Personal Essay: The Dreamhouse
Why it took me until age forty to be ready for motherhood.
by Maude Allen
June 12, 2009
After ripping pages out of magazines and filling several notebooks with sketches, I came up with my design. The lower floor would be a kitchen, bath and living room and the top floor would be my bedroom suite. There would be a spiral staircase leading to
it and a hatch at the top like on a submarine that I could close at night. I would also have fire safety ladders hidden in the window seats, so if I ever needed to escape in a hurry I could. It took me about a year to imagine my boyfriend at my dreamhouse,
but eventually I did. I even added an imaginary office for him.
Shortly after that I began picturing kids hanging around outside. At first they were just neighborhood kids riding bikes that I would wave to from my dreamhouse garden. But one day I saw myself on my hands and knees digging, and there was a little girl next
to me. We were making holes and I was showing her how to put the plants into them.
It is now ten years later. My boyfriend has become my husband. He held my hand as we picked out curtains and doorknobs and even chairs for the beautiful home we moved into together. And while it took some time for me to warm up to the idea of setting up
house together, once I did, I became as obsessed with it as I had once been with my dreamhouse.
Our house is full of happiness rather than the dread I felt as a kid.But instead of using ideas from magazines to design our place, I ended up using the few happy memories of domesticity I did have. I'd always loved my best friend's house. Her mom decorated it in the '60s and then just left it the same for twenty years. By
the '80s, the once-bright colors had all faded to sun-washed pastels that spoke more of a busy happiness than neglect. That's what I decided to do too: decorate once and then marvel as things aged.
I also stole some ideas from the set of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood. Its simplicity always made me feel calm and seemed to reinforce all the nice things he had to say to me. (I have a feeling I am not the only person who cried harder when Fred Rogers
died than when certain members of my family did). And of course, I planted a garden, just like the one my mom and I used to work in together.
Our house is a beautiful, safe place full of happiness and possibilities rather than the fear and dread I felt as a kid. Sure, my husband and I fight sometimes and sometimes I get depressed despite the pastels everywhere, but it really has become the home
I always wanted. More importantly, after fourteen years I am finally convinced that I am not going to come home to find my husband shooting up with an underage hooker in our kitchen.
And that's how I, at age forty, found myself in the waiting room of a fertility clinic. The dreamhouse is built; the only thing missing now is the girl in the garden.
About the Author
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Maude Allen lives in New York. |
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