Bioluminescence

Twelve + Thirteen

March 29, 2004

I was going through some pictures the other day. Pictures that I had neatly packed into a clear, plastic tub in an effort to be more organized. Unfortunately, the tub was thrown into the spare bedroom that is the home to all the homeless things in this house. Blossom wants desperately to have this room for her very own. She dreams of it every day. I, on the other hand, find that this room looms as something I would rather run from than challenge. There are boxes and papers and boxes of papers and books and outgrown clothes and things I am even afraid of in there. Blossom, though, has visions of what this room will be. It will be uniquely Blossom. Unfortunately, uniquely Blossom doesn't really seem to go over well with those who actually pay the mortgage on this house. I am fairly flexible, but I have had to dissuade her from such color options as all black, red with various horrifying trim colors and dark blue with equally horrifying trim colors. This is a small room with one window. It needs all the help it can get in the lightening and brightening department.

Blossom will be twelve this summer. While going through the pictures in this plastic tub, I came across a picture taken when I was thirteen. My best friend, Dee Dee Fortin, took it and it is dated May 1979. I looked long at this picture. It was familiar, but suddenly I was seeing it through a different lens. My mother had redecorated this room and moved my sister into a different bedroom so that I could have a bedroom all my own. I remember her bringing wallpaper books home to peruse as she redecorated the entire house. We lived in an old Victorian house on the nicest street in town. A street lined with huge elm trees and wonderfully different, but equally nice houses from the same era.

I vaguely remember how it all came to be, but I really have no recollection at all of choosing wallpaper with columns of what appear to be blue cabbages up and down them. Neither do I remember choosing a glaringly blue carpet or a powder blue bed ensemble with more ruffles than any dress a Southern belle might wear. What I do remember is coming home from school one day, when I was twelve, and my mother opening the door to what was now my bedroom. I remember the feeling of freedom it evoked. No little sister muss and fuss. Just me and my Donny and Marie eight-tracks playing as loud as the player could manage. (Mind you, these were given to me by a friend who was a Donny and Marie fanatic and, at the time, I was under the impression that one must play what one has available. I actually much preferred Rod Stewart.) I felt like I was in some heavenly realm and I never wanted to go back to sharing a room with anyone. Of course, when I went off to college it became a necessity. I then married Beau and now only occasionally dream of having my own room.

I decided to set this picture aside to show Blossom what I looked like when I was about her age; hoping to give her some insight into the fact that I was not always a thirty-eight-year-old mother. When the girls came home from their piano lessons, I brought out the picture to show them. There I was, posed on the window sill of my bedroom. Thirteen. Skinny. Wearing my favorite shirt and framed by columns of blue cabbages. I was wondering what Blossom's response would be, but unprepared for it. Blossom was speechless. I looked at Birdie and Birdie spoke what Blossom was unable to.

"Mommy, you had boobage!"

Now I think I remember why that was my favorite shirt.