One Halloween

My pink leotard, tights, tutu, and raffle tickets were good to go. But I was not. It was my ninth Halloween and I had a sore throat.

I stayed home from school that morning, but Mom said she’d take me to the Halloween carnival with her if I was feeling better by afternoon. I spent all morning trying not to swallow, willing myself to feel better. When the time came to put my hair up in a ballerina bun, Mom looked in the mirror at my star-bright eyes and rosy cheeks, consulted her mother’s intuition, and shook her head. “I’m sorry, honey, but you just can’t go when you’re feeling this sick.”

She led me to my room and I started to cry. My surroundings swam as she helped me out of my itchy tutu and into my soft cotton nightshirt. I shivered under the covers; she tucked an extra afghan around me. Even as my hot tears pooled at my ears and dropped onto the pillowcase, I knew that nothing had ever felt better than submitting to this bed, to my mom’s cool palm on my forehead. She shook the glass thermometer and placed it in my mouth, then sat down on my bed, right on top of my feet, right where I liked her. While she waited for the mercury to rise, she hummed quietly. And then, the verdict. Definitely a fever. A real party-killer of a fever.

“Promise you’ll put my raffle tickets in and be there when they pick the winner?” I sobbed. The big raffle prize at this year’s carnival was a Cabbage Patch Kid, and I had been eagerly saving up my good-behavior tickets, confident that my name would be picked because, well, I wanted it most.

Mom assured me she would put my tickets in the jar, but she also gave me a little talk about the meaning of “odds.” I didn’t care about odds. There was a chance I could win, so in my mind I had already won. Mom left the room to put my toddler brother in his jack-o-lantern costume, and I hazily daydreamed about the new doll who would soon be mine.

I already owned two Cabbage Patches. The first was a bald baby boy who came with the name Aldin Timothy. I had eagerly mailed in his papers and received a replacement birth certificate with the dazzling new name of my choice: Timothy Todd. Timmy was something special. I spent hours inhaling his baby powder scent and changing his fake little diapers. The year we lived in the duplex he became the victim of a dramatic kidnapping when the neighbor boy Hyrum brazenly entered our apartment while we were at church and waltzed out with my baby Timmy, hauling him over to the dark side of the duplex, the side with the scary teenage brother, the stacks of empty beer cans, and the urine-scented carpet. I pined after my baby for weeks, his fate a mystery, until the day my mom spotted him outside being swung around by the grubby hand of the dastardly Hyrum. She staged a daring rescue. Oh, sweet reunion! Timmy sustained a long white scrape on the top of his bald head, but he was otherwise unharmed and I loved him all the more for his bravery.

My second Cabbage Patch was a girl with long dark pigtails, blue checked overalls, and plastic white shoes. She was called Emily Luann, a name I deemed attractive enough not to tamper with. Emily was the only black person I had ever met, and I found her exotic and loveable and perfect. She helped me hone my braiding skills and enjoyed frequent costume changes as my collection of doll clothes grew. Fortunately, Emily’s young life was free of traumatic events, and we all got on rather well.

But I had room in my heart for more. Maybe this new addition would be a redhead. In a clown costume. Maybe she’d have a dimple and tiny white teeth showing. I couldn’t wait to hug her and kiss her freckled cheeks. I wondered what her name was and pictured introducing her to Emily and Timmy. I would keep her forever and bestow her upon my own kids. She would be an excellent consolation prize for having to be sick on Halloween.

Mom peeked in to check on me. I was almost asleep and her whisper barely registered. “Honey, I have to go work the cake walk for a little while. I’m taking your tickets. You just sleep. I’ll be home soon.”

Before I lost consciousness, my mind drifted over all the delights I’d be missing: the thrill of the fishing pond, the challenge of the bean bag toss, and the pride of the costume parade. (I didn’t mind missing out on the spook alley in the school’s basement. I had never dared go down there and I never would.) Filled with these images and an acute sense of injustice, my mind sank off to sleep.

When I surfaced dizzily, the house felt oppressively empty. Almost foreign with quiet. I was just mustering up some real self-pity when I heard the front door open. Mom was back! Maybe she was carrying my new doll up the stairs! I held my breath in excitement. When she entered my room, her arms were empty. She saw the hope in my eyes and let me down gently. “They didn’t pick your name, sweetie.”

“Oh.”

I sank back on the pillow. This was the worst Halloween ever. Whoever won my doll was probably the kind of kid who would drag her around and neglect her and not even care what she was named. And to make things worse, I couldn’t even go trick-or-treating.

But my brothers came through for me heroically that night. They carried my plastic bag through the neighborhood and explained at every door that their sister was sick but would love some candy anyway. Then they tromped back home and plunked a bursting bag of loot at my feet. As I stuck my face inside and inhaled that heavenly blend of Bit-O-Honeys, Tootsie Rolls, and peanut shells, the pang of my loss diminished and my heart swelled with goodwill. After all, wasn’t this, right here, this bag heavy with sugar and happiness, what Halloween was all about? The Cabbage Patch could wait until Christmas.

