Amateur Hour

by Kimberly Harrington

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  My kids are now eleven and thirteen. To this day, that’s the only time I ever turned the car around. It was the only time I’ve had to. That one spontaneous decision blossomed into a long-term investment. I never had to tell them I’d pull some serious shit if they were misbehaving, because they had already seen me do it up close.

  All I had to say was, “Do you really want to try me?” and turns out they didn’t. They knew. Of course, they were little then. And we’re hardly into the wilds of the teenage years now, a time when I won’t expect more than a shrug even if I dynamited our entire house. But it was a good run.

  So do it. Turn the car around. Leave the party. Blow up the movie plans. Kill the beach trip. Carry them out over your shoulder kicking and screaming and, yes, in public. You’re the one in charge. It feels good to remember that part. Just one suggestion from a veteran of September 17—only throw that threat down for something you really don’t care about missing. Because who are you really trying to punish anyway?

  The Ghosts of Halloweens Past

  I walked past a towering barn and through the late-autumn woods; stubborn yellow leaves the only ones left hanging on to stark, alarmed branches. Sunflower stalks arched into canes, their heads bowed in grief. The smell of the forest in the fall is unmistakable, all of that decaying earthy sweetness underfoot. I feel wrapped in comfort and loss, time slipping away. The wind choosing to lie very still, holding its breath, or blow up in a huff, causing me to feel panic down to my toes.

  Shuffling through the leaves and somber air sent me back to the fall days I took for granted when I was growing up in my small hometown in Massachusetts. Taking things for granted was my specialty back then, when I was a kid and then a teenager. If I were to pause long enough I’d realize it still is.

  Halloween isn’t until this weekend and, as is customary now, my kids have already celebrated it twice. I had to think back to what costumes I used to wear, when Halloween came just once. I don’t remember my parents being involved at all, although they must have been. For at least two Halloweens I dressed up like a hobo, the go-to costume for the unprepared—although with my flannel shirt, bandanna tied to a stick, rosy-red cheeks and straw hat, I looked more like a cross between a scarecrow and a rodeo clown. My friend Linda and I made a plan, put on our costumes, and went trick-or-treating. Alone. Parents didn’t tag along then, and they certainly didn’t make it an occasion for walking around the neighborhood with cocktails.

  Now after more than ten years of parenting-while-under-the-influence-of-Halloween, it’s had its effect. There are always costumes to get, details to nail down, trick-or-treating to arrange, maybe a class party to contribute to. I skate on the very edge of helpfulness generally speaking, and yet, it still happens. I still end up in the mix. I want my kids to have fun, and I want to take pictures. I’m convinced “I wanted my kids to have fun” will be etched on the vast majority of modern mothers’ tombstones. And “She wanted to take pictures” is what kids will request on theirs.

  But Halloween is beginning to feel smaller. Although my son plans on wearing the same police officer costume he’s worn for the past four years, he hesitated when we attended a Halloween parade over the weekend. Never mind that he’s worn it year-round to ride his bike or give visitors a tour of our house, suddenly at an actual Halloween-themed event he balked. “I feel like a jerk” was the first thing he said when we arrived, even though kids his age as well as teenagers and adults were also in costume. This is the year he’s noticing differences and other kids are noticing what’s different about him. And although I know he’s not the only one going through this, he does not.

  My daughter decided to go as an artist this year, and she gave me a very specific list of the wardrobe items she hoped for. I kept badgering her to add a beret and make a painter’s palette so, you know, people would know what she actually was. She stuck to her list. By some sort of thrifting miracle, I found every single item during a twenty-minute sweep of Goodwill. I even found a black beret and bought it, knowing she’d probably refuse it. And she did. And I was done with Halloween prep, just like that.

  When they were younger I would question them throughout September about what they wanted to be. Once I managed to get three consistent answers in a row, I’d start scouring eBay and Etsy for costumes. A unicorn, a puppy, a skunk, and a black cat have all arrived in the mail. A third of the costumes handmade by someone else, the sweetest of scores. Improbably, one year I tracked down a bluebird costume. (“Are you sure you don’t want to be a peacock? Those are easier for me to find.”) Someone had made it by stitching a blue feather boa all over a blue Old Navy sweatshirt in a size just big enough for my daughter. In the package were the matching yellow feet that could be threaded through her shoelaces and a beak to go over her nose.

  As they’ve gotten older, I’ve slowly come to realize that Halloween — like first days of school and believing in Santa —doesn’t actually go on forever. That every exasperated “Ugh, I can’t wait for Halloween to be over” as I scrambled to the store to get face paint or nail polish or tights, is now being met with the realization that someday it will be over. For good. Relief. Then, regret.

  I would’ve trick or treated until I left for college if my parents had let me, but my dad took me off the candy-shakedown circuit when I was thirteen. And just like that, instead of raking in free Snickers at the whopping nine houses on our dead-end street, I ended up in a soccer field in the dark with my girlfriends and boys who were two or three years older than us. We had eggs cracked on our heads and maple syrup poured on our letterman jackets. We slid down hills near the soccer field in the dark and ran around screaming.

