Equalibrium and disequalibrium

[pegkerr]

I mentioned that things are going rather well with Delia lately. This is a pleasant change.

Which means that it must be time for Fiona to enter disequalibrium, and right on schedule, that is what has happened. Come to think of it, she was in an equally bad state when school started last year. She has come back from camp mentally rumpled, with a tendency toward teariness--she has cried herself to sleep the least three nights. And she can't in the least explain why; she is perplexed at her own moodiness and has no idea what is going on.

She is also insisting, even more stridently, that she wants her own room.

This makes me want to cry myself.

I think we have definitely entered puberty. I don't feel ready for this.

I can't give up my office entirely.

Damnation.

Comments

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Have you guys looked into some of the divider sorts of options that places like Ikea have? Maybe having her own space would be okay, if it's just not possible to have her own room.

[pegkerr.livejournal.com]

That has been mentioned, and I'd like to do something. Part of the problem is that the girls have so much damn stuff.

Rob and the girls really do not see this as a problem (I really am fighting a losing battle). But it really limits how much rearranging in the room we can do. Yeesh.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

One of the very best dividers I have ever seen is a kind of 'wall' with shelves and containers. If the room can possibly be divided, with one of these setups, the girls could get their stuff organized AND have their own space.

Target also has them, or at least some Targets do.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

That's the best idea I've seen so far.

Other options seem to be getting rid of the junk in the basement and moving your office in there (if you're worried about the non-code windows in a sleeping area) or building a playhouse that will at least provide some private space.

Up until I was twelve (when I left India and got my own room) my parents and I lived in a one-room space. Literally, one room with three beds on one side and a sort of living room in the rest of it, no dividers. I survived by making the local library and some outdoor hang-outs my private space.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

I did not live in those circs, but I lived in a very small house with far too many people--especially when half-siblings showed up and needed to be shoehorned in. my sister and I fought hideously. I too learned to hang at the library, and in a tree--my sister, the popular one, ended up spending a lot of time at her friends'. So I sympathize with the girls' wish for more space...and I sometimes think if we'd just had cubbies dividing our room so we had the semblance of privacy, and our own things there and a bit of our own taste instead of everything-shared-everything-pink, we would have done better.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

I hung out in a tree too! No wonder we get along so well.

[aome.livejournal.com]

I agree with the others that you should keep your office, and let Fiona carve out a private as-needed space somewhere else (or even a changeable space, depending on what other people are doing at the moment. Might even involve her sitting on the porch or the back yard if the weather is reasonable). However, if she expresses interest in a 'divider' of some sort in her room, maybe even a Japanese screen of some sort, you can make "getting rid of stuff" the obvious requirement, pointing out that it won't work otherwise.

I remember entering the want-to-cry-for-no-reason stage, and it was unnerving. Time to start finding some books on the subject for her, maybe.

[norabombay.livejournal.com]

You know, a basement? Is super cool as a place to live when you are 12.....

[genealogygirl.livejournal.com]

My sympathies! Elizabeth sometimes seems like 4-going-on-14 to me, and I can only imagine what you must be feeling on the very brink of real puberty. This parenting gig is much harder than I ever dreamed. I don't know about you, but I have so much more understanding of my own parents now. I guess that is the way of it, isn't it?

Is it possible for you to create some office space in another room of the house? Perhaps in the master? An attic or basement? A corner of the living room?

Good luck!

[norabombay.livejournal.com]

For a short moment, I thought you were talking about me. Then I realized that Elizabeth has to be _your_ daughter.

Er, and that my name on LJ is not, er, my real name.

It's just a bad situation.

[pegkerr.livejournal.com]

There is no attic, the basement is unfinished, stuffed full with Rob's junk, one room with non-code windows and a huge octopus furnace.

There is no solution, other than giving up my office or moving.

[pegkerr.livejournal.com]

And we're already using a corner of the living room for the girls' computer.

[genealogygirl.livejournal.com]

Oh, that's too bad! I'm sure you've thought through all the options. I just figured if you could even carve out a small corner for yourself somewhere, even if it wasn't a separate stand-alone room, it might not be such a hard thing to give up. I hope a solution will present itself somehow, because I know I would go nuts if I had to give up my space.

[pegkerr.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I lived in basement as a kid, myself.

But not our basement. It's one unfinished room, stuffed with Rob's junk, with non-code windows and a huge octopus asbestos furnace.

[graygirl.livejournal.com]

Is there anywhere else your office could go?

[pegkerr.livejournal.com]

No, there really isn't.

