I have dreaded many words coming from the mouths of my children; “Mum, meet my new boyfriend, he’s in a slash metal band” and “you know that marble Auntie Ellie gave me? I think the baby just swallowed it,” are fairly high up that list. But my daughter came up with a new one recently that sent shivers of terror through my blood, and the immediate cancellation of my credit card.
“Mum,” she announced one day at breakfast. “I’ve decided to redecorate my bedroom. Myself.”
No part of this sentence contained even a grain of anything resembling ‘OK’. The main clue, I thought, lay in the prefix.
‘Re’ decorate. It is already decorated! You decorated it two years ago, remember? That time when I nearly collapsed from the paint fumes, spent a month covered in pink gloss, bankrupted myself and swore I would NEVER DO IT AGAIN? (Another clue there, in the word ‘never’. Never is not very soon, generally.) Why do you need to RE anything it? It already IS.
This, it turns out, is not the correct answer.
The correct answer, I have learned, is “OK sweetheart, let me take a day off (which will later turned into five days off) and pop to the DIY store with you to examine in great detail 400 almost identical shades of purple, before finally settling on the one that is “just right”, buying 10 litres of it (which will later turn out to dry darker than we expected, and thus be the ‘wrong shade of aubergine’ and be deemed ‘A DISASTER!!!’, thus meriting two days of crying and intensive Face Timing with, also crying, friends), plus brushes, plus paint roller, plus masking tape, plus regret, and then spend two weeks living in a landfill site, as every item of furniture, clothing and hair accessory is emptied out of your room, and into every other room. Yes. Let’s do that!”
It’s all good
The thing is, children’s bedrooms are THEIR space. The only space, if they are lucky enough to have their own room, that they can call their own. Where they can express themselves, and experiment with decoration, style, taste and mountains of unremovable Blu-Tac, in a relatively non-catastrophic way.
And so, while every atom of my being was opposed to the (re)decoration mission, I let it happen. Once every few years is not so much, really, and most 16-year-olds don’t want the same colours on their wall as they had when they were a mere, childish (pah!) 14.
Most importantly, now that it’s done, my daughter has her own space that she has made herself. She has learned how to sand, prepare, paint and clean up afterwards. And, by doing a huge amount of the work involved in the project, she has also learned why, when I hear “Mum, I am going to redecorate my room,” I pale. A lot.
I didn’t enjoy it. But then sometimes we have to let go, give in to it all, and let it happen. If it all goes horribly wrong there is always cheap white emulsion. That can hide a lot of dark aubergine.