The Ghost Room

Otherwise known as "my bedroom"

I can’t remember the last time I slept in my bedroom. I think it was sometime this past summer. Sometime before the hurricane, when it felt essential to have my body next to hers. Sometime before the preschool transition that crashed and burned. Sometime before I decided it was simply easier to surrender, to get a full night’s sleep in my daughter’s bed. To let her room become our room, and let my bedroom become… a ghost room.

In the fragile weeks after the hurricane, when my parents came to stay with us while power and water was still out everywhere, they slept in my room.

But then they left. A few weeks later I found a dead mouse underneath a pile of forogtten sewing in the corner.

After that, I only ever went in there to throw laundry on the bed.

When the first killing frost arrived, I moved a few plants in that I had rescued from my flooded apothecary. We tried to clean them as best we could, wiping down each leaf and leaving them outside in the rain for weeks, but I still feared that flood dust was lifting off their lengths, so into the room they went.

I started calling it The Ghost Room.

Not because it was empty, but because it had once been full. And that lack of fullness felt eerie, haunting.

For months, peering into that room disturbed me. Not because I wasn’t in there, but because something had been in there. I had been in there, and now I was not.

This, I think, is the definition of a haunting. The fullness of what is left.

It seems there are many ghost rooms in my life these days.

Motherhood, with the intense, unceasing bustle in so many other rooms of your existence, almost requires the creation of them.

For months, writing has been a ghost room. It used to be a sanctuary for me, but recently it’s felt more like a closet, a place where I’ve been consistently sticking things without even bothering to turn on the light.

Slow mornings are a ghost room.

Drinking my tea while sitting down.

My dreams have been a ghost room now for years. I used to remember them every morning, writing them down over breakfast. Now I normally wake up before I complete my last sleep cycle, scrambling to remember what arrived in the night and watching it disappear, like petals in spring winds.

I used to be fascinated, obsessed even with ghosts when I was younger. In middle school I became a “ghost researcher” for a time, holding séances with the Ouija board (do not recommend) and taking myself to haunted places with cameras to record orbs (only partially recommend). Later, I even slept overnight in haunted hotels (I have some stories…)

Ghosts to me, were the most fascinating and scary things on the planet. Fascinating because: What lingers beyond death? What is the mystery of what remains?

And scary because: How can we stop mystery? How do we curtail what we don’t know?

It wasn’t until I was an adult that I realized what ghosts—metaphorical and literal— actually wanted.

Ghosts aren’t trying to scare us, they are only want our attention so they can move on.

Ghosts, ghost rooms, the place in our lives that haunt us, are just energies, not yet transistioned into their next potential.

They are waiting, lingering, for their next incarnation.

So, this winter, when I felt the thaw after the hurricane come and everyone in our mountains began moving towards the future again, I decided to give my ghost room a rebirth.

I cleaned from top to bottom, freshened the sheets, piled my bed with cozy blankets. I got creative with what I already had. I tossed rugs in every corner and rearranged the bureau.

I knew it wouldn’t be a bedroom anymore—at least not at this phase in my life. But it could be something else. I made it a cozy den for reading, a theater for late-night Netflix, a meditation room for yoga.

I let go of trying to make it my bedroom, and allowed it to become what it wanted to be instead.

Now, when I look into the room while I’m playing with my daughter, I don’t see ghosts.

I see the creativity of potential, of meeting what is with the willingness to become.

It’s made me look at the other ghost rooms in my life. The ones that have felt abandoned since motherhood, the ones I keep trying to use in the same way, and failing.

I look at them now, and see them differently.

What if these ghost rooms, too, are just wanting to be rearranged, reconsidered, reborn?

What if what I perceive as lack, is just the opportunity to clear out, renegotiate, find a different kind of flow?

What if my own life wants to be used differently? And that’s why I’m being asked to face the fullness in the echo? To let myself be rearranged by letting something go?

Tonight, I finish writing this by the glow of pink salt lamp in the room that I now call my Relaxation Den. It’s warm and cozy and the peepers are sounding like soft rain outside my window.

I don’t have a bedroom anymore, but I don’t need it.

Because once you know how to meet the ghosts in your life, you can point them towards the light of change and say, there is nothing to be afraid of.

The only thing that ever haunts us is the thought that we were supposed to stay the same.

The fear that anything, ever, was lost.

When really, it was just your life, unending, waiting to be transformed.

So what about you? What are your ghost rooms? The rooms you’ve left behind since becoming a mother?

And what are those rooms asking of you in your life right now?