My Room, My Rules

So I recently issued a challenge to find something you’re doing every day anyway, and make it your Special Me Time.  Today, I want to talk about something else that helps keep me sane: my bedroom.

See, I read somewhere once that my bedroom should be a retreat, an escape from life, and that I should treat it as such. Keep it clean, decorate it, make it smell pretty, use the hamper instead of the floor for dirty clothes.

Of course, at the time I read that, Paul and I had been married only a short time and I had no idea what it was I was supposed to be escaping from in our bedroom. Now I know; it’s my children.

My bedroom is the only room in the house my kids are not welcome. Well, they can come in, under certain circumstances. If they wake up and want to crawl into bed with us, although it doesn’t thrill either of us, they can do that. We’ve never turned them away, and never will. Night time is a scary place for wee ones.  We get that. We also have a king sized bed, so, you know, the discomfort is minimal.

If we’re in there, they are welcome to come in and chat a bit. Till we kick them out. See, the bedroom also serves as my home office. So when I’m not typing at my dining room table, I’m typing at the desk in my room. Or on the rocking chair in my room. When it’s not covered with dirty laundry. 

But the girls are not allowed in there if my husband or I are not in there with them. They are not allowed to bring toys into my room. They’re not allowed to take anything OUT of my bedroom. I made that last rule after spending half an hour looking for one of my favorite boots, only to find it under the couch, with a broken heel.

It sounds kind of strict, maybe. Maybe it sounds a little unfair to some. Before I had kids, I may have been slightly put off by the whole “STAY OUT OF MY ROOM” thing.  

Even after I had kids, really, my bedroom was like the rest of the house for a long time. It was a free-for-all. There were toys all over, my pillows were used as footballs and for pillow fights, my shoes were all over the house. Every night, I’d crawl into bed and land on a Barbie or a toy car, or something equally uncomfortable.  I’d be cooking dinner and hear my rocking chair slamming into the wall behind it.

One recent evening, I was folding laundry in my room, watching an old George Carlin special on Netflix, and Joey kept coming in. George Carlin, in case you aren’t familiar, was never what one would call “child friendly.” So I found myself lunging for my computer at regular intervals and the jokes ceased to be funny when I couldn’t hear them as they were meant to be delivered.

Come on, timing is everything in comedy.

Aside from that, there was also the fact that she was excitedly jumping up and down, with her hands on my bed, knocking over the piles of clean clothes I was folding. Not cool, kid.

Finally, I got irritated enough that I said, “You know what? Get out of here. Let me finish folding the laundry and then, when I come out of my room, you can tell me all about the Wonder Pets, k?”

She stuck her lower lip out and glared at me a bit, but she listened and she left.  And it suddenly struck me, in that moment, this is MY room.  I can totally kick them out of here whenever I want to!

Let me warn you, here, folks. There’s a small caveat. If you don’t respect your kids’ personal space, don’t expect them to respect yours.  If my children kick me out of their bedroom, I leave. In fact, Joey sleeps on the top bunk and has respectfully requested that her bed be her own special place, where none shall enter. And none do.  Kimmie doesn’t feel that need for a private space, yet, but I have a feeling it’s coming, and it will probably be her bed. I’m cool with that.

So, I make sure I respect their space, and suddenly realized that the major benefit of this is that they will respect MY space. And that’s when the rules sprang up around my bedroom. 

Let me tell you how great this has been for my family. I can make my bed in the morning, and no one messes it up until I turn down the sheets at the end of the day. And when I hit the hay, Barbie is safely stowed somewhere else in the house.  I can complete an entire thought on paper; several of them, in fact, because my kids don’t barge in every four seconds anymore. And, perhaps most importantly, I have a safe place where I can go to get away from the madness for a few minutes if I need to. 

I have a retreat, an escape from the rest of the world. Amazingly enough, since I’ve begun to encourage my children to treat my space with respect, I have been having an easier time of respecting it myself. Right now, in fact, my bed is made and all the laundry is in the hamper. My desk is almost completely cleaned off. My rocking chair is patiently waiting for my butt to take up residence when I've got a spare minute or two. 

Another amazing side effect of this? My kids are treating their own space with a little more respect. In fact, Joey helped her daddy clean up the toys that were lying on her floor AND helped vacuum the other day. Shocking. 

So guess what my next challenge is? Yep! Stop using your bedroom as storage for things that have no other home, and pretend it’s your own retreat. Spruce it up, clean it up, and take care of it. Make whatever rules around it that will work for your family. You’ll be overjoyed to find your blood pressure dropping a few notches just by crossing the threshold of your bedroom, after a while.