Our philosophy with hockey players, and any other strays who may wander through our front door, is pretty simple: If we have an open bed, you are welcome.
We don’t always know how long that welcome will last. Some boys fit into our house easily. Others discover that living with us isn’t quite what they expected, and sometimes we discover the same thing. We like having people to cook for, though, and hearing, “Wow, that was pretty good. What was it?” will always score more points than, “I only eat pizza and hamburgers.”
After the rapid departure of our previous hockey boy, I tried to process things from his side a little more. For four years, his identity had been, “I am wanted by an Ivy League school to play hockey.” When that suddenly disappeared, I could understand why he needed to make a change. I stopped taking his departure quite so personally.
Then, because apparently the best way to deal with one hockey boy leaving is to put another one in his room, NEW showed up.
Our EX, who is also one of the team captains, seems to have been keeping track of the other boys by creating his own unofficial “billet happiness” spectrum. He apparently knows which players are happy, which ones are less happy, and which ones might be one bad dinner away from packing a suitcase. When he left Wednesday evening for his new home, he casually mentioned, “I was talking to another player who is really unhappy at his billet house.” I thought, “Great. I’ll believe it when I see it.” I assumed he was just trying to say something nice on his way out the door. A little verbal reassurance that his leaving wasn’t personal.
Then he texted me the next morning. EX gave me more background on a particular player and suggested I contact the billet coordinator about him. My text to her was simple: “Yeah, we are interested if this kid is looking for a place.” Her response came shortly afterward: “This wasn’t supposed to be communicated at all.” That seemed like a strange way to respond to someone volunteering to take a hockey player off your hands. Despite her frustration, she completed the transaction. By “transaction,” I mean she sent us his paperwork and let us know we could go ahead and contact him. Her terseness left me wondering whether she was simply having a bad day or whether there was more to the story than we were being told.
When NEW arrived before dinner that night, he volunteered to fill us in on “the rest of the story.” Before he got very far, though, his previous billet’s social media post told us most of what we needed to know. He showed it to us. We don’t follow her, so we weren’t exactly sitting around monitoring the situation. I repeated my commitment to him, although this was the first time he had heard it: “Our job is to feed you well and do everything we can to make sure you sleep well.” He took that commitment seriously. Especially the sleep part. He took a few liberties with the upstairs thermostat. Those Minnesota boys would sleep with the window open in the winter if you let them.
NEW arrived on a Thursday night, which meant Friday was a home game. That meant I would be frying bacon. Or at least I thought it did. Since we had been hockey-boy-less for 24 hours, the rest of the hockey breakfast club had already made alternate plans. Once that little hypocrisy was cleared up on breakfast eve, I quickly graduated to putting a few trays of bacon in the oven after my coffee in the morning. The breakfast club showed up, ate well, and then I made another questionable decision. I mentioned the de-commitment story involving our EX to the early arrivals. Their dropped jaws immediately told me I had stepped into an unsafe place. This was not my news to tell. I swore them to secrecy and hoped the statute of limitations on being a bad breakfast host was shorter than the hockey season. The chatter was good, the boys were grateful, and eventually they all left with full stomachs and eyes that had narrowed to barely functional slits. The rapid eye movements were clearly getting close.
The final piece of the story came during the hockey game. We met our EX’s mom a couple of weeks ago. She had a gift bag for the twins at the game. I had told Judy beforehand that I wouldn’t be surprised if she brought something for the girls. She struck me as the kind of person who took care of billet parents in an above-and-beyond sort of way. We talked with her for close to an hour. Early on, I asked the simple question, “How is he doing?” She opened up and told us more than I expected. Then she dropped the nugget that connected everything. “You know my son played a pretty big role in getting you your new hockey boy.”
My eyebrows went up. She explained that the billet coordinator had told EX that we needed to reach out to her if we wanted NEW. My quick response confirmed what I had already suspected. Whatever drama the billet coordinator had been trying to avoid was no longer avoidable. Not surprisingly, she was considerably less chatty with us at the game that night.
The verdict is still out on whether this will be our last year billeting. I had already looked at a few trips for February, but those may have to wait until at least next year. Billeting can be a little like dating. You end up with someone who looks like a good match, hope you’re compatible, and discover a few things after they move in that probably should have been included in the profile.
NEW has a lot going for him. He has lots of nieces and nephews. He says he will eat anything. He even says he always cleans his plate. And then there’s the big one: he would rather pack a lunch than go out for lunch every day. This makes him a very rare find.
We didn’t swipe left or right on any of our hockey boys. They just showed up, stayed awhile, and eventually moved on to whatever came next. We weren’t a great fit for our EX. He was dealing with his own stuff, and we were dealing with ours. But somewhere along the way, he decided we were a good, stable place for another kid. So he did a little greasing of the skids on his way out.
I kind of like that. The boy who left our house may have helped us find the boy who replaced him. Maybe that’s how this whole billet thing is supposed to work. You open a door for one kid, learn a few things, occasionally buy 47 pounds of food that nobody eats, and eventually another kid walks through the same door.
We still don’t know if NEW will be a keeper. For now, he eats what we eat, cleans his plate, wants to pack his lunch, has his own upstairs bedroom, and apparently sleeps well enough to keep the thermostat company.
After everything that happened this week, I’m willing to let the billet gods have the final say. So far, they seem to be saying, “Keep this one.”
