There was a time when I wouldn’t sleep at my Dad’s house because I didn’t want to. Now, having grown old enough to put aside the typical grudges we hold as teens, I don’t sleep there because I can’t.
For the past three years, every time I’ve tried to fall asleep in my childhood bedroom I’ve woken up in the middle of the night saddled with an allergy attack so intense its generated sounds cause my father to shoot up from bed and dart into my room at a rate faster than I’ve ever seen him move. The amount of Benadryl I take prior to going to bed only slightly impacts the amount of hours that pass before I wake up wheezing and bleary-eyed, covered in hives and almost completely unable to breathe. I have tried inhalers and high doses of Zyrtec, anti-dust mite bedding encasings and hypoallergenic sheets. My Dad has even bought a HEPA air purifier and changed the air vent in my room—twice. None of this seems to have any effect; every time I spend more than an hour or so in my bedroom, I end up completely succumbing to my allergies.
My allergist tells me that I am allergic to my dog, the dog I’ve had since I was a kid. I got him for my 9th birthday, and before going off to college I never had any issue with pet allergies. But according to my allergist, this is a very normal occurrence—often times kids go off to college and come back completely allergic to the pets they grew up with. Aside from learning from your mistakes and having a higher tolerance for your parents, “growing up” apparently also entails developing a hyperactive immune system incapable of withstanding childhood comforts.
My dog is old now, almost 16. He is completely deaf and almost blind. For the past four years, my Dad has sardonically joked that this Christmas will be his last. He still barks at the mailman—when he can notice that he’s there—and dutifully begs for food at the dinner table every night. But now I can’t pet him or hug him the way I used to—I can’t really touch him at all. Sometimes, he looks at me with this meaningful look, a look that says, “Why don’t you pet me any more?” It’s the look of an old friend, a lover pushed aside. It makes me want to cry. So I try not to look at him at all, and when my Dad says again, for the fifth year in a row, that this might be his last Christmas, I laugh halfheartedly just like I always have.
Frequently it feels as if I have three lives: the real every day one, in San Francisco, with a steady job and a loving boyfriend and an organic-only corner store; the one I cultivated in New York, centered around media and journalism, brimming with iPhone-strapped blogger friends; and the one I left behind in Pennsylvania at age 18, the one to which my childhood bedroom serves as a shrine. There is nothing left in that room that matters to me, nothing I need to continue on with my shiny new life in San Francisco. It is a room full of spare items of clothing I will never wear again, dinky softball trophies and academic medals, posters of Dave Matthews Band, boxes of books I’ve read and papers I’ve written and ticket stubs from movies I saw in 2003. That I haven’t slept in my room for two years without waking up in the middle of the night choking seems as good a reason as any to dismember the shrine, outfit the bed with clean guest-appropriate sheets and stash the keepsakes in the garage for a time more outfitted for nostalgia. Being in that room now, its contents so unchanged while I myself have endured so many different apartments and jobs and boyfriends and iterations of self, simply makes me sad. Keeping it so intact is like wearing a wedding band for years after being widowed.
In a way, my bedroom remains the same for people other than me; I know my Dad is not fond of the idea of switching out the bed, or sending all of my books to the basement. When I told my Dad I couldn’t stay over on Christmas Eve, he made a face like I’d punched him in the gut. This is part of growing up: reminding your parents that the growing up has happened, but doing it delicately, in a way that lets them still sleep at night. It is strange to be a kid wearing kid gloves, to handle our parents with such care, but they are human too–fragile and susceptible to nostalgic fits. So I promise I will come over early Christmas morning, wearing pajamas and cradling a mug of coffee: it’ll be just like I’d slept over.
When Maddie was born, my parents knocked out the closet in my bedroom to add on to my Stepmother’s office and make a bedroom for her. It barely fits a crib, a changing table and a dresser. I’m thinking this Christmas (my dog’s last), when Maddie turns six months old, I’ll suggest to my Dad that they turn my bedroom into a room for her; soon she’ll be too old for a space so small. I live 3,000 miles away in San Francisco, with a job and an apartment of my own, and preserving that shrine isn’t important to me anymore. I picture how the conversation will go. “Maddie can have my room,” I’ll say to my Dad. “I’m only home a few times a year, and I get hives when I sleep in there anyway.” He might consider it for a moment, but I know he’ll turn me down. Hives or no, he’ll keep trying to make my bedroom a space I can come back to when I’m home, keep installing air filters and changing the sheets and hoping that one day I’ll be able to sleep in it again without my airways closing up. I don’t think that day will come, but I’m not going to tell him that; eventually, he’ll figure it out on his own.
First two photos from Olivia Bee’s Bedrooms series
So you had a dog growing up and at some point you fell to the dark side and became a cat person? There is hope for you yet then…