The dog broke out of the yard and ran away while we were trick or treating. We found her gone when we got home, the kids and their overflowing pillowcases, side gate slightly open.
She’d never escaped before but she’s an old dog now and that’s what old dogs do, they get anxious when left alone and sometimes they break free.
After making a dozen calls, I found her at an animal control facility in south LA but was told I’d have to get her in the morning.
“She’ll have to sleep here tonight. It’s too late to process her….”
But before that.
Before I went screaming down the block trying to find her.
Before we made it all the way to the good house in our costumes, there was a rattling in me all evening, like a piece had broken off. Something bone-shaped in my chest. A deeply primal thing.
The knowing that something was ending.
That this was the last year of the parade.
***
I hadn’t felt it earlier that day, which is very me, actually. Things don’t usually hit me until everyone’s either asleep or too preoccupied to notice. And then, out of nowhere, I am in tears. (I have never been triggered by big moments, only little ones. It is never the death that makes me cry but the way the program creases in my hands at the funeral.)
Which is why I felt nothing during the last elementary school parade. I felt nothing watching my girls in their costumes dancing limbo, their hands full of photo booth strips. I felt their joy and excitement, yes, but nothing in me.
What I mean to say is that I didn’t feel the loss.
I didn’t feel the loss on Halloween night when our house filled with people and the pizzas came. Nor did I feel it when Archer appeared in his costume, the one I had ordered for myself last minute, and then gave to him instead, creating my own DIY “mom” version he said wouldn’t embarrass him. (Although I checked with him just in case.)
It wasn’t until we were an hour or so into trick-or-treating and I was standing back on the sidewalk, watching my twin fifth graders disappear up a staircase, their costumes a blur of red and silver — that I realized that I was suddenly and overwhelmingly, sad. That their disappearance, even for a moment, was indicative of what was coming. Of what was here. A moment punctuating a year punctuating a childhood.
Suddenly I was staring back at myself on graduation day. This was it - the end of my tenure as a mom who took pictures of her children’s costumes at the parade that happened hours earlier. There are no parades in middle school. Or high school. Or college.
My babies — who for years had me convinced they would never grow up, were suddenly rounding the same corner into adolescence that their older siblings once did.
There were 28 costumes over 13 years. A total of 12 parades, not counting the year Covid stole from us. The rest, even the parade that came four days after Hal’s death, were accounted for.
There is a certain tree-falls-in-a-forest-quality of being an only parent. In having these moments of reconciliation with time. I often wonder if what I’m feeling is something other than what it is.
The growth of my children became so much more layered when they went from being ours as parents to mine as mother. The branches descend and suddenly I am acutely aware, not only of what I’m going to miss when this is over, but what he already has. Four years of Halloweens without him. And, here we are, with another wave of losses. Changes, really, but also, let’s be real. These are deaths, too.
I don’t remember my life before the parades. Before trick-or-treating with my children. I spin a little when I think about where I’ll go next year, if the twins decide, like their older sister did at their age, that they’d rather be with their friends than with me.
Will I hand out candy at home by myself? Will Archer Facetime me from college? Will I still even want to dress up?
The morning after Halloween I drive to the ASPCA to pick up my dog and drive her home. She’s been there all night and I was unable to sleep knowing she was probably cold and scared somewhere without us. But on arrival I can’t help but feel angry with her for running away and scaring the shit out of us. I’m so mad at her. Even when I’m relieved to see her, I shake my head. Why did you leave when you knew we’d be back? We always come back! She’s a dog so of course she doesn’t answer me. Instead, she wags her tail very slowly, her eyes wet with guilt.
Later, after I’ve filled out the necessary paperwork, paid her bail, something occurs to me as I lift her, old and heavy, into my car. I realize that her escape — her loneliness — her erratic need to go looking for us in the night — was informed by the same panic I felt when my girls disappeared up that staircase.
That even though we know our people will come back, they’re also, in this very visceral way, long gone. Their need for us has changed which means… where do we go?
