A reader writes:
When we moved into this house in Portmore we had one baby and one on the way, and two bedrooms seemed like a palace after the room we had been renting behind my aunt’s shop. That was eleven years ago. We now have four children, aged seventeen, fourteen, ten and six, and we are still in the same two bedrooms. I am writing because every time I read about “space” and “privacy” I feel like somebody is telling me we have done something wrong, and I want to say how it has actually been.
It has not been easy. I will not pretend it has. The first bunk bed my husband Clive built from pine he got off a man in Old Harbour, and it lasted until the two big boys decided it was a pirate ship. The second one he built properly, with bolts, and when our daughter came along he took it apart and built a third level along one wall so it looks like a train sleeper. Visitors laugh. The children love it. The six-year-old sleeps in with me and Clive more nights than I would like to admit.
What made it work, as far as it has worked, was rules. Not strict ones, but clear. The bathroom has a morning rota that is stuck on the back of the door with tape that has been replaced maybe twenty times. The eldest goes first because he catches the earliest bus. Homework is at the dining table in two shifts, little ones straight after school and big ones after dinner, and the television does not go on until the second shift is done. Everybody has one drawer or one box that nobody else touches. I learned that one the hard way after my daughter cried for a whole evening because her brother used her notebook for a cricket score.
The hardest time was when Jermaine, the eldest, turned fifteen. He got quiet and angry, and one night he said something to his father I will not repeat. After everyone was asleep Clive and I sat on the verandah and I said, he has nowhere to go to be a young man. So we hung a curtain across one end of the verandah, put a folding cot and a small shelf out there with an extension for his phone, and told him that corner was his from nine at night until morning. It is not a room. There are mosquitoes. But he stopped slamming things. He still sleeps out there most nights, and his brother is already asking when it will be his turn.
Money has been the other thing. We looked at bigger places twice. Once the rent would have taken nearly half of what Clive brings home, and the other time the house was so far out that he would have been on the road before five every morning. Both times we prayed about it and both times we stayed, and I have had to fight a feeling of shame about that. At church some people talk about increase as if it only comes in square feet. I believe God has given us increase. It has just come in other forms: the children are healthy, we are not behind on anything, and Clive’s back has held up.
There are things the small house has given us that I did not expect. My children know how to share without being told, most days. They know how to be quiet when someone is sick or studying for exams, because there is nowhere else for that person to go. When there is a quarrel it gets settled quickly, because you cannot sulk for three days when you sleep one metre from the person you are vexed with. We eat together because there is only one table. My mother-in-law says our house is like a ship’s galley, everything folded away. She means it kindly.
I do still dream. Clive and I are saving slowly towards adding a room at the back, and he has already marked out where the foundation would go with four stones and a length of string. It may take years. There is a verse I keep on the fridge, Proverbs 4:18, about the path of the just being like the light of dawn that shines brighter and brighter until the full day. I do not read that as a promise that we will get a big house. I read it as saying the light comes gradually, and we are further along than we were.
If you are in a small house with a big family and feel like you have failed, please don’t. Make the rules clear, give each child one thing that is theirs, and find the corner, even on a verandah, where a growing person can breathe. And when it gets too much, go outside and sit for ten minutes. That is what our verandah is for.
— Paulette, Portmore
Editor’s note
Paulette’s letter is a reminder that a house works because of the habits inside it as much as its floor area. Two lessons stand out. First, clarity reduces conflict: a taped-up rota and one untouchable drawer each did more for peace than another room might have. Second, teenagers need a threshold of their own, even a curtained corner, and giving it is a sign of respect, not indulgence. If your household is squeezed, it may be worth asking not only “how do we get more space?” but “how do we make the space we have fairer?” The answer to the second question is often within reach this week.
Reader letters may be edited for length and clarity, and names and identifying details are changed.
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