a room of her own
Our place is really huge, and when we first moved in we decided to make the two spare bedrooms into offices for each of us. This was nice for me to be able to do work at home, and for The Little Red Haired Girl to work on her thesis. I got the bigger room with more privacy, since I was probably going to make more use of an office than The Little Red Haired Girl. A couple of months ago we became unhappy with having our tv as the focal point of the living room, so we moved it into The Little Red Haired Girl’s office and put a futon in there. Needless to say, The Little Red Haired Girl no longer had an office, even though her desk stayed in the new tv room.
Last weekend we decided to swap offices. I have my “podspace” here at school, and at home I have been using the dining room table rather than my office desk anyway. The Little Red Haired Girl values private time and space a lot more than I do, and she gets almost none of that in her life. There are still bits and pieces of me left in The Little Red Haired Girl’s new office, but it’s pretty much her space now. Last night when she got home from work, after finding out that I didn’t need help preparing dinner, she shut herself in there until it was time to eat.
I didn’t grow up having my own room, and I never feel the need to be by myself. Maybe it’s because, in my line of work, I’ve always had a lot of alone time anyway. These days I have most mornings all to myself at home, and unless I’m in class I am generally rockin’ it out all alone in my pod. By the time The Little Red Haired Girl gets home from work I’m practically begging for non-internet human attention. Of course it’s the opposite for her. I just have to learn to not take it personally when she shuts the door to her office to do whatever she needs to do, because it makes her happy and, eventually, she will come back out to play.