The Sky in My Room: An Ode to a Mother’s Love
It’s about 3:00pm when I enter my house through the garage door. I tuck my Batman backpack underneath the overhanging island in the kitchen, a light thud uttered from the beige wood it collides with. I run through the canyon of my kitchen, banking sharply to continue my excitement from leaving school. Taking a wide right turn, I dart up the staircase, not stopping my flight until I reach my room. My refuge. My home base. Swinging open the door, I screech to a stop. The light blue walls of my bedroom surround me, with my childhood bunk bed maintaining its monolithic position. But as I stand alone in my bedroom, I am surrounded by a buzz. Not of noise, rather of color. For the sky blue paint of the walls imitate its inspiration, as I gaze upon the tiny, colorful airplanes that punctuate the plaster.
Throughout my life I have lived in three different residences, but none have stuck with me as much as my first house has. It was the house my loving mother and father brought me to after the extended hospital stay required by my jaundice birth. My first memory is of standing in my living room, playing on a rhythm-producing playmate while my parents threw a party. It was a place of feelings: the chirp of our pet parakeets, the soft fur of our dogs Lucy and Winnie, and the simple scent of a green chair in the office, which often acted as an infirmary if one of us kids got sick. My first house was curated by my parents to be as homely a home could ever be. Yet, the aspect I have gone over pale in the one act that my mother did for me before I was born.
During her pregnancy with me, my mother took special care in preparing my bedroom. She began by painting the walls in two shades of blue: A cool navy and a warmer sky blue, each divided by a running horizontal strip of white chair rail molding. When revisiting my faintest familiarity of this space, the memory is just these simple selections. If I scour my memory without considering the details, I think I grew up in a room of two blues. Yet there was still something there, among the cool blues that greeted me in the morning and bid me farewell at night. Among the solid blue, wrapping around my room’s entirety, was a line of lively, hand-painted airplanes. My own private airfleet.
Each aircraft was artistically painted by my mother. There were four different designs that would repeat in a pattern, one tailing the other. As if they were flying in formation. When I was a very young kid, I thought she had made them with one of those templates you would find at any craft store. But my mother, as if she knew of my inquisitive nature before I was born, took care in hiding little, intentional imperfections. A yellow plane would be missing a window, a red one had only one wing, and so on and so on. These purposeful mistakes were left to act as a game; making my room a giant game of spot-the-difference. One orchestrated by my loving mother. She had a passionate love for her child and made the effort to make my room special.
Those little painted planes may seem like a very simple art project, but they mean the most out of all my childhood memories. They were an act of my mother’s love, one that taught me a valuable lesson on how to express compassion. It showed the power in doing something unique for someone you care about. By sharing this intimate story, I hope to inspire a sense of compassion in you, dear reader. As we start this new year, we should all remember the role that compassion plays in our lives. Whether it be the affection that others offer us, or that which we choose to express. For love is a freeing element of life. As free as the airplanes that flew in the sky in my room.
