Home office space: a love/hate story

I have become my college mentor. Her daughters and I used to tease her for overcommitting. (Note to young people: oh, how we do end up eating our words as time marches on.) She was always busy, not with crafty mom stuff or with a formal job, but with various committees and initiatives. That’s how we met, actually. She was my Pi Beta Phi alumnae shadow advisor when I was an officer.

Sometime after I graduated, I went for a visit and she showed me around their upstairs redo. In all the renovation, she hadn’t made a formal office for herself. The trend at the time (the mid 90's) was to expand and make a uni-tasked space for everything. Magazine spreads were full of fancy home office ideas. Yet, her office was a well apportioned closet with a window between her daughters’ bedrooms. I asked why. By this time I had learned that Sherri’s advice was well worth seeking.

She told me that it was her job as a mother to stay in her children’s sphere, although not necessarily in their business. She didn’t directly monitor everything they did. She didn’t hover. But since she was in their space, she heard, she felt, she anticipated, she deterred. She was available to them. She knew about their lives without interceding out of habit. And she still had her own pursuits.

I remembered this, and a fair few other bits of wisdom that she passed on to me, when I had my own children. In England, I officed in the foyer and then the kitchen. In Texas, we have one of those 60's ranch houses with a long hallway, part of which has a large window alcove. I put my office in the alcove. The children’s bedrooms are directly behind me.

And it works just as Sherri said it would. As a mother, I love my office arrangement. Most of the time, I even love it as a writer. But this arrangement does not work for deadlines.

My children are typical. They bicker, often. It is usually low level bickering, sometimes about whether they are bickering. Regardless of how normal all this is, it does not aid concentration.

I kick them outside, but today the rain started again. (This is Houston, just after the flooding.) I have a few remote offices — a coffee shop and a Tex-Mex restaurant —which I can use in a pinch and if someone else is here. I also have some noise canceling headphones given to me by my thoughtful and problem-solving husband. But sometimes, none of my zigs work. If I’m not on a deadline, I just put work up until later. But if I am, “Argggggggggg!” (That’s my Charlie Brown not-kicking-the-football scream.)

Today, I have a deadline at the start of summer in a post Memorial Day 2015 flooding thunderstorm when I might lose power and/or have to bail something out. I should add a few more g’s to that arggg.