Welcome Guest Blogger Jessica Inclan!

When my oldest son was very small but able to converse with us, he used to walk into a room and say, "I want something to eat and drink."

Of course, we would give him both. He would sit like the small king he was in his highchair or at the table and enjoy what was rightfully his, basking in our attention, glowing from the food.
Later in his life, he would say, "I feel like going out to eat."

Sometimes, we would all go out, and he would look at the menu and order the most expensive thing not because it was pricey, but because it was made of the tastiest ingredient. Or it was something odd and intricate or rare. He was the one ordering the oysters or the lobster or the steak the size of Kentucky.
Sometimes late at night, my then husband would look at me and say, "He was a prince in another life."

And now, even though my son has become an anarchist, deep in his bones, I know he still wants that steak, medium rare. And dessert.

I have noticed a similar royal strain in myself as I've been trying to help plan our new kitchen in our new house. As my boyfriend Michael does the drawings, as we go into the appliance stores, as we sit with our designer at our table, I realize I have no time for hinges. I don't care about where the electrical panels are placed or how the ceiling is lowered or raised for a skylight. I just want it all there. I want to walk in and say, "I want to use my new ovens."
Poof! they are there.

I want to walk across the silky, buttery new wood floors and not know anything about how they got there. I'm just not into this process at all. In fact, I hate thinking about it, and I had to do some deep thought about why. And then I remembered holding the end of the boards as my father sawed through them.

Yes, I was a remodel-shaped child. My father had no sons, and as the eldest child, I was his helper. In fact, he asked me to watch him sometimes, as the work he did singly around the house was never ending and boring. Sometimes he would listen to the transistor radio, but mostly, I was sitting on some kind of pile of wood watching him bang in nails. Or I was holding the end of some board as he cut through it. I tried not to be scared, but I always was. I hated the noise of the electric saw, the sawdust blowing up around us both, though it did smell good, a pine or redwood forest in the middle of the driveway.

As I was growing up, he painted and did something to every room, changing doors and walls. New bathrooms, new bedrooms, new kitchen. It went on and on, but my parents often ran out of money, and when my father died, we had half a pink house, only the front and sides shingled. When I was a teenager and then a young woman home from college, I painted the back side of the house, and not so well. But at least it was all brown. In another post-father project, my mother and sisters and I finished the remodel of the den that the contractors my mother hired didn't finish—it was then that I learned how to finish off the sheet rock.

Once as I was painting the den, one of our cats Friday decided to climb up the back side of the ladder as I was standing on top of it, and she clawed her way to the paint can, and yes, it spilled all over the floor.

In later houses I owned, I had a similar lack of money and only my own skills, so I built retaining walls and painted and did the heavy lifting necessary to make things livable, and you know what? I don't want to do it anymore. In fact, I barely want to be involved in any of it at all. I'm on strike, I think, at least mentally. I will help pay, of course, but I want to be the king or prince or queen that my son showed me how to me so long ago.

"I want a kitchen and a new floor," I say, looking around, waiting for my minions to bring it to me. "Now."

For more information on Jessica and her books, visit www.jessicabarksdaleinclan.com.