After our hockey boy numbers dropped to an abysmal one, Judy and I had to examine ourselves and decide how we felt about the situation. Emotionally, we enjoy having a few boys around. They keep life interesting and prevent me from getting bored, which is important because Judy’s work has rendered her incapable of sustaining some of the conversations I would otherwise inflict on her. More boys also give us more motivation to cook. There are practical benefits to having a few extra people around, even if they do occasionally consume food at a rate that suggests they are preparing for hibernation.

The biggest challenge is knowing how much food to make. We have developed a protocol for the hockey boy who treats our house as a convenient place to sleep and do laundry while maintaining an active social life elsewhere. We will cook for you when there is a reasonable expectation that you will be home for dinner. A morning conversation in which you announce your dinner plans carries very little weight. The only reliable confirmation is your return home by 4:00 p.m., preferably accompanied by a declaration that you are taking a nap. At that point, we can reasonably conclude that dinner might actually happen at our house.

We appreciate that the boys have social lives and are exercising their social skills on a regular basis. However, their social outings do not cause the extra food we prepared to disappear when they check in just before bedtime. So, if their feelings get hurt because we’re feeding them something prepared in the microwave or air fryer, they might want to consider giving their words a little more value. When “I’ll be home for dinner” no longer requires an implied “unless something better comes along,” we’ll know we can cook for them without filling the refrigerator with containers of food that eventually become part of a science experiment. We are adapting.

The Grandkids Have Opinions, Too

The hockey dinner challenge is complicated by our efforts to cook a couple of meals each week for our daughter’s family. We want to give them some variety while providing Ellie with food a toddler can successfully feed herself. Soup isn’t a great choice unless the objective is to see how much of it can end up everywhere except inside the child. Pasta can work, and corn will always get her vote. We also get some pleasant surprises. Who would have guessed that Ellie would enjoy dipping her meatloaf bites in barbecue sauce? We may have a future food critic on our hands, although her current reviewing process seems to involve eating something and then demanding more of it.

Between the hockey boys and the grandkids, we’re doing our best to keep everyone fed. The difference is that Ellie hasn’t yet developed the ability to tell us she’ll be home for dinner and then disappear for six hours. We’ll see how long that lasts.

We Don’t Do Drama

Whether we have one boy or three, our rule about drama remains the same: we don’t do it. That doesn’t mean drama never tries to find us. Hormones spike, relationships get complicated, and people occasionally experience crises that seem to require the participation of everyone within driving distance. We simply don’t invite it into our home.

After seven years of billet parenting, we’ve heard enough stories to know that some houses experience considerably more turbulence than others. I can’t speak to every rumor or confirm every story, but I can listen when our billet son describes things happening in other homes and wonder how adults manage to make a young hockey player’s life more complicated than it needs to be.

A recent golf outing sponsored by the team provided another example. Words were exchanged, or people were accused of saying things, and the resulting complaints found their way to the coaching staff. The coach was expected to have conversations with players accused of disrespecting others, and his list of potential troublemakers began to grow. I don’t know all the details, but alcohol may have contributed to the situation. Give people a little alcohol, lower their inhibitions, and sometimes the event ends with a few more people convinced they’ve been wronged than when it started.

The boys are left to navigate the fallout. They have hockey to play, relationships to manage, and coaches to keep happy. The last thing they need is to wonder whether the adults responsible for their housing have the emotional maturity of the teenagers living under their roofs.

When the Billet Home Becomes the Problem

Our current billet came to us from one of those more challenging households. There still seems to be some lingering resentment surrounding his departure, and we’re hearing stories about disagreements involving the player, other billets, and the coaching staff. Whatever the full story, the situation has become another complication in a season that already has plenty.

Our billet coordinator has had her own challenges this year and seems reluctant to approve additional moves between billet homes. As long as a house isn’t considered dangerous, the boys’ requests to move may not get much traction. I understand that coordinating a hockey team and its billets isn’t an easy job, but I also think there’s a difference between a boy being unhappy because he doesn’t like the house rules and a player who continues to deal with unnecessary stress from the adults responsible for him.

This isn’t a billet mom deciding she’s had enough because a kid stepped over the line. We’re talking about a starting player whose life, for eight months, should be relatively straightforward: sleep, eat, practice, play hockey, and repeat. With some minor variations, that is the job. He shouldn’t also have to worry about an adult repeatedly demanding to know his exact location or trying to pressure a coach into reprimanding players over perceived slights.

These boys are young, and they still have growing up to do. That doesn’t mean the adults around them should be adding obstacles to that journey.

