When I was a little guy, there was nothing more frightening than waking up in the middle of the night and seeing my closet door drift open. It happened a few times, probably due to some freaky combination of air pressure and a closet door that hadn’t quite been closed all the way.<\/p>\n
To me, though, it presented a terrifying dilemma. Should I stay in bed and hope that whatever’s in the closet stays in the closet, or should I charge across the darkness and close the door before it’s too late?<\/p>\n
Remembering that battle, I’ve always been careful to make sure my sons’ closets are closed when I tuck them in at night.<\/p>\n
A month or so ago, I stuck my head into my youngest son’s room to say goodnight and noticed his closet door was open.<\/p>\n
“Yikes,” I said. “Didn’t Momma close it?”<\/p>\n
“Na.” He shrugged. “I don’t care.”<\/p>\n
“Don’t care?! You can’t sleep in a room with an open closet!”<\/p>\n
“Daddy, it’s just a closet.”<\/p>\n
“I’m serious.”\u00a0He clearly did not understand the danger he was in, so I walked to the closet, and reached over to close the door. Instead of closing it, though, I jerked it open and fell backwards, screaming “Aaah!”<\/p>\n
He sat bolt upright in bed. I’m not sure, but I think I saw a little bit of fear in those wide round brown eyes. Then he threw a pillow at me. “Da-addy!”<\/p>\n
We both laughed and I left him sleeping peacefully with a closed closet.<\/p>\n
Since then, it’s become an on-going challenge. Every night, I close his closet door. Every night, it almost kills me.<\/p>\n
Last night, as I started to close his closet door, something grabbed my arm and pulled me halfway into the closet. There was a loud bang and I collapsed to the floor, clearly and obviously killed by whatever was in his closet.<\/p>\n
Shortly after that, I felt a pillow hit my legs. “Da-addy! You’re not scaring me.”<\/p>\n
Hmph.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
How can anyone sleep with an open closet door? It’s just not natural.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[123,122,120,119],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2191","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daddytales-cute","category-daddytales-n","category-daddytales-embarassing","category-daddytales-funny"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6DpYi-zl","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2191","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2191"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2191\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2191"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2191"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2191"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}