It was dark when I came in the house from working in the yard. I was dirty and went immediately to the shower. We have an old tub with an afterthought shower setup. It includes a long chrome pipe, sticking out of the top of the tub faucet. Normally, on newer houses, this runs inside the wall. Ours is outside the wall, inside the shower. Near the bottom is a second shower head on a hose. To use one or the other, you turn a little valve.
Ever since we moved here, I have typically been the only one that uses the upper shower head. Most everyone else uses the tub faucet or the shower head on the hose. Lately though, one of my children has gotten into the habit of using the upper shower head. This wouldn’t be a big deal except for he always changes the setting to massage, only the massage setting doesn’t really work. Mineral deposits inside the shower head have locked the moving parts in place. So instead of an alternating spray out of six holes, three at a time, the water shoots out in three laser beam streams.
Okay, not a big deal. I know this. But I’m still bugged. Maybe I’m bugged because I have asked him to change it back when he’s done, and still he doesn’t. Or maybe it’s because he has to stand on the sides of the tub to reach the shower head and could easily slip or fall. Or it could be that I get sprayed all over, trying to figure out which way to spin the little dial, returning it to the setting I like. Lame as it sounds, the most likely answer is that the upper shower head is just mine, it’s always been mine, and I don’t like people touching it. Like I said, I realize its lame.
Tonight, as I reached up to change the head back to my setting, I thought about how it really isn’t a big deal, and maybe I could just let it go. Suddenly, memory took me instantly to my high school days, when my old truck was in the shop, and my mom let me take her car once in a while. She hated it when I adjusted the mirror in her car, and let me know about it whenever I forgot to change it back. Eventually, it was easier to just stop adjusting it and use the other mirrors instead. The mirror adjusting issue is so ingrained in my psyche that I still think about it almost every time I adjust the mirror in Nancy’s car.
It was so strange for me to suddenly make this connection between these two seemingly unrelated events. It’s also interesting that I didn’t make the correlation until I was actually reaching up, the way you would reach up to adjust a mirror, and at the same moment, I told myself to just let it go, the same way I wished my mother would have done for me.
Sometimes this boy and I don’t see things quite the same way. He makes a lot of noise and has a hard time staying on task. These two things are sometimes hard for me to deal with, especially when he should be clearing the table or going to bed. I try so hard to be nice and to listen and to understand. I constantly remind myself that his actions and behavior are all age appropriate, but, all too often I am just complaining about how he does this or that wrong, or how he could have done this or that differently or better.
My own mother didn’t like a few things about me and tried to correct what she could. But it was very rare for her to find fault or get on me about every petty thing. She loved me, and I knew she loved me. No matter what, I never questioned that about her.
She never let her frustrations with me get in the way of the relationship. Or if she did, I never knew about it. I honestly don’t know if my son can say the same thing about me.
Today, when I got home, he ran up the stairs yelling, “Daddy’s home!” He said it the same way all the kids did when they were younger, and grew out of saying when they reached the age of six or so. I gave him a hug and rubbed his back for a minute. “That feels good,” he cooed.
I thought about how he doesn’t get much attention like this anymore, at least not from me. I believe it’s time for that to change. It’s time for me to change. He is what he is. He doesn’t know any other way. I’m the one who’s wrong. I’m the one who needs to let it go.
“Daddy’s home.” The words keep echoing in my mind. Maybe I’m not completely there, but I’m working on it. And I will keep working on it until the relationship is right, until I have let it all go, and until I can fully accept him for the person he is.
I’m coming home. And yes, that does feel good.
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