A room of one's own is good, but give me a personal chef instead, please!

I have learned to write just about anywhere. I always have a notebook and pen in my bag, and I can set up my laptop on a table, desk -- or even my lap. A room of my own is not necessary. Finding space to write is not my issue. 

My issue is in the kitchen. 

I know where it is and I function well in it. The fridge and cabinets contain food items to work with, and I know how to produce a good meal. It's just, well, there are days when I wish the meals would sort themselves out without input of any kind from me -- not thinking, planning, shopping, prepping or making. Just POOF, appear on a plate, ready for me to eat.  

I love good food, enjoy exciting flavours, and function best when I eat regularly. But, some days, the effort required to produce something decent is just too much, or seems to be too much, because, ultimately, hunger and good sense prevail and I get down to preparing the necessary meal. Not necessarily exciting, but functional. As I do so, I fantasize about what it might be like if I could simply get up from my writing place, walk to the dining table, sit down and eat (and enjoy) what has been plated for me without me having to think about it for even a nano second.

Think how much we could each accomplish if we had the staff that, say, Mark Carney, Canada’s Prime Minister, has, which must surely include drivers, housekeepers, chefs, personal assistants, and so on. He deserves every person, I am not begrudging him the support required to do his job. It’s just that I can imagine how I could do my job (which is living an ordinary life) if I had the equivalent in even scaled-down form -- an indulgent fantasy that amuses me while I peel potatoes and wash the broccoli. Bon appétit to me.

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A recent writing prompt sparked the piece below that indulges in a variation of my personal chef fantasy. The prompt was this brief quote pulled from Joanna Trollope's novel City of Friends: “If the supremacy of the mind meant that you left a coffee pot and a waiting mug among the papers on your desk and gave them no more thought after you had put them there, then so be it.” 

Note to Housekeeping on Checking Out, Written on Cream-coloured Linen Paper

Dear Housekeeping:

I am sorry that I have not permitted you to do your job in my room this past week, but, you see, this space is the only one in my life that I can control. At home, there are no locks on the interior doors and there is only one bathroom and I cannot claim even that space — even when no one should, really, want to be in there with me, they enter as they wish. But here. Here I have the only key that opens the front door, as it were, and the bathroom — well, that is like my quiet shining kingdom with hot water that never runs out and a soft robe hanging on the door for my use, my use alone.

I come here because at home, while I own the house, I own none of the rooms or space it contains. You see, I work with my mind and my brain. I deal in thoughts and ideas, in imagination, these are my raw materials, but at home the focus is so much on meals and manners, on laundry and school schedules that I can never find the time I need to work, to think, to be me in the best sense. Because being me is not about the children I have birthed and am raising not so well. Being me is about my mind. I am my mind. My ideas are like precious children to me, though no one in my life understands this properly. But I understand those mind-children better than I do my flesh-and-blood progeny, yet my family and this world looks askance at this. It is just a fact. Why should it condemn me? It is ridiculous that a woman of my intellect should be denied her needs.

That is why I come here. Alone. On my own. No one to bother me. Not even you, dear House Keeper. I revel in this space in which the stack of take-out containers gets higher each day, in which the bed remains unmade and always open for my using should I need some respite from my work. I go between the desk and the bed as I choose, as I need — an untold luxury that is hardly that. Not luxury, but lifeline for me, a woman of the mind.

My mind. I want it. I need it. And here, in all its glory, I have it. Free of the demands of others. Free to be used as it should be and as I must — with gusto and delight, without limit.

Your presence in this room, dear Housekeeping, is not so much unwanted as it is unneeded. I use, with pleasure, the same one coffee cup that I shall rinse, once again, before I leave. You will know it by its presence on the desk. Clean-ish. And, you will know — well used, happily used, over and over again. No need for even such basic change as a new coffee cup when I am fully with my mind.

Please check under the pillow for my gratitude to you for your respectful absence, expressed in a way I hope is useful.

Until next year, same room, 

thank you for seeing me by never interrupting me.

Sincerely,

Jane Smith 

Woman, Writer & Thinker, and Mother of Three 

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Land acknowledgement: I respectfully recognize that I live on the original lands of Anishinaabe, Cree, Oji-Cree, Dakota and Dene peoples, and on the homeland of the Métis Nation. 

Photo by Odiseo Castrejon on Unsplash