What I mean to say is that sometimes, breaking and bolting is what we do — not because we feel trapped, but because we feel free in a way that’s so new, we tend to wander off. Panic when we don’t recognize our new lives. We spin a little. Become lost dogs. Get picked up by animal control. Spend the night cold and alone.
Revie assures me that next year we’ll trick or treat like we always do. With everyone meeting at our house and the same ordered pizza and late-night candy organization and and and and… Fable said the same thing at her age. And Archer probably did, too. But I know what happens over the course of a year when you’re eleven and then twelve.
I know what happens in middle school. And it’s okay. It’s okay that it changes. That in this next phase, I’m not allowed. I’m not supposed to be.
It’s just that… until now I’ve only ever had little kids. Even when I had big ones.
It’s just that… next year I’ll only have three children at home. Just us girls.
It’s just that… we became a family when I was outnumbered. Me and the boys.
It’s just that… Halloween was always when we came together. And now…
“It’s okay that it changes.”
I nod and smile and tell her not to worry about me. That I’ve always wanted to hand out candy to the neighborhood kids which is true! I had kids before I had a house with a doorbell and now I have a doorbell (that sometimes works) and grown kids.
And maybe some of us will be together next year. Maybe Fable will decide to forgo her high school party and watch The Addams Family with me like we all did together on Covid Halloween.
But let’s be real: most likely it’s just gonna be me passing out candy with my dog — which means next year she won’t have to run off like that — and by then I will have *properly grieved the changes in family dynamics as measured by Halloween plans.
*Ha! No I won’t. There’s no such thing as proper grief. It doesn’t just stop, the gasp. Grief is a thread that is needled through every experience, especially parenthood — which, I have come to realize, not only through the death of their father but in bearing witness to their coming of age, is a commitment to loss.
Holidays will always be punctuation marks against the years’ sentences. But this year was an exclamation point followed by an ellipsis. Followed by a
paragraph break.
The feelings that came and went and will return are their own form of collision. New growth against an abandoned mask. Eighteen years of costumes
a. kept
b. discarded
c. turned into rags.
How does one choose which ones stay? e. I don’t even know.
But we’ll always have the parade. Isn’t that what someone said once? Some black-and-white-movied Humphrey Bogart type? With a cigar and a Borsalino hat and maybe a pocket square?
It’s just so wild to be on the other side of such a pivotal family thing. To have traded a future of parental experiences for a past of “remember whens.” To wake up, in the weeks after Halloween, to a generation’s worth of ghosts.
I hear you. This year I decorated the door alone, stood shaking on the ladder, trying to hang the phantom from the gutters. Kids posted snaps with the ghoul behind them almost every day, but I received no thanks for the creative backdrop. My 11-year-old son went straight to a friends house after school and I picked him up at 9:30 on a school night. I did not even see him in costume. Not one picture was taken. My 13-year-old daughter, now taller than me and looking like Ziggy Stardust on a daily basis, puts together the laziest outfit, a construction vest and announces she is going to a party. She is not even interested in answering the doorbell. She makes fun of me for buying shitty candy.
So, their dad and I rummaged through our well curated tickle trunk, lamenting about their lack of effort. Then he, dressed in baby blue tuxedo with ruffles and cummerbund and I, in a jean bell bottom onsie and fur coat head to our neighbors for a drink and to commiserate.
This new normal of waiting around for their phone calls to pick them up sure is bittersweet. I feel more free and more alive, yet simultaneously stuck pending their sporadic need for me. Job duties have shifted to being on call.
I feel this one a lot. We took in our 15 year old nephew who is 18 now and will leave for college this summer. I have two kids 5 and 8 and getting a crash course on parenting a teen made me realize these moments with my littles are so precious and fleeting. I need to make excuses to see my nephew who is living a great teenage life and that’s just how it goes. I see him less and I was gifted with understanding to cherish my time with my kids that much more.