Shades

I have painted many rooms.

Painting a room is hope. It is joy. Sins of the past are covered up and grace is granted.

I have painted many rooms.

The yellow nursery, with the perfect white crib and the blue rug, while we waited for September to come.

Then, the light blue nursery with zoo animals. For a perfect family, in a perfect home. Rocking in the white chair, drinking herbal tea. October this time. Oh, how I wish I could go back to that perfect home and that perfect family and that perfect life and stop all the bad decisions that were to be made. My decisions. If I could only turn back time and stay there, to that place.

And then, in an attempt to save the perfect family, new bedrooms outlined with wallpaper carefully selected, with so much hope and yet, hope lost so quickly that the images and the pattern have faded.  Except for the bean bag chair that looked like a baseball, which I remember so clearly. The perfect family faded away, too. Frantic, scary, failure, loss, shame.

A new space, a new home. Rooms, all painted in a creamy white, every room. Whites and grays. Except for my bedroom, painted a sunny, soft, yellow in defiance of all the others.  My room.  My haven.  My space, for a while. The yellow room where I fell to my knees in sadness when the love ended yet again, and my life could have ended but for the three-year old who toddled in wanting breakfast, and saved my life. That room. That three-year-old, who does not know what miracle he is, what miracle he performed, who is now a teenager and barely knows me.

And yet again, a new home, a borrowed home, not mine. Painting and painting and painting to make this mine, struggling to make it ours. Painting a lovely, soft, soothing blue over the bedroom walls to cover the chaotic, uneven, scrambled patterns. Finally. Peace. Rest. A new bed. A new marriage. A new dog. Happiness. Calm. Love.

For a while.

Shades.  So many shades. So many bedrooms.

Paint. Love. Life. It’s all temporary.

I have painted so many bedrooms, and yet I have nowhere to call home.