A mouse has died in the crawl space behind my office, and somehow, this feels relevant.
I call this room my “office” despite the fact I haven’t written anything substantive in it for 12 months. I call it an office because my books are located in it, and an old glass-topped desk draped with a tablecloth, and the bills I need to pay, as well as a particle-board filing cabinet, which I lugged from Tennessee 12 years ago and which is finally falling apart, bowed from a decade of receipts and tax returns and papers I will never, ever look at again. These effects are now steeped in the smell of decay.
Really, my office is a walk-in closet. An 8’ x 5.5’ room with a sloped ceiling and no windows or natural light. It is generous for storage—but as a workplace comical. Tucked inside the French doors of my daughter’s bedroom, it is therefore unusable from the hours of 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. This detail also feels relevant.
In 1929, Virginia Woolf published A Room of One’s Own, an extended essay based on two lectures she delivered at women’s colleges in Cambridge. In signature discursive style spiked with delightful literary side-eye, Woolf posited that one must have “five hundred [pounds] a year and a room with a lock on the door” in order to write fiction or poetry (at least good fiction or poetry). I think of this essay every time I enter my closet-office, the one room in the house that I might call my own.
The closet has not always served this purpose. For years, I worked at and wrote my last novel on a door-sized French farm table in a spacious L-shaped room big enough for a couch and a queen-sized bed. That room is now my 4-year-old’s bedroom. She moved in last year when her baby brother took the nursery across the hall.
It was my husband who started using the closet as an office, during the COVID-19 lockdown. Despite the availability of the perfectly good and large home office, he declined to use my desk strewn with Post-It notes, papers, and half-empty notebooks full of story ideas. Of the Type A variety, he is unsettled by clutter.
I have a photo of him, dated April 9, 2020, sitting in the closet before a desktop computer wearing a suit jacket (reader, my husband does not wear suits), looking hollow-eyed and not unlike a cornered animal. Only eight months earlier, we had welcomed our daughter, and, like all new parents at that time, had been suddenly and terrifyingly thrown into a strange and haunting reality where the burdens of parenthood were magnified a hundredfold by a mysterious virus raging across the globe. Between games of Peek-a-boo and recitations of Hop on Pop, he retreated to the closet for Zoom (a new word!) meetings and tried not to think about death. On days when the closet became too claustrophobic, he relocated to the breakfast table in our open downstairs living area, and I took the baby upstairs.
This game of musical chairs wasn’t an entirely new arrangement. In our pre-marriage days, when we lived in a condo on the Portland peninsula, I worked at our dining table. I did this until I learned that my squatting in our living area made him crazy, feeling as if he had nowhere to be while I finished my thoughts, so I began migrating to the bedroom when he arrived home from work around 5 p.m.
Historically, Woolf observed in her essay, “If a woman wrote, she would have to write in the common sitting-room.” Furthermore, she would have to write in fits and spurts, as “women never have a half hour … that they can call their own.” Since becoming a roommate and then a wife and now a mother two times over, I feel this acutely.
Woolf, of course, as she almost always was, was speaking figuratively as well as literally. “Five hundred a year stands for the power to contemplate,” she wrote. “A lock on the door means the power to think for oneself.” One hundred years removed from those Cambridge lecture halls, I theoretically enjoy these rights in ways the women, real and imagined, whom Woolf held up as examples did not. There is no university beadle shooing me from the metaphorical lawn—and yet, and yet …
“The whole of the mind must lie wide open if we are to get the sense that the writer is communicating his experience with perfect fullness. There must be freedom and there must be peace. Not a wheel must grate, not a light glimmer.” Ha, I think, hahahaha, between daycare drop-off and vet appointments, 65 unread emails and the laundry to fold, gentle parenting and self-care and dishes. Nowhere in this Sisyphean mental load of modern womanhood do I feel the power to “let the line of thought dip deep into the stream.”
People talk of dogs resembling their owners. I believe houses begin to resemble their occupants. I don’t mean in decorating choices or architectural styles, but that the physical spaces we inhabit—as well as the ways we move within them—at some point begin to reflect our psychic realities. Rooms are put to use as compartments of being. The closet-office reflects the hemming in of my creative self in this season of life. Overwhelmed by the sudden forfeiture of time, space, and self that parenting and partnering necessitate, my husband and I move around our house in a desperate search for four whole walls. It is some semblance of privacy we’re searching for, a fleeting and illusory moment of physical and mental autonomy in which we might cast our lines of thought.
“By hook or by crook,” as Woolf instructed her young audience, I have made a room of my own … and it is a closet that smells of decomposition tucked into the corner of my child’s bedroom. This room is a privilege, but it’s not yet the power. There is a need still for renovation. ▪
