When my older son was very small, he liked to “be” someone different each day. He had assigned costume status to various outfits: baseball player, cowboy, fire fighter, astronaut, pilot. Halloween was just another ordinary day, but with candy.
(His younger brother approached Halloween, and life in general, with more glee. When he was about seven, he famously approached the pumpkin-carving with a cheerful, “Okay, Jack! Time for your lobotomy!”)
My firstborn seemed to have been born tracking Lynn Dell Cohen’s vibe:
This deciding every night about who he was going to be the next day—well. It was sometimes a lot of pressure for someone who has only been on the planet a few years.
We have a legendary photograph of the E-man at four, sitting on his bed with all his different outfits laid out. Of course his distress was real, but he was wearing a caricature, over-the-top sad face. Like a mime. A big tear on his cheek. He couldn’t decide.
That may or may not have been the morning after he had panicked one night, going downtown with his worries. He was not only anxious about the next day, but he hurled himself wildly into the future. His lament began something like this, slowly escalating:
“I don’t know who I’m going to be tomorrow, I don’t know where I’m going to go to college, I don’t know where I’m going to live when I grow up, I don’t know what I’m going to be when I grow up….”
And I’m probably missing a few here. But I distinctly remember the crescendo toward the grand finale:
“I don’t even know who I’m going to marry!”
Now that is some serious existential quandary right there.
I totally get that.
I was in divinity school when I learned, a week after my twenty-fourth birthday, that I was pregnant with that guy. I’d hardly had any time to be an adult in the world before my future became framed by “mother.” In two years, I’ll be the mother of a child learning to walk. In five years, the mother of a pre-schooler. Et cetera. And even while I forged my own identity, the presence of my son, and then sons, was the central feature of my adulthood.
So when my younger fella graduated from college last May, I began to wonder. Who do I want to be?
It’s… kind of a lot. To think about. When you’re paying a mortgage, and you’ve never given a rat’s ass about a “career,” which is how many of us are taught to identify ourselves. My honorary daughter works in a law firm in downtown Seattle and mused yesterday that “differences between men and women’s business attire is unfair in literally every way.” And “business attire” is 100% the reason I was never going to be able to “be” a business woman. Or work in any kind of cubicle. It is not the costume I prefer for the theatre of my everyday life.
And then there’s been the recovery from Mortal Peril, which involved a lot of wondering about the next world and do I even belong here with the living?
So in the last weeks, as we approached the Day of the Dead, I have been remembering my boys and their Halloween adventures, but also looking back to realize that although I was not hospitalized until January, it is clear from my journal entries and photographs that I was already ill at this time two years ago. Which is also a lot.
Halloween was mostly stressful for me when the boys were small, but my favorite memory is my big boy, at four, in his ghoul costume, a white pillowcase with holes cut for the arms and a fabric mask. We bundled up with his newborn brother and walked through the Proctor District, where shopkeepers, bless them, handed out Tootsie Rolls, which, in my mind, should not be allowed.
As we approached each shop, my earnest boy would lift the mask to reassure the adult with the loot. “Don’t be scared! It’s just a little boy under here!”
The pressing in of the season of death with resonances of the enormity of the future, the enormity of our mortality—this is the right time to reassure each other. Don’t be scared.
That’s a lot!