Behind closed doors

A person much smarter than me once said, “A man is not measured on how he starts things. He is measured on how he finishes them.”

How true, and how timely, because parents around this county will be dropping their children off at college over the next few months. There, they will start down the road of higher education, a road that will have many twists and turns. Waiting for them at the end are a college degree, possibly a wife or husband, and the maturity that only four additional years of studying will bring. Years that will task their strengths and weaknesses and eventually make them men and women.

We wish them all the best of luck. But as I think back to when we saw The Boy off, more than a few times his senior year, I really didn’t think he’d make it. To be quite honest — I really didn’t think I would either.

The Boy, like most teenagers, spent the better part of the last year at our house up in his room with the door closed. He came down only for the briefest of times — for life’s necessities: to grab food and drink, to use the bathroom or take an occasional shower, and to argue with his dad. That last year he was home, there were a lot of those arguments which became louder and more frequent as the time for his departure drew closer.

He sat behind his closed door watching television, playing video games, working on his computer, or chatting endlessly on his cell phone with his friends. They too sat behind their closed doors.

He sat behind his closed door hiding from the world. He sat behind his closed door hiding from his father. Who in the last year had somehow become the stupidest man on the planet and his favorite target for endless, senseless arguments. Arguments about everything and nothing. Arguments with a father who has been the impediment to him growing up. Arguments which robbed from them both the precious time they had left together.

The Boy sat behind his closed door, hiding from himself, while at the same time trying to find who he really was.

After dropping him off at school, The Wife and I returned back home about 2 in the afternoon, plenty of time to still get in a half day’s work. We had four years of college to start paying for. But before I got started — before I got on with the rest of my life — there was something important to do.

Walking up the stairs to The Boy’s empty room I remembered. I remembered how small he was the first time I saw him in the hospital. I remembered the first time he said, “Dad, I lobe you.” I remembered his first taste of Co-Cola and the funny face he made as the bubbles tickled his nose.

I remembered how, when he finally caught that elusive blue tail lizard, he screamed as its tail fell off (a defense mechanism used to get away from the excited grasp of little boys). I remembered another scream, one of pain, as the baby snapping turtle clamped down and wouldn’t let go of two curious little fingers that got too close.

I remembered Little League baseball games and waiting for him through high school football practices that went well into the night, practices that helped to temper The Boy and started him well onto his way to becoming a man.

I remembered the divorce that fractured my soul and the look on his tear-stained, crestfallen face as I drove away. I remembered two years later how he chased the parachute from a rocket shot so high into the blue sky that it almost disappeared from sight.

That was the first meeting between him and his soon-to-be step-mom. When asked later that night what he thought of the lady he had shot rockets off with in the high school parking lot, he replied with a smile on his face, “Dad, I like her; she’s funny.”

The Wife and I were married three months later. The Boy was the proudest usher in the church.

As I closed the door to his room, I remembered every day of our 18 short years together — all the good and all the bad.

It seems it was just yesterday that I held him for the very first time in my hands. When he looked up at me with those clear blue eyes, the memories started. And the memories, which to this day, have never stopped.

I closed the door to his room and slowly turned away. That way, for the next few years, whenever I pass the stairwell and glance up, I can imagine. The Boy — he’s still up there. Hiding behind that closed door. Trying to find himself.

I suggest you also close those empty bedroom doors. Hopefully it will help to muffle the emptiness you now feel inside as the echoes of the memories of your children and your life together flow down the steps, reverberate through the hallways, and engulf each room with the sadness of a time which will never come again.

A time now gone forever — kept alive now only in memories. Behind closed doors.