[graygirl.livejournal.com]

Drat. Build her a tree house room. ;)

[althea_valara]

I think my parents just about died when I asked for my own bedroom as an 8th grade graduation gift. I got it, though--they built one in the basement for me. I lived down there until I moved out at the age of 25. I'm now wondering if it was hard for my dad to give up the work area he had for years. We just moved it to the other end of the basement, so he didn't lose it entirely, but that still was a change. I don't think he used it as much as you likely use your office, but still. It had to be an adjustment for him.

I don't think you should have to give up your office entirely. That doesn't seem fair to you, and your needs are just as important as hers. But hopefully you can work out something so that everyone is happy, even if there's some compromising that has to be made.

[jonquil.livejournal.com]

I, too, have an adolescent. The thing that they are making the fuss about may not actually cause (or alleviate) the fuss. If you could wave a wand and give her a new room, it is at least possible that a new crisis would emerge.

You can say "no" and still be a good mother. You can occasionally put your needs ahead of a child's and still be a good mother.

Good mother is NOT equivalent to martyr; the friends I had whose mothers were martyrs said that the martyrs always expected payback.

[janni.livejournal.com]

Well said, all of it.

You should not have to give up your office. It's your workspace; your writing is a part of your career, too.

And having a place of one's own can actually make one a better parent, I think.

But even if it didn't, you deserve that space and are in every way entitled to it.

[callunav.livejournal.com]

What jonquil said.

[litgirl101.livejournal.com]

Jonquil makes good point. As a teacher of adolescents, I agree that asking for her own room may not even be the real issue and getting it may solve nothing. It's her age, her hormones, etc. Address the child herself, with love, reassurance, and patience, as best you can and as much as she'll let you. That's all you can do. Girl siblings that close in age will fight when they are together so much - I know firsthand - you can ask Dave, he witnessed atrocious spats between my sister and me! - but I would have felt very lonely without my sister in my room. When she would go out for the evening (she is two years older than me) I could never sleep until I heard her crawl into bed. And now, she is my best, most trusted friend, as long as we spend less than 48 hours together. At about 48 hours, the carrieage becomes a pumpkin again and we scrap! But sharing a room did not cause that.

[callunav.livejournal.com]

I've been thinking about this, and there's a few other things I want to say, though I'm not really sure how relevant they are; they all have to do with my own childhood as an anti-model.

The first is that my brother (four years older than I am) was completely estranged from me, even for the 14 years we lived in the same house, let alone after he moved out. We had separate rooms, and separate lives and separate worlds, and I would have given anything for something in our environment to force us into closer contact with each other. I know your household is, thank heaven - or rather, thank you and Rob - very different, so maybe there's no relation there, but it springs to mind.

Second, my parents were very....rationally permissive parents. They were sensible. They never forbade me anything unless they had a really good reason to. In your place, they would certainly have sacrificed the office to make a second room. And my parents were sucky parents. This teaches me that there's no relationship between accomodation and good parenting.

And finally...one of the revolutionary things I had to learn for myself in my early twenties was about moods. I never really knew that people just had /moods/. There can be lots of reasons for them, they're absolutely real experiences, but they're simply feelings. I didn't know that when I was growing up. Everything eas either logically defensible or else argued out of existence. There was no such thing as 'just being in a bad mood.'

There are - oh, any number! - of things I wish had been different about my childhood, but that's one of them. If you can acknowledge Fiona's feelings and be sympathetic to them without leaping to either fix the problem or prove the problem nonexistant, then from where I stand, you'll be giving her an enormous gift.

[seajules]

I have three younger sisters. My father is in the military, and we never lived in a house in which at least two of us did not share a room. As the eldest, I was always given the option of my own room when there were enough rooms to go around. However, such an arrangement never lasted for longer than two months at a stretch, because my two middle sisters were...tempermental, to say the least, and did everything in their power to ensure they were the ones with single rooms, including making the life of my youngest sister absolute hell until I insisted she room with me to spare her.

Of course, my revenge was often to insist on rooming with the youngest when we all had to double up, leaving the two middle sisters to deal with each other as roommates.

One of the middle sisters grew up to run smack into the reality that throwing tantrums would get her nowhere with anyone not in her family. The other, despite numerous lessons, still has not learned. Having their own rooms made them no less tempermental, and I think my parents giving in only reinforced bad habits that got them in trouble later in life.

As for me, my own bad habit became automatically compromising in any similar situation, making myself the martyr, and resenting the hell out of whomever I was sacrificing for. It took many years to stop that passive-aggressive trend, and I still struggle with it on occasion.

Puberty's a rough patch. Adolescence is a rough patch. So is adulthood. It seems clear to me that space of your own is a proven necessity on your part, and only a theoretical balm on Fiona's. I staked out a corner of the living room sofa as my own space when I was a teen. Everyone had their scheduled TV time, and when no one was scheduled I'd read in my corner and the family rule was that no one was to disturb me. You might try such an option with Fiona. It would address her need for space without taking yours away, and also lead to less hard feelings when un-space-related trouble arises.

