When I had younger kids, I hated Halloween.
The holiday is the worst for parents with little ones – the sleep schedule disruption, having to pry away the endless Snickers’ bars from a crying toddler’s grasp, and walking the fine line between having your kids’ be scared shitless while simultaneously admiring a solidly frightening front yard set up by the neighbor.
I hated Halloween then.
Yeah, I hate it now, too – mostly centered in our new parenting reality represented by our costumes changing from cute princesses to “kiss, marry, kill”.
Getting our elementary-schoolers ready to trick-or-treat is, I’ll admit, still super fun. Everett (10) and Emersyn’s (8) excitement for the night coupled with a lax school day had them fired up to hang out with their mom and I for the entire night. Everett was a rapper and needed help inserting his “grills” – I obliged. My wife attended to my daughter’s scary and fake blood makeup prior to heading out to a friend’s neighborhood.
My teens – what teens? They were nowhere to be found.
They popped in, grabbed whatever they could muster in the way of a DIY costume from the closet, and headed out in three directions. I did managed a “please check in” as they burst out the door toward, well, wherever they were going.
The remaining four of us ventured out at nightfall to our normal trick-or-treating spot where our collection of parent/friends have met up for years with their kids. For the first time, though, our two not-so little ones were the only trick-or-treaters in attendance this Halloween.
So, after trick-or-treating with our kids for an hour, we returned to our seven adult friends handing out candy to a generation of “Woody” from Toy Story or “Princess Elsa” from Frozen and their (much younger) parents.
Little kid by little kid we’d comment, “Oh my God, I remember these days!”
By the end of night we were each say, “Man, Halloween is different now.”
I’d describe it differently with one word: weird.
Halloween was weird and, I guess, so is this stage of parenting for me.
It’s weird to wonder if I’m over-reaching with our oldest son (a high school senior) as I remind him that early admission deadlines to college are RIGHT NOW. He’s gonna be out of our house next year – that reality both scares the shit out of me, and has me yearning for him to take his age-appropriate apathy somewhere else.
It’s weird that my other two teens find it so hard to check-in via text, but find it impossible to stop texting me food or ride requests all day long at work. They need too much of me, give very little, and prefer Snapchat over my snappy dad-jokes on most days.
Parenting now is just weird – and it will continue to be, I’m afraid.
The future “weird” might be being introduced to my future in-laws, or in not having a perpetual boiling frustration over our lack of time together leading to an outburst at the dinner table that only exacerbates the problem. Calm in our home would be, well, weird.
That’s why Halloween was meh this year for me. And, this feeling is more than a realization that “it all goes too quickly” as we’ve been told countless times by our parents who now laugh at our child rearing. For me, the weird feeling is that it is now impossible to know if you’re doing the right thing until your teens return home sober at curfew, when they leave the house they’ll do so for a place where they will thrive, and that your younger kids will watch them and attempt to do the same.
The uncertainty is weird.
This type of worry for the future through a mundane present is weird.
Our Halloween was weird. And, I hated it – just not for the sleep schedule interruptions anymore.