Wednesday

It was one of those moments when I really feel my mommyhood.

Minutes earlier, Ellie had come creeping up the stairs with a look that plainly said, “I feel like I’m going to throw up but I want to keep playing with my friends because I made them a Harry Potter scavenger hunt and it’s going to be so fun but I really do feel like throwing up and I’m going to cry because throwing up is my very worst thing.” Her actual voice might have supplied a few of those details, but the look in her eye told me the rest.

I sent her to bed with the trusty barf bucket and headed downstairs to disappoint two bright and bubbly third-graders. No sooner had I shown them the door than the summons rang from Ellie’s room. I held her hair and rubbed her back as she cried and gasped and purged her very soul, it seemed, into the old black bucket. And now, as I helped her into pajamas and tucked her in between cool sheets, momentary relief showing on her sweet and clammy face, it struck me once again.

Look at me. I’m such a mom.

Moved by my newly stirred feelings of maternal benevolence, I walked into the kitchen with the thought of conjuring up some dinner for the rest of my brood. But such a vision was shattered by the sudden scream of smoke alarms throughout the house. What? Was I already cooking something? Clara came clattering down the hall with her hands over her ears and her hair in her face, Ellie moaned from her bed, and Jacob and friends crowded around to peer in the back door. I took a quick inventory of the house. No flames, no smoke, no forgotten grilled cheese sandwich scorching on the stove.

I ran from room to room with my step stool, yanking out batteries and trying to disable the alarms. Still they pealed. Ellie crawled out of bed and slumped outside to dutifully sit on the driveway in her jammies. Clara ran rampant through the house. Jacob and friends shouted theories from the backyard: “I bet the flames are inside the walls!” “Maybe it’s a really tiny fire!” “Maybe the house will explode!” My disabling efforts were in vain. Neighborhood dogs ramped up their barking.

I tried all two of the non-emergency fire department phone numbers I could find. No answer. Heads were poking out of doors up and down the street. Ellie’s pale face was pleading with me to make it all stop. My neighbor hollered that I should call 911. I didn’t want to. They hate me at 911! (What about that time two-year-old Clara secretly dialed them repeatedly and brought two cops to our door on a Sunday afternoon? What about that time our carbon monoxide detector went off and caused a frenzy for no reason anyone could find?) I hate calling 911, and this was not an emergency.

And yet it began to feel like one. The unbearable screeching went on and on. Ellie was about to vomit in our yard in front of all the neighbors. So I sighed, called 911, and sheepishly recited my address.

Despite my insistence that this was not a big deal, truck after truck after police car after fire engine (two of them!) pulled up to my house. Man after official-looking man poured through my front door.  From my porch I surveyed the scene on the street, and I caught my breath at the thought of what would happen to Jeremy’s heart if he happened to come home from work right then.

A fleet of flashing emergency vehicles, sidewalks filled with onlookers, the unsettling sound of sirens. And us in the center of it.

I’m thankful for throw-up afternoons and slightly fevered little brows. I’m thankful for a yard full of light sabers and six-year-old war whoops. I’m thankful for tiny clomping feet and perpetually tangled hair. For the calm of my everyday chaos.

(Oh, and by the way. You’re supposed to replace all your smoke alarms every ten years, not every eleven and a half. Surprised you didn’t know that.)

Excuses

One of the reasons I haven’t started a blog is because I know myself. I’m a perfectionist and a procrastinator. If I can’t do something brilliantly, I don’t want to do it.

That’s why the few pictures on my walls are the same ones that have been there since we haphazardly hung them after moving in almost seven years ago. I don’t know how to decorate.

That’s why the nice long patch of dirt in our backyard, set aside (with cement curbing, even!) for a garden many summers ago, is growing nothing but rocks, weeds, and an assortment of Tonka trucks. I don’t know how to go about growing things.

I could go on and on (Painting my front door! Learning to oil paint! Organizing my storage room!) but we’re talking about blogging here. I don’t want to have a blog that just languishes, never updated, never visited. But I also don’t want to have a blog that I hate because it’s not good. Hence the urge to let it languish.

I want to squelch that urge. I want to write lots of subpar blog posts (“Congratulations!” you say, “You’re well on your way!”) so I can get over myself. I want to break through my self-imposed stupor and strike down the excuses that arise when I feel the need to write: It’s too messy in here, I can’t express myself when there’s Play-doh under my fingernails, the sunshine is giving me a migraine, I can’t think when there’s a person on me, I need to pluck my chin hairs, I can’t say no when Ellie is begging me to read Harry Potter with her . . .

Actually, I’ll never rise above that last one. The girl has found my weakness. All she has to do is show me the book and raise her brooding little eyebrows and I’m hers. Until way past both our bedtimes.