[starfishchick]

One of the middle sisters grew up to run smack into the reality that throwing tantrums would get her nowhere with anyone not in her family. The other, despite numerous lessons, still has not learned. Having their own rooms made them no less tempermental, and I think my parents giving in only reinforced bad habits that got them in trouble later in life.

As for me, my own bad habit became automatically compromising in any similar situation, making myself the martyr, and resenting the hell out of whomever I was sacrificing for. It took many years to stop that passive-aggressive trend, and I still struggle with it on occasion.

I'm really glad you wrote this - I could have written it myself.

[ali-wildgoose.livejournal.com]

Do not give up on the office! I don't know the layout of your house, but even if it means artificially creating a fort in a corner of the livingroom with bookshelves and a sheet, hang on to the office-ness! Though I know Fiona is insisting on her own room right now, if she looks back on this as an adult and sees that her insistance resulted in further delays in your writing career, she'll be a very sad boo.

Have you talked to her about your side of the dilemma, or is she disinterested/too young to understand?

[peacockharpy.livejournal.com]

I'm so torn on this, myself. I once had a defined space for writing. Then Meg was born, and my writing room became her nursery. (We have a three-bedroom house; the third bedroom was always a mutual project space.) If we have another child (not yet decided), the current guest-and-project room will likely become Meg's room, so the smaller room can be a nursery again. (The difference in child ages will pretty much force that issue; plus, as I've said, the current guest-and-project room isn't really an office for me, though I sometimes set up a card table and work in there.)

So I've had to find a new personal space, both for writing and working (copyediting).

Personally, I've solved this problem by switching to a mobile "office" -- my laptop. I had to give up certain things, like a personally owned-and-decorated space, and of course my bookshelves have to stay in one place. But the tradeoff is that I've gotten more ability to move -- to the library, the coffee shop, wherever. Because I often need to get out of Meg's reach to work (when Mr. PH is home, of course), this has worked for me. I've worked at the kitchen table, in the guest room, at Starbucks, at various Panera restaurants, at the library.

It's not a solution that works for everyone, and of course if I could manage it I'd prefer my own close-the-door office space. But it's working for now.

(This is not meant to say that this is what YOU should do... it's only telling you what has worked for me.)

[peacockharpy.livejournal.com]

...and I now realize that I used the word "personal" in various forms way too many times through that entry, which possibly betrays the fact that I'd rather have a personal space... *grin*

[chance88088.livejournal.com]

I think part of the problem is that you seem to be waffling on this, so she keeps bringing it up hoping to tip you over into giving way. I shared a room with my younger sister the whole time I was growing up and it was made pretty clear to us early on there wasn't going to be any changing, so we might as well stop talking about it and learn to work it out.

It wasn't always perfect, but we did quickly stop longing for something that wasn't going to happen. (There was space that probably could have been converted, but for whatever reason my parents didn't want to go that route.)

I like the cubby/divider suggestion. Is there a room that the girls could move to that's bigger than the one they have now that would function well as a bedroom? (Or possibly if your bedroom is bigger swap with them?)

Good luck with it.

[janni.livejournal.com]

When I hit fourteen, I announced to my sister that we were going to rearrange our room into two separate sections, with the dresser a barrier between my side and hers, so that it would be like we had separate rooms even though we didn't. Which seemed to take care of things for us.

My parents had a separate office, and never expressed any willingness to give it up for us, and looking back I think diverted the subject when I brought it up.

And I survived just fine, and in no way feel abused for this. :-)

[alfreda89.livejournal.com]

A simple sideline...you might ask your doctor if it's all right to give her extra calcium/magnesium. Kids at her age are horrible at eating, skipping meals, eating junk, and they need cal/mag for growing body parts, and the mag to calm frayed nerves. I know one home ec teacher who spiked her kids food with cal/mag for years. And dropped an egg into her son's milkshake every day for six years, until he caught her at it.

I think after a week with no egg, he returned to her and admitted something was missing, and asked for the egg back. BUt he still never ate eggs as a meal.

A good nutritionist could make suggestions, or you could visit on-line sites.

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

I have no ideas for the room situation, but... The one time I remember bursting into tears for no reason was when I was fourteen (I was a late bloomer and hit menarche around then too). My mom figured it was puberty related, did not pester me for reasons (I'm sure she did ask why at least once, though), let me cry it out, didn't bug me (my mom's generally a much more touchy-feely person than I am) and then gave me a ride to school so I wouldn't be late. Nearly two and a half decades later, I remember it as one of her more shining parenting moments.