The Mickey Room
This post is sponsored by Disney’s Epic Mickey 2: The Power of Two the video game.
The walls of my bedroom in my parents’ house are covered in Mickey Mouse wallpaper. The phone in my bedroom at my parents’ house is a classic Mickey Mouse telephone. There are framed posters of Mickey Mouse, plush toys of Mickey Mouse and even a few holiday ornaments of Mickey Mouse spread throughout the room. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that the person who spends most of her time in there is a huge fan of good old Mickey.
And that person is my mother.
Less than two seconds after my sisters and I finally moved out of their house for good, my parents did what many parents do and reclaimed our bedrooms for themselves. My sister Lisa’s room became my dad’s office, my sister Amy’s room became the guest room and my old digs immediately became my mom’s sewing room. Lovingly decorated from top to bottom in the theme of great American icon, Mickey Mouse.
My parents hadn’t thought to mention this little transformation to me before I paid my first visit, so you can imagine the shock when I walked into my old room, expecting it to look the same way it always had. Instead I saw that I’d entered the M-I-C-K-E-Y M-O-U-S-E Club.
To my huge dismay, gone were the Wham! and Duran Duran posters that had made it my teenage sanctuary. The bed that I threw myself onto in frequent bouts of high school angst had been swapped for a fancy sewing machine. And my bulletin board that was covered in carefully chosen ironic postcards and buttons had been replaced with its polar opposite: a cheery red and white clock with Mickey Mouse pointing at the time with his giant gloved hands. It was like someone had flipped open the curtains on my gloomy teenage years and finally let the sun burst through.
Just what the heck was going on with my mom? After many whispered phone calls, my sisters and I finally determined the answer: she was nuts.
“Why did you put all of this Mickey Mouse stuff in here?” I asked her. “It just doesn’t make any sense. I mean, we’ve never even been to Disneyland.”
“Because I love Mickey. That’s why,” she answered. “Who doesn’t?”
Well, I couldn’t argue with that reasoning and neither could the rest of the family. We just had to accept her newfound interest in all things MM. So we started giving her cute Mickey items we thought she’d like for the room and learned to appreciate her mousey decorating. And when I took a job on the Disney Studio lot in Burbank, I made sure to send her all of the fun Mickey stuff I could find. She loved it.
A few years after the room remodel, we finally made it to Disneyland for the first time. We didn’t have any children and not many husbands yet, so that day it was just my sisters, me and my husband, all of us in our 20’s, and our one happy mom who’d just turned 50 but acted like she was the biggest kid of all. She was completely delighted to be there.
That day we followed her around the park doing everything there was to do at Disneyland. Twice. It was incredibly fun. And then, at the end of the day, when all of us but her were sprawled on a bench ready to go home, she told us there was one more thing we needed to do. “I’m not leaving here without getting my picture taken with Mickey,” she told us. “So let’s go find him!”
We did. And the picture we took that day still hangs on the wall in her Mickey room. Right where it belongs.
Photo source: Amanda Downing
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This post is sponsored by Disney’s Epic Mickey 2: The Power of Two the video game. Thank you to everyone, as sponsors are what allow us to keep this website running.
