I have mixed feelings about Halloween these days. I don’t understand the point of Halloween parades, where parents make a disproportionately large effort, missing work or dragging along siblings, to watch their kid walk in a circle in costume. The overload of candy is understandably exciting (Eric claims it’s his favorite holiday after Christmas), but seems excessive, requiring increasingly complicated negotiations as the kids get older to reasonably manage (this year each kid got five pieces, then the rest were combined and quarantined). I’m always ambivalent about costumes—part of me hates shelling out for premade costumes of commercialized characters on amazon, but I also find myself without the energy to hand-make four costumes or coordinate family costume themes, like I used to. I like the sense of community trick-or-treating in the neighborhood brings, but I also hear about folks increasingly flocking to lucrative, entertaining destination neighborhoods like the Steve Jobs house, and I’m not sure what to make of all that.
The main thing I was struck by this year, though, was how cute the kids were as we walked through the neighborhood: Eric rushing up to every door that had a light. All of them saying “trick-or-treat!” and “thank you” and Elijah taking forever to decide what pieces to pick. Esme putting pieces back if she felt she got too many. The older kids asking how many they were allowed to take. Esme’s costume sliding around to obstruct her vision half the time. Holding hands in the dark. Everyone talking about how heavy their pumpkin buckets were getting.
More than any other holiday, Halloween seems made for kids, and I’m reminded that one day when they grow up, it will make me miss them. People are always telling you, “the days are long but the years are short”—and really, catching the true preciousness of each stage, enjoying them as something that will not be forever, can be so hard to do. Tonight as I was opening my nightstand drawer for something, I saw a piece of paper—it was another one of Esme’s drawings. She’s always covering paper with scribbles, declaring it’s a gift for me, then secretly leaving them on my nightstand or in my nightstand drawer. I felt slightly annoyed at first (more paper I will have to walk over to the recycling bin), but now I’m sitting down to look at it. It has a lot of scribbles, and one little stick figure. It has eight different colors, which means she had to uncap and recap eight different markers. It’s an unused medical billing sheet, her favorite scrap paper to use because the hospital logo has figures which she likes to color in.
One day, I will miss being constantly gifted pieces of art-slash-recycling. I’ll probably miss the knee-level smudges on our glass doors and the treasures-slash-trash (old stickers, cheap prizes, rocks, used toilet paper rolls, empty mint boxes and the like) that gets hoarded. I’ll miss the half-books that Ellie is always starting and leaving around, folding little socks and shirts, having kid-sized utensils and cups in our kitchen drawers. I might miss going everywhere with the double stroller. I’ll miss Esme coming in to snuggle in bed with me in the mornings (a few minutes after 7AM, which is when Ellie lets her leave their room, as instructed—who knows when they actually wake up). I’ll miss seeing Elijah rolled up in his security blanket like a burrito, Eric walking across the school field for pickup every afternoon in his baseball cap while holding his bento lunch box in one hand and eating out of it with the other (apparently he doesn’t actually eat during lunch hour). I’ll miss Ellie’s eagerness to go on dates with me and jumping rope all the way to church. I’ll miss how being held can make everything okay when they’re mad or hurt.
There is so much change in these little years. The person they are right now will be gone next year. I suppose it’s the unrelenting immersion of caregiving that obscures that fact, the living in constant streams of multi-tasking. A piece of paper in a nightstand drawer becomes one more task to deal with—when in reality, it’s a time capsule of this moment, a memento of a little girl’s imagination and heart and devotion. It’s good to pause and see that.
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