Someone's knocking on my door.....

So...people and front doors, eh? 😱

That seems to be what The Boy thinks.

Now then...I like a nice postal delivery as much as anyone else in these modern times. For me , it is often a nice surprise because I have forgotten that I had ordered X, Y or Z...

...when it was the run up to Melody Maid's wedding, the post person seemed to be delivering ribbons or bibbons for weeks in advance. Things to decorate the tables, reception, the cake, me.... it was all very exciting.

For me.

For The Boy , it was terrifying.

You see, he  has a full-blown panic, whenever someone knocks at the door.

I guess it is the unknown. The unexpected. The unpredictable....and therefore, the scary. The terrifying.  The threatening.

I try to prepare him when I know that someone is expected...I tell him that someone is coming to see us, that they will have a cup of tea and a chat and that it isn't scary and everything will be ok.  Even then, when he hears the knock on the door  he often flings himself ,and anything moveable within reach, around the room. As a result of this behaviour, we try to ensure that the mantlepiece is clear, the surfaces are empty, there are no cups within reach etc.

So, when I don't know that someone is arriving, or if the postman brings something that won't fit in the letterbox and the knock on the door sounds, the Boy goes wild. He hammers himself on the head, goes into full blown panic and is ,quite frankly, terrified AND terrifying. If I am within reach, I am often the object of his fear...which means my hair is pulled, my glasses can be thrown......you know ,the usual.

On Saturday, we were expecting visitors. I had tried to prepare the Boy as much as humanly possible. When the knock came, he was quite flustered but when it turned out NOT to be our visitors rather a delivery man instead, he morphed into a caged animal. He was wild eyed, frantic, furious, scared...he ran into the kitchen where,in his anxiety,  he swept the contents of the spice shelf to the floor. Coriander, cumin and cinnamon went flying, mingling with nutmeg, cloves and everything else.

To be honest,  the smell was  lovely....but it was not so lovely to see.

It was a spicy massacre.

When our visitors arrived  the Boy and I were still flustered....which was unfortunate because the visitors were M's cousin and his wife whom I had never met. M and the said cousin had been close as children but then , due to geography and the fact that life happened ,they didn't see each again until M's dad's funeral last year which I couldn't attend as we had no one else to look after the Boy.  So this was to be our first meeting.

 As you can imagine, I wanted to be calm, cool and collected. Turns out, I was flustered and flushed.

They, the cousin and his delightful.wife, were lovely people.

Just as well.



Took me and the Boy a while to regain our equilibrium!

So....There is nothing I can do to help him when the unexpected happens because, well, the unexpected is by definition unexpected!

I wish I COULD help. I wish I could ease his anxiety. Explain.  All we can do is do what we can do. No one can do more than that.

Can they?

The End