This post was from seven years ago when I made the move from Wix to WordPress. I was going to hunt down my very first post from two years before but this caught my eye. It is updated.
One way I spent the summer of 2017 was doing house projects—including painting the family room. It turned out to be a healing experience for me.
It started as a modest project of painting the family room blue. I left the painted wood wall for last. Should I paint it blue, too—or lightly sand it, I wondered? That didn’t turn out to be a simple question.
Thirty-four years ago, it was a lovely wooden wall. My husband had installed a nice oak floor that matched the wooden cabinets in that room. I like the look of natural wood, but I also enjoy the look of wood with a light coat of white paint (where the grain shows through).
After getting my then two young daughters off to school, I felt compelled to paint this room. That day it was too woody. How hard could it be to make the wood look like I envisioned it in my head. With no research, I ended up with a wall covered in paint and no wood grain to be found. My patient husband expressed surprise when he came home from work.
You see, the night before, I’d had my third miscarriage. My way to deal with emotional pain is to get busy. So, I painted and covered up that beautiful wooden wall.
We lived with it until the summer of 2017. Again, I just jumped right in and started sanding the paint off. I started with the distressed look. I tried to like it, but I didn’t. So, I got to work and sanded all the paint off that section of the wall. There was the wood I remembered from years ago peeking out of the white. Determined, I got to work with my little circular sander. It took all my strength to hold it up and push against the wall to chip away at the white paint, but it was happening bit by bit.
My husband came home from work—and stared at the wall. He realized the work we had ahead. He went into the garage and returned with his heavy-duty sander. The paint came off faster with the heavier sander and paper, but it was also heavier to hold up. My arms ached at the end of each day, but my husband would take over when he got home from work. We continued this for several long days into the next weekend.
The family room was off-limits during this time, with sheets hung up to prevent the dust from spreading throughout the house. Each day, the mess would be cleaned up.
Finally, on a Sunday morning, my husband wearily pronounced he was through. He declared this was a project he never wanted to do again—I agreed. All we had left to do was the cleanup and painting of the trim and ceiling. Even with my best efforts, the dust made it throughout the house. Clean up was a whole other project I focused on, while he finished up the painting.
Now, we have a beautiful room and I have the closure needed from some painful experiences. The time came to sand all of that paint away and bring back the beauty again. Writing a memoir that year had helped me see some patterns in my life and let them go—finally. I sanded away what had been buried inside me all these years by painting over a wall.
That summer back in the early 90s expunged and exposed the possibilities that life offers—including the soon to be surprise birth of a son who’s going to be 30 years old this year.
I recently pulled my memoir off the market with the intention to rewrite it in the future. For now though, I feel lucky with the journey writing has taken me.
How about you? Has writing helped you?
Embrace your inner child! D. L. Finn
