25 Jul A Fair Share?
Joseph Kelly contemplates the decline in the popularity of siblings sharing rooms.
With the arrival of my second daughter, I carried on with the mistaken assumption that my two girls would happily share a room. The assumption was based on solid empirical evidence on the topic – the Brady sisters shared a room, and they got along. The kids in Eight Is Enough shared a room, and I’m pretty sure some of the Partridges did, too. On this evidence alone, I could expect my two girls to grow up happy, well-adjusted and with a deep love of flares. However, as with flares, it appears as though the social tide has turned against the shared bedroom.
The kids in The OC don’t share a room (at least not on an ongoing basis). Lisa and Maggie are at different ends of the Simpson house, and there is no exception to the one-person-per-room rule in Erinsborough or Summer Bay.
I have discovered that condemning my two girls to share a room is the social equivalent of declaring an intent to send them down the mines to work. “You’ll crush their individuality,” declared one friend who obviously hasn’t figured out that crushing their individuality is my sworn duty as a parent.
Being one of eight children, I shared a room with my older brother, Tony. This lasted until I was 16 and Tony was 19, at which time Tony moved out of home, and I finally got to spread my stuff all around our room. Tony and I were, and still are very good friends, but at the time Tony moved out, we were suffering from a severe case of ‘musical differences’. Tony also felt pretty confident that living at home and sharing a bunk bed with his brother wasn’t going to win him the legion of female fans he believed he deserved. He set himself up on a terrace in the inner city that my mum cleaned every Sunday without fail. I can confidently say that Mum was the only female to see the inside of that house in the years that Tony lived there.
When Tony and I shared a room, we used to take turns playing a side of a record before we went to bed. While I got a lesson on the finer points of Albanian and Irish folk music, Tony learnt to distinguish the subtle differences between heavy metal and hard rock. Tony used to stick pictures of aircraft around my bed in the vain hope that I would share his passion for planes while I taught him the art of going a week without changing undies.
Tony also showed me that as long as you have a stapler, there’s no need for a sewing machine. Being on the top bunk, it was my job to turn off the light, while it was Tony’s job to change channels with the broom handle. We used to stay up late debating such weighty topics as whether it would be better to have gills or wings, whether bionic arms were better than bionic legs, or what we would do if we ruled the world for a day.
Other times, we didn’t get along so well. The night before my first day at a new school, he surreptitiously wrote in liquid paper, “I love boys” on the bottom of my school bag. I glued all of his Irish folk albums to the ceiling of our room. But on the whole, sharing a room was a great experience.
So it was surprising to learn that bunk beds had become about as fashionable and socially acceptable as dressing your kids in matching outfits (which, by the way, was my wife’s idea). Even Tony suggested that my plan to shoehorn my two girls into one room made me look cheap. I soon discovered that the only option available to me to prove my worth as a good father and provider was to build a room for my five-month-old daughter so that she could experience all the rights dependent on our current love affair with individualism.
With this in mind, I commissioned an architect and set down the path of liberating my baby’s inner-adult.
Thomas Jefferson was deservedly famous for observing that the price of freedom is eternal vigilance. I hope to be equally famous for observing, after receiving three separate quotes, that the price of individualism is between $50,000 and $80,000, depending on whether it comes with an en suite or not. At that price I’m just as happy for my two girls to exchange the principles of individualism for the values of cooperation and tolerance. I’ll just be sure to hide the liquid paper and the glue.
