My husband and I bought our oversized blue-and-white French Country print sofa when I was eight months pregnant and forgot that I wouldn’t always be huge enough to warrant seating the size of a small nation-state. When I sat all the way back, my feet didn’t reach the ground, and in my enormity, I couldn’t leave the sofa without either helping hands or a duck-and-roll maneuver I would be embarrassed to execute in front of others. But none of this mattered because I could visualize life with my newborn lived out on this sofa. I imagined long lazy days of nursing and napping, the sun streaming in from the many windows on the enclosed and heated porch where the sofa would go. I pictured my growing baby on her back on the wide pillows, chubby arms and legs waving in the air as I shook brightly colored toys in front of her, watching her eyes light up as she recognized shapes, sounds, her own mother’s smiling face. I wasn’t purchasing a sofa; I was buying an idyll, the epic story of my blended families.
When the sofa was delivered, it clashed with everything in the room. The colors were wrong, the style was wrong, the size was wrong, wrong, wrong. When my baby was delivered, we did spend the cozy hours I imagined planted on that sofa, but it became more of a refuge than an idyll. My marriage couldn’t withstand the strain of parenthood. Slowly, painfully, the clashes moved beyond style to substance and my husband and I split.
The oversized sofa followed me after the divorce because it was my three-year-old daughter’s favorite piece of furniture. It represented security and comfort to her in its billowing pillows and the wide prairie of its seat cushions. In the doll-sized house we rented, the sofa left room for not a single piece of furniture more in the living room. Luckily, all T. and I needed was the one, a floating ship of safety and familiarity in a new, unfamiliar world.
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