I have a desk.

It’s blue and squat, with a wide top drawer, and a row of drawers on the right side. World War I era. The owner of the antique store where I found it was happy to let it go for a song—$60, if I recall correctly.

“Can you believe someone painted it blue?” he said. “Ruined it.”

I am all for colorful ruin. The blue is lovely, and is the only reason I could afford to buy the desk. Inside the top drawer, someone carved the initial “W” and “1914.” That charms me.

Virginia Woolf wrote about the necessity of a woman having “a room of one’s own.” Space is scarce. I dream of a room of my own—not a bedroom, but a room for writing, for creating. A room with images I love, tacked up all over the walls.

For now, I settle for a desk of my own.I had hoped by this point in my life that I would have my own workroom, where the desk could live, take center stage. Not yet, but still, I hope, even as I work on my bed with my laptop topping my lap, so I can be close to my ailing old dog, curled in my covers. There will be time for the blue desk, for that room.

Many of my work-at-home comrade-mothers have to make do with less than rooms of their own. My dear friend Gayle claimed a shallow two-doored closet as her space at her home in England—painting the back wall a soothing aqua, sliding a desk into the closet, and adding paper-lantern lights. Framed pictures, including a black-and-white shot of her and me in a play in graduate school, and a photo of her husband and her, adorn the aqua wall. This is very much her place as a woman and a writer, not as a mother. When I visited her recently, I slept in that room and left the doors of her closet-office open. I smiled each morning when I woke up to the aqua and the cheerful lanterns. Yes, I thought, this is what we need. This is a must. Not a want, but a need.

Working from home as a single mother is a balancing act requiring patience and forethought. Deadlines can easily become it-died-lines when children get sick and pets get sick and life messes with our best worker-bee intentions. Creativity is a finicky bird, easily startled and prone to flights of absence. All the more reason to be surrounded by a few colors, a few cherished objects, that remind us of who we are, of who we’ve been, of what we are capable of outside of the realm of good mothering. 

 

 

 

 

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