I miss Piglet. One of my sons, whose name shall remain locked behind my lips to maintain his late elementary school aged dignity, dressed up as the small pink pig for Halloween many years ago. Of course, I choose the costume – and made it out of a pink fuzzy-footed sleeper suit.
The next few baby-years consisted of cow, bear, and tiger costumes. When they were preschool aged I took both boys to a quiet drug store and made a trek up the mask aisle. “See this? Touch this; it isn’t real…” I said as I held a latex mask made hideous with bulging ears and angry scars. I knew they’d rear back and gape up at people wearing such masks on Halloween night. I was trying to mitigate their fear, trying to draw a clear line between real and make-believe.
Children learn to pretend when they are very young. Before a child can use full rounded sentences to describe a scary grizzly bear, she will pick up a stuffed bear and lean it towards you, scrunch her face, make a growling sound. And you, the adult, recoil in mock seriousness, say “Yip! Yowee! You are a scary bear!” And she smiles. She wanted to be scary.
Halloween? What better time to play out the black/white good/bad character lessons of childhood?
So my sons and I venture out to the decoration store. And, after an hour of wandering the aisles, my eyes are exhausted.
What happened to just scary? What happened to simple creepy, ghoulish, ghostly, menacing?
Must we have bodies disassembled, blood from every orifice, hooks and metal bars and guns and knives protruding from skulls? Machine guns? Bombs?
Isn’t there an invisible line where one side is fun and the other is not-fun-anymore? Or am I a kill-joy?
I’m trying to respect my boys – they are not me-as-a-child; they don’t want to be a princess with a hoop skirt, Little Bo-Peep, or Amelia Earhart. I get it. But, still, I say to them “Let’s keep Sethy and Fiona in mind (they are both 4) – would you want them to see that?” and “Let’s try to stay away from revolting”
“But, revolting is the best part,” my child says grinning, knowing I won’t buy it, but trying to teach me anyway. “Halloween means SCARY.” He sweeps his hand in an arc as if writing on a chalkboard – S-C-A-R-Y.
The other son adds, “It’s the one night where YOU get to be the scary thing. So, the scary thing can’t get you, because you are it! He too smiles, knowing I wouldn’t buy his logic.
But, funny thing is, I did. And I do.
Growing up is a scary business. Maybe fairy tales, the big bad wolf, the clear cut of good-guy verses bad-guy helps children make sense of the world they are growing into in a way that is manageable, even in a way that is play.
I still see no use in the all-too-real violent costumes. I can’t find the Halloween scary-fun in dressing up like a dictator, one of the Columbine killers, or a terrorist.And the latex versions of horror movie characters are my version of over-written, over-dramatic, over-dressed, tasteless, yuck. The more classic costumes, the more powerful costumes, are subtle I tell my sons. They don’t believe me, but are used to it by now.
A vampire, a sneering skeleton, a monster. I’ll go along, hesitantly, with those costumes.
“There’s nothing to be afraid of,” we say. But, children know of monsters. Their imaginations grow looming shapes in the dark without any help from us. They know “Boo!” and hopefully they know comfort.
All their lives long they will travel back and forth between fear and comfort. Pretending, for Halloween night, to be one of the scary things may just help them the next time these post-9/11 kids have to learn that some of scary stuff is frighteningly unimaginable yet unfolding before their eyes.
When we grow up we have to learn that people are more complicated than all-good or all-bad. We learn that people are capable of every gradation between great good and great monstrosity. Even a masked man, even Frankenstein, even an Angel. Even us. And that’s scary, too.
I still miss Piglet. But, I get it. Grrrrrrrrr.Boo. Yipes.Scary night. Yep, you scared me. Good for you little one.
