Deer In Headlines II

By Gery Deer

A child’s bedroom represents much more than four walls, a bed, and a closet door that never quite closes right. Strip away the posters, the overflowing toy box, the rock tumbler they begged for but only used once — and what’s left is something quietly monumental: the first incarnation of personal identity, in its purest form.

To a child — especially one trying to decode their place in the world — their bedroom is personal. A place apart. Not because it’s off-limits to others, but because it feels like the only space in their universe that is truly, unquestionably, theirs. It’s one of the first places over which a young person has reasonably full control.

When I was a kid, my bedrooms weren’t luxurious or particularly large. From the age of 5, when I first got my own room, to about 25, when I left the farm for my first apartment, I had occupied four different rooms – in two houses. The one I had the longest was on the second floor of our small, Cape Cod farmhouse. Unlike the loft at the top of the stairs – which also once served as my bedroom – this one had a real door. Having a door offered independence and solitude — the kind you don’t realize is valuable until adulthood starts chipping away at your time and control like a sculptor with a new block of marble.

Except for food, my room was outfitted with everything I needed to hole up. There was a pair of hand-me-down twin beds, a tiny black and white TV sitting on a corner step stool, plenty of art supplies and books, and a JC Penney stereo system perched on a wobbly stand. All of these things, and the room itself, helped chisel out the person I’d eventually become. I also had a desk that became far more important that I could have predicted, although somehow my mom knew.

Around 1981, predicting the computers that would eventually occupy so much of my time, my mother insisted on getting me a large, wrap-around desk. The epidemy of 1980s techno-furniture, its wood frame sported a black, slate top, with just one lonely shelf above. It wasn’t fancy, just functional. As it turned out, that old desk, as much as the room it occupied, became my launchpad. My mother seemed to believe in things before me, and now — 43 years later — I’m sitting at that very desk as I type this for you.

Those who were there have said that, in many important ways, my office and personal study echo that childhood haven. I think what they mean is that my work and home offices are more than just organized – they’re curated. Every object has meaning and purpose: typewriters that don’t just tap out words but inspire my writing, photos and nick-nacks that remind me of family and events and highlight why I write, and lots of blue — a color that, for reasons I can’t explain, always made me feel… like me. I think we all need someplace like that, even if we don’t realize it.

In my old room, even if everything outside felt like chaos, even if fitting in at school was like trying to breathe underwater, I could always retreat to a place where I made the rules. Ask any of the nieces I grew up with and they’ll complain, as they did to my mother when we were kids, that I would never let them come up there.

We seriously underestimate how foundational a child’s room can be as they grow up. Like so many other children, my room gave me solace, but it also provided a launchpad from which to craft my life’s narrative — one where my voice mattered. It wasn’t just any room in any farmhouse. It was my room, my Fortress of Solitude – maybe yours was too.

I’ve arranged other spaces in the image of that room but, try as I might, nothing will ever be like that again. Sometimes I would give anything to be back there, with so little responsibility and so much to live for. I’d hear the bustle of my family downstairs and, just once more, my mother calling up the stairs, “Gery, supper’s on.”