Prompt #3: “What was your bedroom like growing up? Did you share it with your siblings, or did you have it to yourself? Can you remember the carpeting, the wallpaper, the pictures that hung? What did you do to make it your own?”
My sister Anna had her own room for a blessed 14 months before I showed up, wrecking all of her plans of displaying play food on low shelves. With my advent, her small toys were banished to an upper shelf waiting for my nap-time.
Not that I remember that bedroom.
The first bedroom I really remember is the one where Anna and I spent much of our elementary years.
It was the largest bedroom in the house, maybe 12’x14′(?). This was the room where Anna and I fitfully shared the full-sized bed (fitfully due to Anna’s penchant for tickling and/or kicking me OUT of said bed.) This was the room where Anna and I much more peacefully shared the same crack of light from the hallway (so we could better read our novels after lights out.)
This was also the room where our doll changing table/crib (that Dad made for us) was set up and where the blue bookshelf (that Dad also made for us) held our favorite books.
This was the room that contained the closet that was perpetually overflowing with dirty clothes because we were less than diligent about doing our laundry. The doll changing table/crib was where we once found an apple core that was filled with maggots due to my disobedience to the rule about not eating anywhere but the dining room–and due to our rather lax room-cleaning habits.
This was the room that was almost perpetually a mess.
Every so often, our parents would get fed up with the mess and issue an ultimatum. Either we cleaned the room or Mom and Dad would come in with a broom and a trash bag and do it for us.
No way we’d let them throw away our treasures. We took to the room with a broom first, sweeping everything into the center and then dividing out the pile into a dozen littler piles, then finding homes for the items in each pile.
Finally, the pale hardwood floor would be fully visible.
Oh, that hardwood floor.
How we hated it.
How we wished we could have carpet like the rest of the house.
We begged and pleaded for carpet, but to little avail. How would we manage to clean carpet with the kind of messes we made? It would be a disaster.
Still, we petitioned our parents until they relented.
Conditionally.
We could have carpet if we could keep our room clean for a month.
And so we did.
Mom and Dad, with remarkable foresight, gave us not the wall-to-wall carpet we’d dreamed of, but a single large area rug for the center of the room.
While it wasn’t what we’d wanted, it turned out to be a wise move. Because within weeks (days?), the room was back to being a pit. “Do you think we live in a pigsty?” my parents would occasionally ask.
Maybe they didn’t, but we kinda did.
We knew it and were rather ashamed of it, but not enough to do something about it in the long term. We hadn’t the diligence to tidy it on a regular basis.
Instead, we spent our preteen years performing semi-regular all-night cleaning parties. We’d get out our brooms, sweep everything onto the carpet, and swear we wouldn’t go to sleep until we’d gotten it clean.
Six to eight hours later, we could roll up the carpet and sweep underneath it.
We couldn’t vacuum it, because by then it was six or so in the morning.
Instead, we went to bed exhausted, vacuumed (or beat) our carpet the next day, and unrolled it again across the floor.
A few years later, my Aunt Martha and my dad built a room for Anna and I in our previously unfinished basement. The teenaged and pre-teen kids (the first four of us) moved into the basement and Mom and Dad moved into the room that had previously been Anna’s and mine. Before they moved in, they carpeted the floor with dark green wall-to-wall carpeting.
As my sister and I neared the end of our teenage years, our family collectively realized that our allergies were being exacerbated by carpeting–and we pulled up all the carpet that had hardwood floors (or concrete) underneath. All except Mom and Dad’s room that is.
When Mom and Dad finally added on a few years back, they laid hardwood floors in the living room–leaving that one corner room as the only carpeted room in the house.
That’s the guest room now, and where Anna and I stay when we visit our parents in Lincoln.
Ironic, isn’t it?
When it was just my brother and I (four years apart), we shared a room and had bunk beds. I don’t remember much else about it. At some point, I ended up with my own room for much of the rest of my time home. The first four of us were four years apart, and then two more siblings came a little more quickly. The youngest four were girls, my brother the only boy. When my parents divorced, he lived with my dad, the four younger girls all slept in one big bedroom with two sets of bunk beds, and I had a small bedroom to myself. Being bookish and introverted, I loved the solitude of my room. As we started leaving home one by one, the oldest child home got that small bedroom.