If you ask where my home town is, I’ll tell you Poughkeepsie, New York.
That’s where I was born and where I returned for over twenty years of my adult life.
But if I’m being honest, it feels like my childhood really happened in the little town in western New York called Eden. I lived there from age nine to fifteen.
Eden is where I went from being a child to becoming a young woman. From seeing myself as the good girl who followed the rules to discovering that I was also really good at breaking them.
It was just my mother, my little brother and me when we moved into that old storefront bar on Main Street called The Garden of Eden.
But I don’t think of Eden as my “home town” because it was a dark time for me, one I refused to revisit, even in my mind, for many years.
Steph in her vomit-colored room
Until my very first coach prompted us to revisit our childhood room, and I wrote this piece:
***
There once was a little girl who was given her own room. Finally! Something she doesn’t have to share with her little brother.
The little girl opens the door to the room she’s been waiting for all her life, and her heart falls. The walls are the color of peach-pink-fuscia vomit.
“I can’t live inside these walls!” she cries.
Her mother promises they’ll paint it together. The little girl imagines her newly painted room in vivid detail: she’ll hang deep, blue tapestries from the ceiling and have piles of burgundy pillows on the bed, a Mediterranean oasis like in the books she’s read.
Days pass and the girl grows older. The paint does not arrive. The tapestries are never hung, and the room never feels like hers.
Still, she keeps waiting and hoping for her mother to buy the paint.
The little girl becomes a young woman. She knows fear in that room, terror, disappointment, disgust, self-loathing, shame, hatred and despair, all reflected by those ugly walls.
Every day the girl begs God to change her room. She prays for a miracle, promising that she will do whatever He asks, that she will stop sinning, that she will be good, if only He will make that room beautiful.
God never answers, and she knows that she is not good enough.
One day she leaves that room, swearing never to return.
Many years pass and the girl is grown. She finds a house with a room of her own, and paints the walls cobalt blue.
But she never forgets that ugly room. It haunts her. She begins to feel sorry for the room that was never painted, and one day, finds the courage to go back.
She pauses outside the door to her old room, bracing herself against that familiar, nauseating shade, and the shame of it. One deep breath, and she steps inside.
She blinks.
The walls are the same color, but it’s not only shame and anger in this room. There is love here – and wonder, discovery, devotion, peace, as well. Only she had been so focused on the ugliness that she couldn’t see it.
The little girl, now a woman, hasn’t returned empty handed. She carries a can of paint, a shimmering, silvery white.
Now she paints those walls, thanking every inch.
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