I’ve been tidying up and cleaning, but as you can see from the photo, my space is still rather cluttered and congested. Still, at least it’s clean and less of a mess than it was! The trouble is, this little bit of space is probably the most intensely used space in our whole house – and as you can see, it’s tiny!

I work in here, sew in here, knit in here, listen to the radio and generally chill out in here. All my fabric, quilting books, knitting and sewing patterns, yarn….everything is stuffed in here. It’s probably my very favourite place in the whole house – my sanctuary from fractious teenagers, MY SPACE!

I’be been waiting for days to take this photo – but it’s been totally fogged in round here of late – typical Zurich November weather (yuk!) and it has been actually too dark to take a photo – it’s still a way darker photo than I would like, but if you look closely, you will see a small shaft of sunlight recorded for posterity. This is the first time I’ve seen the sun since I came back from Houston over a week ago. I think this must be a very bad place to live if you suffer from SADS – because it even starts to get me down and I’m normally my own little ray of sunshine!! What you can’t see on the photo are the two velux windows built into the sloping roof – which mean that I get to catch any sun that’s going. Without them I would, in all honesty, be working in a cupboard. But I’m not – and it’s lovely.

I think it’s so important that we stay at home work at home women have some space that we can call our own – even if that space is as tiny as mine is. Nobody would ever question the importance of teenagers having their own space – and I actually think it’s probably even more important for mothers to have their own space too. I mean, family life does sometimes get a bit much, right – and if you’ve got nowhere to run away to now and then for a little bit of sanity, then I for one would probably go bonkers fairly quickly.

It’s so nice to have somewhere that’s mine, that’s full of my stuff and does not get encroached upon by other people’s junk. I don’t want to have to fight for a computer to use or continually shift left-behind homework or other people’s discarded dirty socks. I do that quite enough in other parts of the house, thank you very much!

So here’s to sanity and a room of my own!

Helen

This entry was posted on Monday, November 14th, 2011 at 5:27 pm and is filed under Places. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.