Anger Door

My house has quite a few doors. I am rethinking starting a blog with that sentence. I might as well have started it, "You have my permission to stop reading now." My house DOES have several doors, though. I have taken to calling one the Anger Door. Not out loud, just in my head.

We live in a pretty old house, so everything is uneven and very few of our many doors work well. A quick mental count returns a grand total of 2 functional doors. My least favorite is the Anger Door.

The Anger Door leads to a small stairway down to a landing from which you can choose to either go outside or into the basement. One of the doors in the basement has the image of a clown on it created by gluing yard  to it in a clown shape. I don't know why. You can also access a pantry out the anger door by turning left before heading down to the landing. We enter and access this door multiple times a day - to get food, to let out our dog, to do laundry, to stare in wonder at the yarn clown - and each time the Anger Door does its work.

For some reason, in the last few months, this door has transformed to a poor fitting, cracked, ugly door into a uncloseable monster. A few years of use has conditioned us to simply shut the door normally and walk away, but now, inexplicably, it will not shut. If you shut it normally, it will just quietly swing it back open. If you slam it shut, it will make a loud noise then swing back open. If you really hulk out on it and actually get it to stick shut,  it sounds like you are completely enraged. Of course, though the door is shut, everyone thinks you actually are angry. More than once I have been asked why I was so angry after shutting the door. Sometimes, I just say - I'm not angry, I was just getting the door to stay shut. Sometimes, I AM angry because that was my fourth or fifth attempt at shutting the door.

Sometimes a person has to act out to get something done, and often that is misinterpreted. My son Jack used to get upset at me for yelling at mommy. He didn't understand that for a person who is upstairs to hear a person downstairs, your voice has to be raised - even if you are just asking for a pair of socks.

I have seen this rationale taken too far. Raising your voice, making a scene, or slamming a door isn't generally a mature way of handling conflict. Yes, you can generally get what you want if you are willing to act out in public, but when you do that you are a turd. I couldn't think of anything else I could put there. Turd will act as a placeholder for you to fill in an (in)appropriate word. Like a blog Mad Lib.

A subtle distinction needs to be made. When I am shutting the door with a level of violence because that is what it takes to shut the door, I am taking an appropriate course of action. If I am losing control of my emotions and lashing out at the door violently to bend it to my will, I am probably acting childishly. Is it the only way to shut the door? Yeah. Sometimes though, its best to just leave the door open for a bit.