A Place of my Own

There are many rites of passage throughout life. Graduation. Driving a car. Marriage. First paycheck. First kid. First debt. But of all of them, one that sticks out for me the most was getting a place of my own.

It was actually tied to taking my first on-air television gig out of town. I remember looking for apartments in south Alabama, and using a rather different method of choosing between the top two candidates. One was in Enterprise and the other was in Ozark — and no offense to the fine people of Ozark, but I had a sense that getting my second job would be easier with an “Enterprise postmark” on the resume.

I remember the freedom of living alone. I remember those Saturday mornings when I would postpone getting dressed, walking around my apartment however I wanted to, because it was mine, and I could, (and no one had yet done those teevee sweeps stunts where the UV lamp revealed all manner of ugliness, but I digress…)

But what about that moment when I truly did have my own place for the first time? I really don’t remember it — and the question arises because my son has just struck out on his own.Ryan is two-and-a-half, and until tonight he’s been sleeping on the toddler bed in the master bedroom. Which means that every other night or so, he ends up in the bed with us. He’s been a decent little tenant, and is sleeping through the night, but he still winds up with us quite a bit.

Tonight, I arrived home to find my wife had done a little shuffling, and Ryan’s bed is now in his actual room, which until recently had been a place for his dresser, his toys, and more of his toys. And some toys. He has in some sense known that it is his room, but hasn’t yet associated that belonging with a physical place where he will spend his time.

At what point does one realize that he or she is master of a domain, no matter how small? I don’t expect him to catch the concept right away. He still falls asleep with us in the living room, where we do our nightly story time followed by dark and quiet. “Where you fall asleep” is not the answer, because Laura (at 4-1/2) still doesn’t always go to bed in her bed — yet she still gets possessive about her room. Does it come down to a matter of control? Is it the power that comes from excluding others? Is it the drunken joy of freedom, even in the limited scope of preschool privileges?

I wonder if there is somehow a connection there between identity and ownership. How much of the “I” that I am aware of is tacitly defined by the items and places I associate with myself? Does a notion of self and identity develop more slowly in a culture where there is little or no possession? How much does collective property help define a collective mindset? How much of the above dynamic is a strong feedback loop, that reinforces its amplified inputs?

I fear I have a lot of questions, but very few answers this time around. At stake, though, is the entire notion that we can engineer personality traits and social conformity through restraints on private property. It is true to the extent that raising a generation in a post-Kelo world where property rights are in question, they may have a different expectation about what it means to “own” something. It’s also true that “ownership of my body” is a common thread in many pro-choice arguments. (Although it does present a bit of a ‘straw man’ defense. The legal contention isn’t whether a woman has a right to control her own body – it’s defining the point in time when there is another body to account for…) This overall issue of ownership may seep into my writing from time to time, percolating on the back burner. Is this Place of My Own, both figuratively and literally, a matter of acclimation or inclination?

[tags]Ike Pigott, Occam’s RazR, philosophy, ownership, education, sociology, identity, self awareness[/tags]