My son’s bedroom floats alone on a quirky floor of its own between the ground floor and the first floor, branching off our townhouse like a tree-house. The four yellow, wooden letters stuck to his door announce who sleeps behind it. But the letter “L” often goes missing, leaving just “Uca,” which, until only recently, was how my son pronounced his name. He peels it off the door; we tape it back on.
My son’s bedroom is a patchwork quilt of squares of our lives haphazardly sewn together. While my husband has the last word on where to store the wok in the kitchen, I’m in charge of our son’s room. In trying to create an oasis for my son, I’ve also made it one for myself, often retreating to it in challenging moments of motherhood. Here, I am reminded that a two-year-old is more entitled to a floor fit than his mother.
Luca and I are both growing up in this room. In it, I’m continually put to test as a mother. I have spent as much time changing his diapers in this room as I have taking his temperature. I have spent countless nights rocking him to sleep in it and cursing its creaky floorboards as I transfer him from my chest to his bed. I have ignored his screaming protests to stay longer by his side before bedtime, and wrung my hands as I wait for him to fall asleep on his own. I have reluctantly stood outside his door as babysitters will occasionally put him to bed, and envied their ease in lulling him to sleep. I have thrust him into the arms of my husband when I want nothing more than to be relieved of night duty. In hair-tugging moments, I have plopped him onto his mini-director’s chair for a few reflective seconds. Yet I spy on him every night while he lightly snores, and revel at how angelic he looks tucked into his sleep sac. I groan every morning when he crows with the roosters - yet I secretly revel in no longer having to set an alarm clock.
I fill his bedroom’s picture frames with photographs of people who are guiding us both as he grows up. The collage of photos from his first year glues grandparents on top of siblings on top of godparents. I hang up prayers in Italian that his great aunts want him to recite before bedtime. Two framed posters show caricatures of cats and dogs dressed in various athletic clothes with names of their sport typed in Italian at their paws. At sixteen, I would have never imagined that these exotic, Italian posters that hung in my bedroom and seemed so foreign then would hang in the room of my half-Italian son now.
His bookcases once held my tomes on Roman history and Italian politics next to binders of newspaper articles published with my byline. Now, he can select Goodnight, Moon, Curious George or Pimpa from their shelves. A poem written by my husband’s colleague anticipates the excitement we felt as new parents before he was born. A photograph of us when he was just three days old shows me looking tired but relieved to have my new son asleep on my shoulder.
The chest of drawers on which we change his diaper was a gift from his grandparents from an antique shop in Brussels. I fill its drawers with generous hand-me-downs and adorable clothes that I have spent too much money on and know he’ll grow out of too quickly. The room’s rug comes from a trip to Iran where I sipped tea with my husband while a salesman flipped multicolor, magical carpets like pancakes in front of us.
At the center of his room are two beds. The first is an all-white, wooden crib with a menagerie of stuffed animals perched around its edges as his gatekeepers. The second is an Imperial-style bed squeezed into the room’s tiny alcove like a boat’s sleeping quarters. His father slept in this bed throughout his university years. It’s now the forum on which we read our son his bedtime stories.
He will pat his two-year-old hand no bigger than a sand dollar on the blue-striped bedspread and order us to sit down. He will listen with the intensity of a telephone operator to stories of naughty George and adventurous Babar. Eventually, after rubbing his eyes, he will hug me like a koala, and faintly repeat each name of the long list of family and friends that I recite to him every night in a simple prayer. I sing him to sleep, digging up a cappella ditties from my college days.
On a recent morning, I found Luca straddling the sides of his crib like a praying mantis. Soon, we’ll have to transfer him from the little bed to the big bed. But, for now, imagining what lies ahead of us as parents, I’ll happily settle for dilemmas such as super-gluing the letter “L” on his bedroom door. He won’t be “Uca” for long.
