boo

I feel, a bit, and there’s a grim humour to it that I can appreciate, like I’ve missed out on Halloween twice. Once as a kid myself, because my parents believed it was the holy day of the devil. (Here’s a thing about some of that.) Halloween was a day when I’d plead Jesus’ name under my breath more than usual, when I’d walk around wondering if demons were hanging invisible in the air more thickly than on other days. I felt like they were stronger on Halloween, like the things that usually kept me (sort of) safe — praying and wearing enough Modest Clothes and not watching Aladdin — might not work so well that day. We didn’t give candy to kids because that was Encouraging Evil Things. Sometimes we’d go visit another non-celebrating family so that we wouldn’t be home that evening, wouldn’t have to ignore the knocking of the kids in their costumes outside. I’d sit in the back seat of the minivan and watch the trees go by out the window and feel scared.

(I plead the blood of Jesus I plead it I plead it — )

This missing out, well, it’s not so bad, it’s not as bad as that. This time it’s just the loss of the fun I would have had watching Em enjoy it. But — well, it feels more and more ableist and egocentric, the further I get into this, to think of things in terms of him missing out. I suppose he doesn’t, not really. It’s only me who cares, not him. The other boy he might have been, that boy might have enjoyed it, the dressing up and the going round and the candy. That boy might have gone to school as Bob the Builder or a dragon or as Elsa from Frozen, might have had a tantrum over how much candy he got to eat, carved pumpkins.

(Maybe he wouldn’t have, though. It’s easy, sometimes, if I’m honest, it’s too easy to project too many things onto that other boy.)

But this boy, my lovely alien, he hates clothes of any kind. He’d go to school naked if we let him. (He’s tried.) He gets upset by strange fabric touching him, by collars, by things on his head, by hats and masks, by things that flap too strangely when he jumps. He wouldn’t like face paint, or having to carry a pail of candy. He’d fling it into the air to watch the candy fall around him. And that’s ok.

I thought that was all I wanted to say but, writing this, I realise — that’s not exactly the loss I feel most, this time round, his putative joy over costumes and candy. What bothers me more is the larger feeling that the way Em is keeps me from disrupting the fucked-up parts of my own past through him. I keep catching myself thinking, lately, I wanted to be able to end that with me. I wanted to raise a kid who wasn’t afraid of things, god or people or the world, who didn’t imagine demons in the air. I wanted to raise a kid who wasn’t scared on Halloween.

I have, I suppose. Just not in the way I meant.

So, a crowd of spectres clustered round — the ghosts of the Boy He Isn’t, of the joy he doesn’t miss, of the vindication I thought it would be for scared little me, of all the amorphous fears about the monsters in his future. Ghosts of yet more plans for Life Done Right littered on the floor.

I don’t miss them. Let them lie. Happy Halloween.