There are three desks in the downstairs of my house. One in the living room, another in the front room, and the last one that took over the formal dining room. There are also small tables scattered about that weren’t there the year before. A bookshelf is also in the living room that holds school supplies, notebooks, and random crap that accumulates over a year of online school.
My office is also no longer my office. It contains my wife’s chair from work, a keyboard, coffee mugs, and a cup of assorted pens and highlighters. My filing cabinet serves as a shelf for assorted reports. My comfortable writing chair is pushed too close to the window. A wastebasket that was barely used before is now overflowing.
I was reduced to buying a portable laptop desk as my only workspace. How much space does the writer need anyway? There’s school and office work to do. For most of the last year, I have typed in a lawn chair that I stuck in the walk-in closet.
But today, I’m taking everything back.
My family is vaccinated and it is my wife’s first day back at work. At home, I have already begun making changes.
It starts with the bookshelf, a cheap particle board thing that fit the budget and the space. I one arm all the crap off of it and call out to the kids. Get a garbage bag or a paper shredder. I don’t care what happens to this stuff, but the shelf has to go. Then I move onto the desks and move them back into their rooms.
They are bigger and better desks than the kids had before. I had to space them out in the budget over the first couple of weeks last year. I didn’t notice how much space they had taken up until I realized that I had nowhere to sit quietly anymore. Zoom calls or screams for headphones echoed through the house. At these desks, we did our work sometimes, and other times we sat frustrated at an unclear assignment. When I take the desks upstairs, I feel the clutter leaving my living room.
In my office, I am brutal. It used to be my space to think about the next plot point or character development section. I crafted dad jokes in my soft comfortable chair. I wrote stories about epic Viking dad adventures. There were funny quotes tacked up on my shelf.
Now they are all covered by post-it notes with reminders about timesheets and PowerPoint decks. Call Susan @ 12:45. Meeting w/ Matt Thursday. The notes create a chain that looks like shingles on a decaying house. The edges are crimped and the ones that got a lot of sunlight are faded pink or yellow. I tear these off and it’s satisfying. I hate clutter. I detest it. No matter where I find it, I try to get rid of it. I feel clearer when I do so.
Tomorrow is my dining room. I’m taking that back. There’s a printer on the table that needed an extension cord to reach the outlet. A computer charger still lays on the floor, and my teenage daughter decorated a shelf with used cups and bits of snacks to get her through the last week of school. In one day, I’m cleaning that space out because it’s by big windows. That’s why I put her in there. The big windows let in the sunlight and that helps your mood. I know from experience. The more sunlight you get, the better your mental status.
I’ve had many sleepless nights worrying about my daughter. About what she is missing. About the isolation. How I could help. For the last year, it has felt dark for me as I’ve typed on my laptop desk. Now I have my windows back.
I’ve told my wife that for the next two weeks, while she learns how to be in the office again, that I want no extra chores. No lists. No requests. No little faded post-it notes reminding me of a meeting.
As for my family, they are getting back to normal. The kids are starting to see their friends again. My wife makes a stop at the local coffee shop on the way to work. But for me, my normal has a long way to go. For the next several weeks I’m reclaiming my space; both the physical and mental.
I removed the bookshelf because it was as poorly designed as an online school. I don’t want to think about either anymore. The dining room table was cluttered and where I spent hours trying to untie quadratic equations with my daughter. The desks were in the way of missing assignments that I didn’t know we had.
And my office with file folders and cups of pens will turn back into a place of relaxation and creativity. It’s where I can sit and craft a piece of satire without worrying about who I know has caught Covid, and how I’m going to explain it to the kids. I can sit there without the fear and second-guessing my own decisions. In a nice and clean space that is mine. Where I can focus on the task at hand and not the three thousand anxieties that this last year brought. I’m organizing my physical areas because it allows me to organize my mental ones.
I am under no delusion that we are out of the woods yet. There are strains and other worries that this last year has brought up. And I know that my family has come through this better than most, and for that I am thankful. I am thankful that I had the luxury to devote so much time to my family when others did not. That my wife didn’t have to choose between work and school. There were no fights about who could help the kids. And I was always there to let them just sit and snuggle with me when it became overwhelming. I know that I’m lucky and so is my family.
But what all this organizing does mean is that home base will be ready to go again should they ever need it. And at the very least, it’s the place they can all come back to and feel safe while they tell the stories of their adventures.
And for me, it means a mind less cluttered and more focused. For many of us parents, that’s our next step. Reclaiming the mental spaces that this last year has occupied. To pull down tattered post-it notes that have stuck to us for so long and replace them with jokes told from a comfortable chair.
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