The Tunnel

The Tunnel

When the kids were little and I was building the house, I let them pick their own bedroom colors. I wanted them to feel free, to choose what they loved, to be their own people.

And what did they pick?

Leah chose pink. Of course she did—she was in that pink age. Princesses, cotton candy, bubblegum—the kind of age where the whole world can be summed up in one color. She probably regrets it now, but at the time her eyes lit up like she’d just been handed her own castle.

Isaac picked blue. My son, the boy who could’ve chosen anything, went straight for the old standby.

So there I was, trying so hard to raise free-thinking children… and I ended up with one pink room and one blue room.

But the colors weren’t the real story.

What they really wanted was a tunnel.

Not a tunnel between their rooms. Not a tunnel for games. They wanted a tunnel that went straight into mine.

“So we can come to mommy through the tunnel anytime we want,” they explained with total seriousness. “Wouldn’t that be neat?”

It was neat. It was everything.

Because what they were really saying was: We want a way back to you, always. A secret passage to safety, to love, to your arms.

We never built that tunnel. And later, that sense of safety—the very thing the tunnel stood for—was stolen from us. The house went, the marriage went, the trust in the world went. What remained was the memory of what they asked for, and what it meant: a child’s deepest truth, that closeness is the only real protection.

Maybe all of us, no matter how grown we are, still wish for that tunnel. Especially when the walls close in, when systems fail, when the world turns hostile. A hidden passage we can crawl through, back into love, back into safety, back into the arms that should never have been taken away.