I’ll admit, I’ve been atypically apathetic about Halloween. I’m normally full of revelry this time of year. Pulling together multiple costumes (last year I had three) and deciding which parties to attend. In August, I booked a flight to New Orleans and made plans to spend my favorite holiday there. Three months later, I’m not in New Orleans. My plane ticket remains unused.
What’s going on? you ask. What has happened to your joie de vivre?
The answer is probably hiding somewhere in the amount of time I’ve toiled over Mason’s costume and the excitement I have about dressing him up and taking him trick-or-treating. The truth is, I don’t know how many more Halloweens I will get to do this for him. He’s growing up painfully fast. And I’m grasping white-knuckled at these moments I know are fleeting. There has been a shift in my consciousness. A child doesn’t stay a child forever. Cue the Harry Chapin song….
My son is two months shy of his tenth birthday. As the end of his first decade on Earth approaches, I find myself not wanting to miss a thing. I want to take every chance I can get to see the world through his eyes, to share as many experiences as possible with him.
I’ve spent the last ten years chasing the dream that, as a woman and a single mother, I can “have it all.” I can have a satisfying career and be an attentive, loving mother. I sacrificed time with him to finish college, telling myself it was the right thing to do “in the long run.” I worked my 40-hour-a-week job in my chosen career after college and came home tired, impatient and detached. I struggled to pay bills when I ended up unemployed and the stress got so unmanageable, I was barely able to leave my bed. The job that got me off unemployment had me traveling to make ends meet so I saw less of my son than ever. Finally, after much ego-checking, I went back to the service industry where my schedule would be more “flexible.” Except it wasn’t, and I was forced to leave my son home alone for the first time so that I could work a lunch shift during the summer. And as I’ve tried to piece together a freelance career since then, I always end up feeling like my head is in one place, and my heart is in another. This is not the dream I was promised. It turns out, the dream is as unattainable as pressing the pause button on a fading childhood.
The reality I had to accept was that even with his dad’s help, I would be forced to choose between a stable career in my field and the ability to parent my son the way I wanted to. The path I chose–to work in a bar part-time– is somewhere in the middle. A bartender’s schedule is in constant conflict with the schedule of a fourth grader. There are nights I go to work at precisely the time he goes to bed. My body is always confused about when it is time to sleep since I force it to stay up late while I’m working…and then force it to get up early when it’s time to take the kid to school. This leaves me a bit drained, but it allows me to take my son to school 2-3 days a week and pick him up from school twice a week. This is a precious and priceless luxury for me. And it gives me the chance to really be a mom, something I’ve always wanted to be. I don’t know what career, if any, could ever be this satisfying…and maybe someday I’ll find out. But for now, I’m going to savor every tiny kiss he gives me before school and every giggle he sputters and every ounce of wisdom he develops over the next few years.
I grew up with a mother who chased the same impossible dream. The result, for me, was largely a lonely childhood with huge gaps of longing it took decades to fill. As much as I admire my mother for her unrelenting spirit and her hopeful outlook, I would give anything to have had less in order to have had more of her. I think about that every day as I navigate parenthood. Which is why, this Halloween, the costume I’m most excited about isn’t mine and the party I’m looking forward to will be G-rated.
Tags: costumes, halloween, harry chapin, parenting
