Waiting and chasing cats.

There are two front and two back doors to my house. A rather unusual situation, you might say, especially as this is not the result of two houses being knocked into one. The house was built around 1850, and has undergone various structural alterations in its 160 years, resulting in an odd layout. In the front there is a centrally positioned shop door, with a large display window on either side. To the left of that, at the very edge of the front of the house, is the actual main house front door. This door leads into a hallway, which has a broad, heavy back door at the other end, and a couple of steps to the side which lead you into the actual house. Some of the old villagers who remember this house in some of its earlier incarnations, believe that this hallway was once an open passageway through to the back of the house, which was later closed off by means of the front and back door.

We very rarely use this part of the house for anything other than storage space. All traffic in and out of the house tends to happen through the shop.

My son is home from college this weekend, as I told you in a previous post. Every time he does come home, he re-affirms my thoughts about parenting getting increasingly more difficult as your child gets older. So far, this weekend has not been an exception. He arrived home on Friday, after having caught a lift home with a friend who recently passed his driving test, instead of getting on the bus home from the train station. It worries me when he gets into his friends' cars. Every year a number of young people are killed in car accidents on the rural roads around here. And more than often, the driver is a young male who has only passed his driving test recently.
On Friday evening the cosy family get-together was, as usual, very short-lived. Within a couple of hours of arriving home, after not having been here for about 9 weeks, he decided to go and see one of his friends, and announced he was going to be staying over at this friends' house. The trouble with a 17-year old who lives away from home the majority of the time, is that the boundaries move quite dramatically over a short space of time. It becomes very hard to keep him in the house when you want to, because he has become accustomed to an independent life and is used to make his own decisions with just a minimum of restrictions.
So, I let him go...
All went well this time round. That means: he did not come home with a black eye, he did not go out drinking and neither was I called up in the middle of the night by the police. (must write THAT story one time!)
Around two o'clock in the afternoon he came strolling in, only to leave again to see yet more friends, very shortly afterwards.
I often wonder why I so eagerly look forward to his coming home. I need a reality check, because every time he does come home, I get my hopes up so high, looking forward to some quality mother-and-son time, only to have them quashed within 10 minutes of my son walking through the door. I don't think there is any malice in it from his side, but his brain is simply not yet wired up to empathise with my feelings as a mother. It is scientifically proven that teenagers temporarily lose the ability to identify the emotions and feelings of others, thus turning them into selfish creatures, whilst the complex process takes place of preparing and altering a young brain, ready for adulthood.

You will have started to wonder why I told you about the two front doors. Well, here it comes now: Last night, my son announced that he was going out yet again, much to my dismay and despair. This time round though, he was not staying over anywhere, but planning on coming home after his night out. That in itself filled me with dread, because I always worry that he will come in drunk and be sick all over the house. Not that that has actually ever happened as such, but I have this phobia, all to do with drunks and sickness... don't ask, it has to do with the way my dad behaved when I was growing up.

Now that I have my two new feline family members, we have to watch very carefully that they do not escape to the outside world through an open door. They need to be kept in for one full month, in order to prevent them from making their way back to wherever they lived before. The little patchy one (now renamed "Patch") does not seem too bothered, and seems to be very happy inside, but her bigger sister keeps pacing the floor, sits near doors and windows, meowing very meaningfully and scratching to try and get out. She has already made a leap to outside freedom twice in less than 3 days. The first time, I managed to grab her before she properly got out of the door, but the second time, I ended up dashing after her, into the neighbours' garden, wearing only my slippers and jammies.

It's going to be a very long month.

My son does not have any keys to the house, reason being that he persistently loses them. It ended up coming so far that I had to have a new lock fitted, because he managed to lose the last available key to the side-front door. I definitely don't trust him with any keys to the shop. So when he decided that he was going out last night, and when he also announced that he did not know what time he'd be back as he was going out with a group of friends to Newcastle, I did not really know how to solve the key-to-the-door problem. The added aspect was also the fact that I had to make sure that the cats could not be let out accidentally. Staying up for him to let him in, was obviously out of the question. Giving him a key to the shop was also not an option. The last possibility was to arrange for him to be able to come in via the side front door. This however, meant climbing over chairs, squeezing past bicycles and pushing his way between boxes. Another implication was that there was nothing else for it, than for the cats to spend the night well away from that part of the house, in the actual shop.

Being someone who suffers from insomnia, I don't sleep well at the best of times. The past night was no exception, what with the added agony of waiting on my son coming in and worrying about the cats escaping if he did not keep doors closed properly. I was awake until half past one in the morning, and when he had not surfaced by that time, I decided to go to bed. At four in the morning, I was woken up by a slight noise. I heard some rumbling in the downstairs hallway, however I did not hear anyone coming up the stairs.
After about 10 minutes, I assumed that the boy had made a very quiet entrance, and an even more remarkably quiet ascent up the stairs. This seemed very unlikely though. There are a few reasons why I cannot imaging not hearing anyone coming up the stairs: Firstly, the merest drop of a feather wakes me, so anything moving will not only wake me, but also keep me awake. Secondly, because the stairs are so very old, and extremely creaky, the aforementioned feather has the capacity of producing a thunderous noise when dropped upon the stairs, and lastly, 17-year old boys don't come in producing less than the noise of falling feathers after a night out. Something was definitely strange. After I had been laying in bed for a further 10 minutes, I started to become aware of the telltale signs of a door or window left open. I could feel a draught, and I could hear the faint whistle of wind blowing through the gap under the bedroom door.

Having had enough of the suspense, I got up and went on an expedition down the stairs. The reason for delaying this had been the fear of finding my son with a grey face, passed out on the sofa in a pool of vomit. I know it sounds awful, but it's stronger than my rational mind, and images like that haunt me every time he goes out. Careful not to wake my sleeping daughter, I crept down the stairs. I found the front door in the hallway ajar, allowing a chilly late winter wind to blow into the house. Thankfully, the doors between shop and hallway had been closed, so no cats had escaped, at least not yet...

When venturing further into the house, there was no sign of my son, his bedroom had been empty, he was not in the sitting room, in the shop, or the kitchen. The kitchen light was on, so someone had definitely been in. I even gathered all my courage and opened up the bathroom door to check if maybe he was in there, cradling the toilet, grey in the face, vomiting. (I really ought to tackle this phobia of mine!)

Because I have no longer got my old slim pre-kids figure, it would be quite tricky for me to squeeze my way from the back of the hallway, to the front door, past all the obstacles, in order to close it. An easier way to do this, was to simply go out through the shop-front-door, and close the side-front-door from the outside. With a sleepy head I unlocked the shop door, stepped out... and as I did so, the black cat (re-named once more: Sooty) slithered past my legs with surprising agility, making a run for freedom. This is how I ended up stalking through my neighbours' garden between four and five in the morning, in the cold, wearing nothing but thin jammies and a pair of slippers. I managed to get Sooty back in, to close the door and to get back in the house, covered in goosebumps, my slippers soaked by the early morning dew.
All this said and done, there still wasn't any sign of my missing son.
He did not answer his mobile (a very common trick).

Back in the kitchen, I made myself a cup of coffee, whilst I could hear a very disgruntled Sooty juggling some of the crockery and figurines I have on display in my little shop. Just to think that I had been so adamant about a "no cats allowed in the shop" policy. That lasted well.
After about half an hour's wait, the boy finally turned up. Stumbled through the boxes in the hallway, said hello as if nothing had happened, made a quick excuse involving something about feeling car-sick (often used to cover up beer breath!) and hurried up the stairs to bed. Needless to say that I've been awake ever since, and that's how I ended up sitting here composing this post.

I am willing to bet the last of my money (not much to lose anyway) that the rascal will not show face until well into the afternoon, upon which he will simply pack his stuff and head for the next train...
So much for family weekends.

I think I'll need to be patient, wait til he has a child of his own, before he will understand my worries, the agonising wait, and the painful frustration at always lingering somewhere at the bottom of the list of priorities. In the meantime, I'll just keep loving him dearly, keep hoping he'll come home for the weekend and spend some time with me, keep getting that regular wake-up call about the importance of teenage friendships.
I often wonder... was I like that? Of course I don't remember being like that, but then again the older generation never does. Deep down I know though that I can't have been that different in many ways. What I have come to realise over the years is that there is no greater love than that of a parent for a child, and that it is the one single biggest thing you will never be able to comprehend until you experience that love from a parent's point of view for yourself. As a child, or even as a young adult, before I had my own children, I could not grasp the overwhelming enormity of this feeling of love. Loving your teenager is not easy, it's not for the faint hearted, but boy, I wouldn't want to miss it for the world!