1 Mother 2 Another

So last week our big project was the
re-doing of Cora’s bedroom. Declaring yellow “not
pretty any more”, she asked for a pink room, offering Maddie
her bedspread, lovely vintage prints of wildflowers, and more as
she pink-i-fied her room. Cora’s dream? To turn her room into
a ballet haven, complete with a sign on the door saying “Do
not come in unless you are a dancer!”


All went well to start, as you probably saw in my last blog. We
spackled holes, moved out furniture, taped off trim and ceilings,
and primed the whole room. Cora chose to sleep with Maddie that
night, and we closed the door on her pristine white room, the only
furniture in there her big bed covered in plastic in the center of
the room. I tucked the girls into Maddie’s bed and said a
cheerful good-night.


And then Cora started crying.

Nay, sobbing. Heartbroken.


“I miss my room! I just want my old room back! I don’t
want it to change at all!” Serious, serious weeping. Beyond
histrionics: a deep, bone-wrenching sadness, a mourning of a death
of a beloved.


I truly did not see this coming.


Cora’s been my one to plow forward, to embrace change, to
love new adventures. She had a strong bout with separation anxiety
for a while, but by the time she was in school she had no problems
and never looked back. As we talked about changing her room I said
several times, “Are you sure you want to paint it? Yellow is
such a gorgeous color, like waking up in a pool of sunlight.”
“Yep, I’m sure,” Cora was say. “I
don’t like yellow any more. I like pink.”


Cora cried all. Night. Long. As she lay weeping in my arms early in
the evening, I said, “Honey, it’s ok to be sad.
It’s ok to miss your old room.” I talked about how
I’d paint my room as a child, and I loved my new room but
would go to sleep crying, missing my old room. Just for that one
night. We talked about how much she’d miss her preschool, but
how she had to leave it to go to kindergarten. How change is a part
of life, and we mourn what’s passing even as we look forward
to the new.


I pulled out all my best stuff.


And to be honest, I was sad about the loss of her yellow room as
well. We moved to this house when Cora was eight months old, and
the whole time she was alive in New York she lived in a
sliding-door closet in our room. Doors off, but still – no
space of her own. So this pool-of-sunlight room was the place I
could first call Cora’s, the place I spent hours rocking her
and loving her and teaching her to take quiet moments to herself. I
loved that yellow room.


Cora cried so hard and so long that we finally moved her into our
room so an exhausted Maddie could go to sleep. Cora finally crashed
around midnight, but only after several trips to see her room
– “I miss it so much!”- and only after we finally
promised her we would paint it any color she wanted – it
didn’t have to be pink.


She chose yellow.


So the next day we bought two cans of yellow paint- the exact same
shade we gave to the painters four years ago – and proceeded
to restore her room to its original glory. Cora worked
enthusiastically alongside me and my mother for one entire coat,
her arm tiring but her happiness never flagging. “It will be
JUST like it was before!” she’d crow periodically.


Here is what we did right, I think: none of us ever sighed or
rolled our eyes or made Cora feel bad for the amount of work we
were going through to do this. Sure, we could have said, “Too
dang bad” and just painted it pink. But that’s not how
we parent, and I’m ok with that. Sure, we spent a hundred
bucks on paint and primer to make her room look EXACTLY THE SAME
– but that’s what she wanted for her birthday.


And saying it’s exactly the same isn’t quite accurate:
we did get a few changes in there. Cora wanted to paint her room
pink to make it ballet themed, and I had suggested she look at some
of my old ballet pictures I had in my room when I was a child, and
choose some of those for her new room. After she switched back to
yellow Cora absolutely refused to discuss any changes at all- the
art would stay the same, the dust bunnies would be returned to
their original corners, and so on. But I casually cracked open my
childhood box in the garage, and as photographs of some of the best
ballerinas of the last century – Maria Tallchief, Rosella
Hightower, Ruthanna Boris – came out, Cora began sighing with
happiness.


So now she’s got a yellow room, furniture in the exact same
spot – but we’ve swapped out some artwork and hung some
pointe shoes on the wall.


It’s a start.


And more importantly, to Cora, it’s home.