I’ve been thinking a lot about space lately. Not outer space, the great beyond, final frontier. Just SPACE. Room to do stuff like read and write and stretch and live.

Recently we downsized. It has been quite the adjustment, one that has truly tested the boundaries of my family’s patience. At our old house, I had a desk in a giant finished room in the basement where I could go and write unhindered after the kids went to bed. Or even before they went to bed. For some reason, they just didn’t come down there that often when I was down there writing.

Now at the new house, the basement is full of boxes whose contents have yet to find a place upstairs. There just isn’t enough space for everything. It’s somehow easier to just leave all those boxes unpacked than to acknowledge that we have too much shit. I don’t know, maybe that isn’t it. Maybe we’re just lazy.

Anyway, the bottom line is this: at the moment, our children are supposed to occupy an entire second floor. Their rooms are a reworking of an attic apartment that has been turned into their rooms. There is still a full bath and working kitchen up there. They have a fridge, a TV. A microwave, an xBox. Awesome you say? You’d think so. You really would. But will they stay up there? No. They insist on taking over our TV every day and crying about having to sleep in their comfy beds, away from us.

That was really sweet for about the first two days. Now I just really need them to go to bed and quit making my life an unpredictable hell full of sleepless nights. Like, they come all the way down to OUR bathroom in the middle of the night instead of just peeing in their own, three-ten feet away from their respective beds. It makes no sense. Momma’s about to lose her mind.

So today I was mulling over my writing routine and my writing space (that is non-existent). And I decided, you know what? There’s a perfectly good desk in my daughter’s barely-used room. There are chairs in my kids’ rarely occupied TV room. There’s even a fridge I can stick my wine in. A microwave I can pop popcorn in. A TV I can put reruns of That 70’s Show on so I have background noise and no one will bug me because they’re afraid of the wind or a mouse or the boogeyman or whatever.

I hauled my wine, my laptop, my phone, and my cork screw up the stairs. I put on my favorite sit-com. I plugged in my laptop and poured my glass of wine. And you know what? It was the best writing space ever for about two whole minutes. Until both kids, a dog, and a husband came up to join me.