Mary E. Potter - A Room of His Own 汉译

Unmistakable noises are coming through my bedroom wall. Now a scuffling, now a bumping, a long, drawn-out scraping. “John, are you moving furniture in there? Again?” I call. The wall muffles his “yes” but does not filter out of his voice the tinge of excitement.<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />

I am not upset by these impulsive rearrangements, just amused at their frequency. I remember my own feelings when I was 13 as he is—the startling, rapid evolution of body and mind and emotions, the need to invent and reinvent yourself through clothes, hairstyles and the arrangement and decor of your room.

Amid the smothered thuds I remember how much John longed for the privacy of his own domain, how he took me aside two years ago when he was sharing a room with his younger brother, Robert. “Mom,” he said, “can I please have a room of my own? I could use Jeff’s. He won’t mind.”

It was true that Jeff had graduated from college that past June and had flown from the nest. But would he mind if the place where he had spent countless hours growing up was yanked out from under him? Would he feel ousted from the family, barred from ever coming home again?

But beyond his feelings, would I mind? That room was so much a part of our lives over the many years that Jeff had been our only child. In it I taught him to read; we constructed architectural wonders out of blocks and set up elaborate desks. It was where Jeff perfected his artwork and struggled with college applications. It was the place where I told him a thousand stories and where we had a thousand talks.

As close as we were, though, the time came when Jeff needed a door between us, a space of his own to grow in. The door to that bedroom would be shut most of the evening, behind it the muffled sound of a radio or the clack of his secondhand manual typewriter as he banged out one of his marathon letters.

I knew those letters to friends must have been filled with thoughts and opinions Jeff did not share with me. His life was spreading into areas that had nothing to do with home and family. I no longer could—or should—know everything about him.

As conscientious parents, we strive to foster independence. But when it happens, when you pause outside that door and look at the blank panels it is always a little unsettling.

It turned out that getting Jeff’s permission to change the room was easy. “Of course,” he said. “It would be selfish of me to hold on to it.” Then his voice softened. “Mom, I won’t be living at home again—you know that.” Behind his glasses, his eyes were lit with all the love that has passed between us over the years. There were no doors closed here—they had all opened up again.

Then John and I jumped into the task of cleaning out closets and drawers, dispatching all the things Jeff had left behind. Playbills, and snapshots, a withered boutonniere, old report cards that stung me with pride a stack of homemade thank-you cards from the second-grade Spanish class Jeff volunteered to teach.

Suddenly, amid all the upheaval my throat caught. There, in a pile of assorted sketches, was a pencil drawing of T-Bird—Jeff’s beagle, dead these many years—curled up asleep. Jeff’s rendering was so evocative I could almost feel the dear old dog’s satiny warm ears. And in that room, with Jeff’s things heaped around me, I could almost touch the little boy I knew was gone forever.

But we accept-at least we say we do. All of parenting is a series of letting go by degrees. The child walks and runs and rides a bike; he is stricken with the pangs of first love that we are powerless to kiss away. Then he is driving a car, and we are falling asleep before he gets home, alert, even in our dreams, to the sound of his motor gearing down.

I looked at the room around me and, in my heart, I let it go. To hold on would be, as Jeff said, selfish. Now it was time for John, shouldering through the door with an armload of his things, his eyes bright with the promise of independence, to disappear behind the door. It was time for the letting go to begin again.