Furniture as identity & self-expression

What was I trying to say?

When we moved into the country club development in 2001, we brought along the various pieces of furniture we had accumulated in our 16+ years of living in a house in the woods about five miles away.

The furniture was a mash up of 1980s and ‘90s mid-century modern (MCM), most with teak veneers, and a couple of modern dressers and brightly-colored Little Tykes car beds in the boys’ rooms. But there was also a collection of Persian rugs, and a gorgeous, original MCM Scandinavian sideboard that had been in my then-husband’s family, and a teak MCM dining table from one of their family friends, when she had downsized.

While we had bought some furniture over the years (sofas, end tables, dining chairs that sort of matched the table), we had never been starting from scratch.

When I first moved in with the man who would become my husband – let us call him Ethan, which is his pseudonym in my unpublished memoir, and he is cool with that – I was a recent college graduate and had no idea what my tastes were in furniture or houses. I had grown up in a small Cape Cod in Pennsylvania, and then spent four years in Gothic dorm rooms with lots of dark wood and drafty, decorative lead windows. 

Quintessential Princeton dorm. Check out those windows, also know as leadlights.

I had never paid much attention to interior design/decorating; it seemed like you needed to have a fair amount of disposable income to put any energy into such endeavors.

As we started our life together, I quickly grew to love the MCM furnishings in his parents’ house. His father had passed away, but his mom still lived in their single-story ranch in a neighborhood of similar homes built in the 1950s as the town of Princeton grew.

Ethan’s father had been a professor, and the furniture, along with the Persian rugs, and the books lining the shelves in their family/dining room with the soaring ceiling and fireplace, epitomized for me the home of well-traveled, interesting people, curious about the world. I hoped to be that kind of person too.

Flash forward nearly two decades to the move to the country club house, which was totally out of character for both Ethan and me, and is a story unto itself, but sometimes you find your life going a certain, not wholly intended way, and you figure you’ll make the best of it.

There were more rooms and larger rooms to be furnished there. To me, our cobbled-together stuff looked kind of sad in their new McMansion setting. As I went to a few book club and coffee gatherings with other women in the development, I noted that most homes looked as if they had been professionally designed and decorated AND were pristine, as though no one actually lived there, despite the fact that everyone also had children. I never aspired to that kind of extravagance or order – I like yard sales and was constantly dealing with the piles of papers I have mentioned here before. But I did want our home to look a little more put together when it was my turn to host.

I was nearly forty years old and just waking up to a kind of peer pressure that had never affected me before. Thus began the search for an entertainment center, sofa, loveseat, and coffee table that would make the family room with fireplace, vaulted ceilings, and lots of windows something I felt good about.

It was the early 2000s and mid-century modern had not come roaring back yet. But there was this one piece of furniture we had that I really loved: a Mission style bench with a colorful, tribal patterned cushion that we’d kept in the entryway of our house in the woods. And I liked Frank LLoyd Wright’s work. Maybe this was my style?

And so I went on the hunt for the family room furniture, which I found at a Macy’s that sold furniture, and we ended up with this 3-piece entertainment center and coffee table.

Large enough to begin to fill up a large family room with vaulted ceiling.

This table is SO heavy!

Within the next decade, the nest would be emptying, TVs were getting too big for the TV-area of the entertainment center, and Ethan and I would separate. When our new housing situations were eventually settled, no one wanted this stuff. It simply did not work in his modern home or the Victorian or early American styles of my homes of the past decade. And so it all sat in his basement.

So it came as a huge unburdening to me when a local vintage shop, where I have taken a few other things, agreed to take the coffee table and the two glass side pieces shown here. (They did not want the center piece because one of the doors is slightly warped; its disposition is still pending.)

As much of a relief as it has been to pass along this furniture, I have been resisting writing about it for nearly a month. Somewhere beneath the surface, I knew that I would have to relive what still feels painful – the kids growing up, our marriage ending, and the seriously sad recognition that there was so much about myself that I still did not know.

I was nearly 50 years old, and I did not know, in many respects, what I liked, what was “me,” what other experiences and professional challenges and satisfaction I wanted out of life, or the first thing about how to go about getting them. I was a writer, who barely had the words and sentences – the language – to give my feelings shape, to make them real, to give them legitimacy.

Rather than continuing to be avoidant and sad about the past, though, I have finally put at least this into words here, and I am lighter for it. Light enough to declare: I like mid-century modern furnishings and Victorian architecture and modern art and photography.

                                         “I contain multitudes.”

                                   Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself”