45 Degrees and the Window was Wide Open...

I'm at that age that once I get into the habit of waking up at a certain time every morning, even if I don't necessarily have to and without the alarm going off my internal clock wakes me up and refuses to allow me to rest anymore. I've learned that if I want to sleep in, one of the few things I can do to get those extra hours past my normal get-out-of-bed time is to take a sleeping pill when going to bed the night before. Unfortunately, most gentle sleep remedies don't have much of an effect on me, and the ones that do then have the side effect of making me feel as if I was dragging a dead body over my shoulders for the rest of the day. Extra sleep comes in one single flavor for me, one night a week if the next day does not require me to either get up early or be in any significantly alert status. I just love to at least once in a while be able to sleep sound and deep enough to not be aware of anything else. It might seem a bit selfish, but as much as I love having a nice warm sexy body laying next to me in bed, I also love being able to have the entire bed for myself too.

Recently I became brave enough to venture back into my oldest teenage son's bedroom while he was out of the home with a few friends. It is totally impossible to gain access to his room when he is around, since he values his privacy a little bit too much for my taste. I understand him quite well since I too am a very private person and do not like anyone going through my stuff, but a dad has to do what a dad has to do, right? First I collected almost a full kitchen size trash bag of garbage that had found its way to the bottom of the rest of his chaotic wares. Afterwards I found the plates, forks, knives, spoons, and glassware that I knew had to be somewhere since their empty kitchen cabinet and drawer spots had already told me their own missing in action story when I cleaned the kitchen throughout the week. Patiently I made my way through his room and little by little I sorted through the mix of clean and dirty clothes giving me access to a clearer path through the previously undecipherable maze. At least one hour later the reality of how much new damage had been done to the carpet, roof, and walls became obvious, but in the terms we have all learned from the politically correct media, it is all part of the "collateral damage" inflicted during war. Seriously, my son's room is nothing short of a battle zone and just as you would probably not want to reconstruct or re-build any nation until the war comes to an end, I too have opted to only patch up things to livable standards and not put any real money or effort until this conflict is over.

I have come to the conclusion that my son is actually an alien from a different solar system than our own. In the front corner of his room and almost totally blocking the inward swing of his door, there lies a cardboard box that once held some of the contents of our move from the apartment we previously resided in. I have learned that this box is actually being used by my son as an isolation chamber. For the last three or four months he has been utilizing this box to sleep in when he finally decides to get some rest. I have proven with careful observation that his internal clock is currently set to a cycle that is much longer than the average 24 hours. In fact, a little research has revealed to me that none of the planets in our solar system correspond to his typical routine. Mercury's day is the equivalent of Earth's 58.64 days, Venus 243 days, Mars 1.03 days, Jupiter 0.41 days, Saturn 0.43 days, Uranus 0.72 days, Neptune 0.67 days, and Pluto 6.39 days. If I were trying to figure out where this alien creature came from my search would have to be expanded outside of our neighboring planets. All joking aside, I once used my key to his room to check on him while he was sleeping since he was not responding to my knocking on his door. Once I gained enough access to poke my head inside his room I could only see the lower half of his body since the other upper half was contained within the large cardboard box. When he finally realized that I had opened his room and was asking him what he was doing inside the box, his only reply was "sleeping." At the moment I could not help but wonder if this was some kind of test to verify if he could adjust to living homeless and out of a box! The thought was momentary since I have always known that he has a sleeping problem. In fact I have previously found him sleeping in the bathtub too, so a cardboard box in his room is actually and upgrade!

As I drove to work this morning and talked on my cell phone to my mom, I found myself making a comment that has stuck in my mind and am not sure how to handle its meaning. Because of my son's unusual sleeping habits it is common for me to wake up in the middle of the night just to go and check up on him to make sure all is well. I sometimes find him watching movies, playing video games, listening or composing music, writing essays, reading books, eating, all with the common denominator of a cigarette in between his fingers. The battle has been lost trying to get him to stop smoking, but at least I gained the small victory of getting him to do it outside of the house. Unfortunately, because he wants to do all the other mentioned things at the same time that he smokes, another common theme is that he will open the family room window, sit on the rail with half his body inside the room entertaining himself and the other half outside puffing on a Marlboro. Of course some of the smoke drags into the house so I've resigned myself to including in my groceries a couple of cans of Febreeze air freshener every week. I've also resigned myself to accepting the fact that any day some stranger is just going to come right into my home through the same window that he never locks and many times leaves wide open during the night. This is one of the several reasons that I sleep with my bedroom door locked. Out of all of the inconsiderate things that I have learned to live with, the most difficult for me to deal with and of which I spent some time this morning sharing in conversation with my mom, is waking up in the middle of the night and knocking on his door to find some strange new face sitting on his bedroom futton hanging out at some ungodly hour. "Who the hell is this now?" says the little voice in the back of my head as I'm looked upon as being the intruder in my own home. It is bad enough that he has a total of at least ten friends that spend a better part of their lives in my home, but them I am already used to and pretty much resigned to their presence. However, the new faces always freak me out and I am not sure if I am being unreasonable with my internal negative reaction. "Mom, it is like I have had to change who I am, how I react, and so much of myself in order to adjust to my son's behavior," I told her in our morning conversation on my way to work. "There is not way that under normal circumstances I would allow to have someone that I know absolutely nothing about to wander freely about my home," I conclude.

I feel as if I have made too many compromises and have given in far too much of myself, but when I was being my typical self all we did was fight, argue, and be at war between each other. Have I taken the easy way out by not challenging these things when they happen? Should I stand my ground and try to keep a sense of control that in my heart I know is not real anyway? No matter what I say or do, in the end my son will still be his own person and I will not be able to monitor, control, or change any of it anyway. This illness, for lack of a better word, is by far more infectious than it appears to be since even though others do not become aliens once infected, they are still forced to morph in order to survive. I have changed in ways I never thought I would ever be able to change. I am no longer who I was when these challenges and illnesses were thrusted upon me, and today I wonder if who I am is any better or worse from who I was in the past? To be totally honest, I do not know the answer to that question. I feel different but not necessarily better or worse. The common factor in me which I can safely say has only grown larger with time is my love for my son. As much as I dislike so much of what I have to put up with, I cannot help but love him more and more with the passage of time. For this I give thanks to God because otherwise I would of thrown the towel a long time ago. Instead, I have learned to understand my son even though so much in his character makes absolutely no sense to others. Ironically, I do not believe that he is aware of this deep connection that we share between us. In his mind I am completely out of touch with his world and lifestyle. What he does not realize is that in order for me to love him as much as I do, I have been forced to become a different father, in fact, a different man too. This I say it not as a regret, just a simple statement of fact.

Love is the most powerful tool I have managed to accrue in a significant and useful amount. When I wake up in the middle of the night and find myself questioning why it is that my outside doors are unlocked and some of my windows are open even though it is forty something degrees outside, even while I am still half asleep and with my eyes half closed I am able to feel my way into my heart and find an ample supply of fatherly love to get me through the moment. I sigh and as I exhale my mind clears away my instinctive desires to scream out in frustration. I remember the days when the biggest worry was negotiating between me and my wife who was to get up in the middle of the night to feed the baby, change the dirty diaper, or simply bring a few minutes of comfort to the fuzzy child. It really was not that hard to justify myself for being sleep deprived the next day when I woke up in the morning. After all, he was just an infant, and that is what infants do, right? Don't get me wrong though, my admission of how challenging raising two teenage boys has become is by no means a complaint. On the contrary, I can safely say that God knew what he was doing when He gave me my two sons to raise. I believe that I am by far the most qualified man for the job and am proud to be their father, but of course I am biased in my personal opinion. Anyway, I have come this far already and my heart tells me that at the other side of this journey are two wonderful and honorable men in the making that I will always be proud to call my sons.

Dad