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| Daisy supervising the writing of this post |
I’ve always been spoilt. When others complained about fitting in work around partners and children, and struggling to find physical space, I could look smugly at my study, which was solely for my writing. Even back in the days when I had a teaching day job, I never sullied my sacred space with the sordid trappings of marking and report writing. My boundaries were non-negotiable. I knew I could never share.
As you may know if you’ve followed my fortunes in this blog, I’ve recently moved in with my fiancé, and am getting married in October. Taking the contents of two houses – one small writer’s house full of books and paintings, one large family home full of old PlayStations and twenty-five-year-old wedding presents (my fiancé is a widower with a teenage son), and editing
them into one home to suit us all has been a challenge to one unused to compromise. (You can keep that lamp I suppose, but yes, I do need to have six bookcases on the landing.)
This house is over twice the size of the one I’ve just sold, but there isn’t a study or an unused room I could turn into one. How would I cope? I was used to spending hours every day upstairs in my special writing space. The dining room? A large, bright room formerly almost empty and little used, could I make it multi-task? Could I swap my antique oak desk (wobbly and not as good as I’ve made it sound) for the dining room table? Could I possibly work next door to the kitchen?
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Well, it seems I can. The room is set up mostly as my study, with my laptop at one end of the table, bookcases, and one small cupboard which doesn’t seem to mind multi-tasking either, managing to bear having placemats and napkins in one drawer, notebooks and stationery in another. It seems it can blur its boundaries pretty well.
And I can too. I’ve left the kitchen door open so the dog can come in and keep an eye on me when she needs to; I can hear my partner pounding away on the treadmill across the hall; pretty soon the teenager may surface too. I could close the door, and keep those boundaries safe, and if I were working on a novel rather than a chatty blog post, I might well do so. But for now, this space, connected, multi-purpose and open, feels right.
And if the novelty wears off, I can always close the door.
5 comments:
I love this, Sheena! It's always good to see your writing spaces. And the basis of all the best relationships is compromise. So excited for you both in October. Two artistic spirits blurring boundaries ...
Hope your new writing life deeply satisfying. Fellow kitchen/dining table writers will be with you in spirit when you have to make the tough choice to close that door.
If anyone can make this work, Sheena, you can! Good luck with everything.
nice posting as writtn by og why not all it a dlog
Congratulations on your wedding this coming October - we got married in October too, and I recommend it! I am sitting at our table as I write this, with my son and husband watching TV at the other end of the room, my daughter in the kitchen, and at this moment in time those noises are a great source of joy and comfort to me and no problem to me as I read and write - but I know that other days I will need that quiet. Good luck with all the future days of closed and open doors - you can do this!
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