There are fourteen doors in my house. There’s the front door, back door, four bedroom doors, two bathroom doors, and six closet doors. With that many doors in the house, I don’t understand how my boys always zone in on which door that I’m behind. Whenever they see a closed door, they feel that it’s necessary to knock on it. I am partly to blame for this. I have always tried to teach my children proper manners. That includes knocking on a door and waiting for a response before trying to open the door. However, if I close a door that usually means that I need my privacy. It doesn’t seem to matter which door it is, there always comes a knock on the door before I’ve decided to open it myself.
If I’m in the bathroom, with the door closed, then I definitely want my privacy. It’s like these kids are drawn by some magnetic field to a closed door but repelled by an open door. Every time that I go into the bathroom to do my business, my business and nobody else’s business, there’s a knock at the door. There must be some mathematical equation for this. Closed door + mom= knock, knock, knock. For the last twelve years, I have not been able to go to the bathroom in peace.
Today, I entered the bathroom hoping, just once in my life, for two minutes of privacy. Lo and behold, what do my ears hear? Knock, knock, knock.
“What,” I yell from my throne.
“Mom, are you going to the bathroom,” asked Austin.
“No, I’m visiting with the Pope,” is my reply. “Of course I’m going to the bathroom. Why what do you want?”
“Never mind.”
“You mean to tell me that you couldn’t wait two minutes to tell me never mind,” I grumbled opening the door.
It’s always something that could have waited just two tiny minutes until I opened the darn door. The question or comment never comes in the form of a dire emergency. God forbid they have to wait two minutes, let alone two seconds, to aggravate me.
Earlier today, I went outside to smoke a cigarette and to get a few minutes of peace and quiet. Ha, that didn’t work. As I took the first drag of my cigarette and pondered what my next task of the day would be, my oldest son, Christian, knocked on the inside of the back door and peered out the window at me. With phone in hand, he opened the door letting the freezing cold winter air into the house and proceeded to ask me what his fathers’ phone number was.
“I don’t know! What do I look like, a phone book?” I asked with a scowl on my face.
I set my cigarette down on the railing and went in to find his dads’ phone number. He had called his dad several times within the last two days. It shouldn’t be that hard to find the number already in the phone. I then proceeded to show him how to gently put his finger on the redial button and keep pressing it until the area code for New Jersey came up. After all, that’s about the only number from New Jersey that is dialed on our phone. He kept pushing the redial until he saw his dads’ number. With a smile and a press of the talk button, he had learned something new. He was totally dumbfounded by his new found knowledge.
I left him to his conversation and went back outside to finish my cigarette. When I came back in, I had to dodge the dust balls floating across the floor as my husband chased them with a broom. Oh my God, he’s sweeping! Yes world, I said sweeping and not sleeping. Now that’s a first. It’s really nice of him to sweep even though I’ll have to go behind him and redo it after he goes to work. After all, he is a man. I went to my room and shut the door. Maybe this time I can get some quiet time. Usually, when I have my bedroom door shut that means I’m either sleeping or I just want to be left alone. As soon as I sat down on my bed, there came a knock on the door.
“What,” I yelled.
“Can I come in,” asked Christian.
“Yes.”
I waited for him to open the door but he didn’t. I guess it wasn’t that important. I shrugged my shoulders and lay down on my bed. Knock, knock, knock.
“What now?”
“Can I come in?”
“Yes! I told you two minutes ago that you could come in,” I screamed.
“Sorry, I didn’t hear you,” he said opening the door.
“What do you want?”
“I just wanted to let you know that dad didn’t answer the phone,” he informed me.
“And you’re telling me this why,” I asked shaking my head.
“Cuz I wanted to let you know that I’m waiting for dad to call me back,” he replied sweetly.
Will there ever be a time, I wonder, when I can relax behind a closed door? Perhaps I need to start hiding out in the closets. I have yet to see the boys knocking on a closet door.