Natural Consequences Are Still a Thing

As a billet parent, I’m supposed to enforce a curfew. That requirement has always struck me as a little funny because I grew up without one. If my dad wanted to cut wood on a Saturday morning, I needed to be awake and ready to help. He wasn’t going to accept an explanation that my alarm hadn’t gone off or that I hadn’t realized what time it was. The wood still needed cutting.

I take a similar approach with our hockey boys. If they want to play for this team, they need to learn to manage the basic responsibilities of life. Set an alarm. Get yourself to practice. Know when you’re supposed to be somewhere. If you oversleep or miss something important, the coach is likely to be unhappy. That consequence might do more to teach you about responsibility than a billet parent delivering a lecture on time management.

If I were coaching a player who repeatedly couldn’t manage his schedule, I’d expect him to improve. If he couldn’t, we’d need to figure out what was going wrong. Moving him into a special-supervision billet home might solve the immediate problem, but it could also postpone the day when he learns to manage his own life. They won’t always have someone standing outside their bedroom door making sure they can tell time.

We’re happy to help the boys succeed, but we aren’t interested in enabling someone who refuses to learn the basics. There’s a difference between providing a stable home and becoming a full-service life-management department.

A Few Requirements for the Next Boy

If we’re going to add another hockey boy, we’d like someone who appreciates the advantages of living with us. We have a few expectations, none of which should require an advanced degree in human behavior. We’d like him to turn the thermostat back up after cranking it down at night to create a Minnesota chill-vibe in his bedroom. We’d like him to show up for dinner more often than he doesn’t. And if the grandkids are around, we’d appreciate a little willingness to play with them.

We’re not asking for much beyond that. Help clear the table. Refill your water and Gatorade in the refrigerator. Be reasonably pleasant company. If you can accomplish those things while managing to attend hockey practices on time, you may be exactly the kind of young man we’re looking for.

Of course, we have an opportunity to screen potential candidates at our Friday pregame breakfast. Some of the boys are perfectly happy, which is always encouraging. With only one player living with us, we’ve continued the breakfasts, and we had nine attendees last week, with a tenth being a realistic possibility. The more boys we house, the more are likely to attend. That also spreads my labor across more hungry hockey players instead of requiring me to produce roughly the same breakfast operation for a single houseguest.

There are advantages to having more than one boy, particularly when injuries and trades are part of the equation. I would hate to give up the breakfasts if something happened to our current player. Having at least one more boy around would give us a little insurance against the inevitable changes that come with junior hockey.

Last night, I told our player, “We’ll work on getting you a buddy.”

I think that would be good for him. He could spend more time with someone his own age without having to drive all over the place to find company, and he wouldn’t have to spend every evening hanging around with the old people. We do our best to be entertaining, but there’s only so much wisdom and questionable humor a young man should have to endure after a full day of hockey.

If the drama continues, we’ll deal with whatever comes our way. Patience will be important. Pushing the billet coordinator too hard could move us to the bottom of the list, and we don’t need to make a difficult job harder for her. Over time, the more stable homes will establish their reputations. We don’t need to toot our own horn. The breakfasts, the experience we’ve accumulated, and the way we treat the boys should speak for themselves.

Keeping the Bigger Picture in View

It’s been a tough year, but we’re hanging in there. Judy has stuck to her commitment to make the pancakes and eggs, and I’ve handled the meats. We continue to open our home, feed the boys, and try to make their time here a positive experience. If we focused exclusively on the frustrations of the moment, we’d have to conclude that this hasn’t been a particularly rewarding season.

Fortunately, we’re capable of occasionally stepping back far enough to see the bigger picture. Not every valuable thing we do in life feels valuable every moment of every day. And not every life we influence comes in groups of two or more. Sometimes the difference you make for one person is enough to justify the effort, even when that person is currently eating your food, monopolizing your refrigerator, and trying to turn his bedroom into a walk-in freezer.

We billet because we believe we can provide some stability during a period of life that can be difficult for young men. They leave home, pursue a demanding sport, and try to figure out who they are while living with people they barely know. We have an opportunity to make that transition a little easier. We can provide a comfortable home, some decent meals, reasonable expectations, and adults who don’t need to make everything about themselves.

We didn’t sign up because it’s easy, and we certainly didn’t do it because we needed someone else’s problems to work through. We are on a mission as long as this mission wants us here.

As long as that mission still wants us here, we’ll keep making pancakes, cooking meat, and trying to find another boy who understands the value of a good home. If the burden eventually becomes too much, we’ll look for another place where we can make a difference and feel that our efforts are appreciated.

For now, we have one hockey boy, nine breakfast guests, a refrigerator full of food, and the possibility of adding another player to the household. That’s enough to keep things interesting.

And if our next billet boy can tell us by four o’clock whether he’s coming home for dinner, we’ll consider that a promising start.