Our bedroom is not the kind of space you’d see in a Pottery Barn catalog or on HGTV. After years of transient living, and though the rightful owners of the house, my husband and I have yet to concede to a grown-up way of life by making this room our own. The walls are bare and the same off-white shade they’ve been for the last four years. Traffic passes beneath the open window, interrupting our sleep when a cool summer night becomes a warm morning commute. An addition with a new master suite awaits us with space for a Jacuzzi and views of Snowbowl, Stuart Peak and Mt. Jumbo. But for now this unassuming room is ours.
Our bedroom is the place where, on a whim, our baby was conceived—unplanned, but after six years of marriage, not unwanted. It was here, sitting on the edge of the bed moments after telling my husband I was pregnant, he giggled with excitement and confessed to being terrified. Three seasons later, it was here, too, that the three of us went to sleep on the night of her birth, and then every night for the next 5 months. She was so small and helpless then, stirring and grunting and rooting in the dark until she found my breast, not unlike a baby mammal in the wild. Later, after weeks of waking me as she struggled to stretch out her arms or as she banged her head against my spine, we moved her into her own bed, a Pack n Play at the foot of ours—the same spot where night after night in the months leading up to her birth I stretched and squatted hoping to better prepare myself physically for the intensity of labor.
And the same spot, too, where she came into the world and drew her first breath. I, squatting on the floor, gripping the green sheet that covered the bed, listening to the crinkling of the plastic one beneath it push, push, pushing for the duration of the contraction, then standing, leaning over with hands on bed, catching my breath until the next one thundered through my body.
Our bedroom is the place where the five of us (dog and cat included) come together in sanctuary and serenity each night—fourteen legs, five beating hearts, one family.
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