space to conduct her affairs, and we (as children do) assumed our affairs were more important.

My mother often said that she felt she had nothing that belonged to her and her alone. She guarded her and my father’s bedroom jealously, and would not let any of us kids enter without permission. Now that I am an adult, I can think of many reasons why she may have done so, and all of them make me shudder - but I don’t think her protectiveness of her sleeping quarters had anything to do with naughty things hiding in the dresser drawers. I think it had everything to do with the fact that she’d surrendered her entire life and domicile to these creatures called children, whose sticky hands touched every surface and whose demands filled her every waking (and sleeping!) hour. She wanted one place to be sacred, but even her bedroom was not hers alone. She shared it with my father, and when us kids where lonely and scared and upset, she shared it with us, too.

My husband and I have bought a house with three bedrooms and a den. One of the bedrooms is where we sleep, one is for guests. The den is “man land” where my husband’s computer and stereo live. And one room is MINE. I love my room. I love that it is full of things that are important to me - my journals, my artwork, family photographs and letters from friends, watermarked and crinkled with age. I love that this room is filled with light, and most of all, I love that when my husband comes to speak to me while I’m in my room, he stops at the door and waits until I invite him in. He respects that this is my space, and that it is sacred.

A woman who is (like myself) very traditional in her gender roles spends dozens of hours every week in every room in the house. My hands are at work in the kitchen and the laundry room and the bedrooms and the bathroom. And although I work in those spaces, although I chose the paint color and pictures on the walls, they are not my spaces. Only in MY room did I not think for a moment what my husband or any visitors might think of the contents. Only in MY room did I ask myself, “What do you want, Emily?” Many women spend every waking (and sleeping!) moment thinking about what their partner/children/boss/mother/siblings/community/country needs. Only in MY room do I feel completely empowered to think about MY needs.

As a child, I did not understand it when my mother said, “I feel like I have nothing that’s mine.” I thought that she meant she regretted having children, that we stood in the way of her happiness and freedom. I know now that she meant she only longed for something that was hers alone, because in ownership we know ourselves. Often, women relinquish everything that is theirs - even their bodies, their names - or it is taken from them. Their responsibilities overflow every boundary and threaten even their sense of self: If I am not a wife, who am I? If I am not a mother, who am I? If I do not care for my children, or my siblings, or my elderly parents, or my narcissistic boss, am I still a person? Do I still have worth? I know I was someone once, but who?

In that moment of knowing, yet wondering, we feel a need. I must have something that’s mine. Mine alone, and no one else’s. Not because we are selfish. We would shed our own skin to clothe our loved ones! Rather, because we need to know that we are more than generosity, more than beauty, more than function. We need to know that we exist as a person.

When we say “mine,” we are saying, “I.”