Drying Paint

for Amber

My girls are sharing a room again, and the room's previous colour - a jolly frog belly green -became all at once too boyish. So we took the girls' to the paint store and they stood silently staring at the wall of paint samples - The Baby overwhelmed by all of the choices, The Girl sullen with resentment that she was going from having a room to herself to sharing yet again.

Pink? Too babyish.
Purple? Too gloomy.

"That one," said The Baby, reaching up and grabbing a sample that was robin's egg blue, blue like a Tiffany box.The Girl shrugged, refusing to take any sort of responsibility. So blue it would be, and the paint went into the magical paint shaking machine to my younger children's delight, while The Girl sat sullenly on a stool, staring angrily off into space, looking for the distant planet where The People Who Would Understand Her lived.

The Baby ran up and down the stairs while her room was being painted, the jolly froggy green vanishing beneath the strokes of blue, this familiar space suddenly becoming new. Go look, we urged The Girl! It looks magical! It is blue like a robin's egg, blue like a Tiffany box!

She slowly marched up the stairs and came back down again, shrugging her shoulders.
"It's the same old baby room," she said. "It's just blue instead of green."

When the paint had dried and their furniture had been moved back in, the girls were able to spend their first night in their redecorated room. I went up before bedtime to check on them and looked for a long time at my sleeping Girl, who had gone to bed so angrily. And I had been angry with her, too, for her seeming ingratitude, for her inflexibility, for her growing past the sweet, golden haired toddler now only seen in photographs.

There's an old Victorian poem that goes:
For, on a table drawn beside his head,
He had put, within his reach,
A box of counters and a red-vein'd stone,
A piece of glass abraded by the beach,
And six or seven shells, A bottle with bluebells,
And two French copper coins,
ranged there with careful art,
To comfort his sad heart.

And so had she, carefully arranging a few of her small treasures on her table before falling asleep with - my heart - tears drying on her face. How cruel we'd been, I thought, how cruel to wrest her unwilling from her small dominion, her one claim to maturity in the house. How thoughtless we'd been with our little bird, our pearl, now sleeping forlornly in a room that is the blue of a robin's egg, the blue of a Tiffany box.