Architecture and other determinisms

I'm reading a book of theory right now, addressing the nature of space: is space an empty container, a naked stage on which we array ourselves and the objects and institutions that comprise our lived reality? Or is space imaginary, with identical bland furnished rooms understood to be intrinsically terrifying or exhilarating when they represent to us the pain of a visit to the dentist or the coming freedom of claiming a lottery prize? Is space some combination of material and experiential, as when Munchkin and I inhabit daycare differently, me from a vantage point some three feet higher than hers, oriented towards symbols and objects of hygiene and pedagogy and to adult faces, while she knows intimately the geography of the undersides of tables, of tiny chairs, of the quality of light when the shades are drawn and she 'lie down tummy' on her cot at naptime?

What I do know is this: my sense of my family and my home and my future have been shaken this week, much more than I expected, by simple things, material things: objects and space.

Tuesday, I gave away all the baby gear, to a massively pregnant, but definitely glowing, grad student in my department. We are decluttering our house this month, and it galled me to think that our attic was filled entirely with baby gear and Christmas decorations. That's it. So I thought, seeing as we'd decided to be a family of three, that I'd pass along the baby gear.

The student was enthusiastic, and grateful. I sent her an email enumerating the collection: deluxe pack'n'play playpen, baby gym, front carrier, sling, Bumbo chair, exersaucer, diaper genie, infant toys, car mobile. We set a date and time for the pickup. Immediately, I became regretful and anxious: what if, by giving away all this stuff, I foreclosed the possibility of another baby? No matter I still don't want another baby. It was the stuff that did me in--touching the toys, smelling the residual milky-with-hint-of-Ivory-Snow smell of the laundered sling, hearing the distinctive clatter of the exersaucer's array of toys. Tactile memory. Now, I remember that I found those times very hard, and I didn't much like that period of then-Miss Baby's infancy. She didn't sleep, she yelled all the time, I was weepy and scared. But the stuff! I agonized for days, by which I mean I agonized during sleepless nights. Should I give it away? How could I not? Finally, it occured to me that I might demand right of first refusal, and so I did. Before you pass this along to someone else, I asked, could you check if we might need it back?

Discussing this with Pynchon, we got to talking about the new house, seeing as it's the move that's prompting my wild giveaways and possession purges. We started to imagine ourselves in the space, and Pynchon described his vision of the renovated third floor loft, a possible large-scale master bedroom for us, complete with full bath and deep closets. I started to freak out: the second floor has three bedrooms already! The main floor has a formal living room, a formal dining room, a den, a kitchen, a bathroom! We couldn't move up to a loft while Munchkin was still small: who wants to leave their kid on a different floor to sleep? But then when she was older it would be so much nearer to the time when she might move out, why would we need yet another bedroom? We were going to be all alone, maybe in sixteen short years! All alone in what seemed to be such a giant house, with a renovated basement! A renovated loft! All these rooms and sad pitiful empty-nested me and Pynchon a testament to loneliness, rattling around in the huge quiet. Shouldn't we have more kids just to fill the house? Wouldn't we be awful failures, figures of pity, if we didn't?

?? !! ??

Clearly, I am insane, but it's worth noting that the castles I build in my mind are so easily demolished when they bump up against the green plastic of the exersaucer, against the 7 foot ceilings of a 102 year old basement. At worst, I give away all the baby gear in my certainty that Munchkin is to be an only child--and then it becomes a funny story about my hubris having to repurchase everything later. And I love a good story. As for the house, who can say how big or how small, how full or how empty it will feel to us in three months, let alone three years, or ten, or twenty? I am not usually so misguided as to think, in daylight hours, that how I feel right now will be how I feel much later. After all, my parents upsized in retirement, and my mom finds her empty-nest life more vital and busy than any other time she can remember. Life moves on the way that it will. We fill the spaces with our lives and they change with us as we change them.

Neither my new house nor my now-absent diaper genie can determine me. I'm glad we sorted that out.