When J was a in middle school, she dreamed of having papasan chair in her room. This was part of a re-decoration plan and she often showed me sketches of her what she imagined her room would look like in its ideal state. This chair would always have a place there - it was meant to be her physical cocoon. She desperately sought comfort in the part of her life that she felt she still had some agency while chaos ruled supreme in our family.
We would often stop by at Pier 1 to check out the papasan chair in question but we could never quite pull the trigger. Sometimes, we checked out the ads in Craigslist too. I can't remember what made me unwilling to indulge the kid in a rather modest ask, why I could not help her re-decorate her space as she wanted to. But the guilt has remained with me ever since. That period of my life is a blur of stress, anxiety and hopelessness - and I am glad I no longer remember the painful minutiae anymore. Somewhere in the midst of that and on auto-pilot I continued to raise J - making sure that the bottom did not fall off her life. That meant preparing meals, school, after-school activities, volunteering and generally staying close to her mentally. Talking to her as much as I could and as much as she would allow me to.
J's vision for her room's renewal started with simple things like a coat of fresh paint and a few pictures but as time passed and I did not jump to help her with the project, her vision of the ideal room morphed to become more difficult and abstract - harder to deliver. It was not as if she was asking for more material things to fill it will but for me to put more energy into her project - find a certain kind of mirror at the thrift store, help her complete a collage that she had started and so on, think about the best color for her walls and so on.
It was as if we were both pulling away from the center of a realistic vision for different reasons. I wanted her to give a quick win - spend half a day on this and make her dream come true. That was about all the mental capacity I had and it did not feel nearly enough. In response to my reluctance to launch, J wanted to create the most ambiguous plan for what it would take to make her room "perfect" that it would take an unknown amount of time on my part to see that vision come to reality.
We were both hungry for comfort and peace in our lives - I was choosing the fast food route and J was insisting on haute cuisine and eating deliberately. So that redecoration project never saw light of day and she never had her papasan chair - to this day her room remains as it was when we first moved in to our house. Reading about Pier 1 closing all its retail locations and J being back at home in her old room brought back an unexpected flood of memories.
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