  It felt, in that any-attention-is-good-attention way, like a baptism. I wasn’t a kid anymore; I was a teenager, a troublemaker. Someone who would walk into her small-town grocery store, smeared with what was essentially half a recipe, and walk nonchalantly to the refrigerated section to grab as many cartons of eggs as I had cash. It was the kind of night where you stand with your best friend in line, knowing your life is changing but not sure exactly how, and say too loudly to each other as you pay for all those eggs, “Oh man, can’t wait to bake a REALLY BIG CAKE when we get home” as if those cashiers had the intelligence of a pile of rocks with eyes. As if they had never been young.

  The long arching branches that bow over the paths I’ve walked, the crisp leaves I’ve kicked through, and the dirt roads I’ve driven down since returning to New England all call me back to other high school parties held among the hay bales and in distant fields. Nights when we hung upside down from branches in a graveyard, smoking cigarettes and screaming just to hear our own voices. Couples kissing next to tombstones, lying on long-ago repacked dirt, their outstretched bodies just feet above skeletons, the taste of peppermint schnapps on their lips. I can still feel the sharp October air of those nights and see the face of the full moon, watching us live among the dead.

  But times change. Towns barely allow actual trick-or-treating anymore, never mind egg massacres and graveyard parties. Some things never change though, like outgrowing who you were before. It happens when you’re nine and eleven and, as it turns out, forty-seven. You feel different and you know things are different, but you’re not sure how. Like a toddler straight out of an attachment-parenting book, you rush ahead but keep checking back in. My kids check back in with me now as intensely as they want to take off without me. I stumble out into whatever this next phase of my life is, and I check back in with them too. Are we still us?

  I know the real Halloweens—the ones made for kid costumes and candy trading—aren’t over, not really, not yet. But it’s like seeing the leaves change on that first tree in August. The one that just can’t hold its horses. My kids are racing into life. A life that one day will go on without me.

  As Halloween approached, I told my daughter in a last-ditch effort, “But if people see the beret, they’ll know you’re an artist.” She shook her head and said, “I
’ll know I’m an artist.” And having known a lot of artists, I can verify not one of them has ever worn a beret but a lot of them have worn knee-high boots, a shirt splattered with paint, or bright colors in their hair, just like she planned on wearing.

  Every day they’re trying on who they want to be. I see them gauging reactions, measuring laughs, reluctantly accepting hugs and kisses on cheeks. They grow their hair long; she asks to get her ears pierced or wear makeup; he flashes a peace sign at his friends on the bus as it rolls away. They feel the shift of their own strange baptisms already and the pull of attention.

  I’ve reached back, through the smell of woodsmoke and the opening of milkweed, to realize I was once a child in autumn too. I have roamed neighborhoods and forests and graveyards, feeling invincible. Immortal. I have hesitated and balked, then run full force into the unknown.

  It’s their time now. To try on and try out. To forge their own paths through these shifting seasons. The rituals we created together will inevitably wane; they will have to. It is the wide-open field, begging for exploration, and the cold blue sky pointing the way toward migration. It is the flat, still air and the sudden huffing and puffing of change.

  Time-Out

  Radiohead Song or Accurate Description of My Parenting?

  Scatterbrain

  Arbitrary Justice

  I Might Be Wrong

  Slammed Doors

  2 + 2 = 5

  Go to Sleep

  I Can’t

  Head in Hands

  Down Is the New Up

  Existential Implosion

  Sulk

  Stop Whispering

  Dirty Laundry Infinity

  Shouting Out of Proportion

  Let Down

  I Told You a Thousand Times

  You and Whose Army?

  Man Down

  Slips of Permission

  Fog

  Life in a Glass House

  Who’s the Adult?

  Worrywort

  You Never Wash Up After Yourself

  Red Wine Massacre

  4 Minute Warning

  Crying in Public

  These Are My Twisted Words

  A Reminder

  I Never Said I Knew What I Was Doing

  House of Cards

  At a Loss

  I Am Citizen Insane

  Accidental Successes

  Permanent Daylight

  What

  Radiohead song: 1, 6, 7, 9, 11, 12, 17, 20, 21, 24, 26, 28, 29, 31, 35

  Accurate description of my parenting: 2, 4, 8, 10, 13, 14, 16, 18, 19, 22, 25, 27, 30, 32, 34, 36

  Both: 3, 5, 15, 23, 33

  Are You Sure There Isn’t Something Else I Can Do Before the End of the School Year?

  Are you sure I can’t fill out and/or sign another field-trip form / fund-raising form / class placement form / book-order form / class-party form / Popsicle request / overdue-library-books notice / missing-library-books notice / school-district-feedback form / one month of half-filled-out reading logs?

  Are you sure I can’t contribute to one last bake sale, or five? Are you sure I can’t make it something gluten-free, nut-free, egg-free, dairy-free, non-GMO, organic, and/or won’t hurt anyone’s feelings? Are you sure bright pink fake-fat frosting from a can won’t work? Have I mentioned I have the culinary skills of a potato?

  Are you sure I can’t send in money for a yearbook? A class trip to get ice cream sandwiches? A PTO donation? A visiting author’s signed book? Tickets for the end-of-school-year party? A baseball game? The stupid recorders I didn’t even want my kids to have in the first place?

  Are you sure I can’t get the money to you in the form of a check because I’m a pioneer woman? Are you positive you don’t want to accept PayPal or Square or— No, I know. That’s crazy. You’re not a spaceship.

  Are you sure I can’t chaperone one or all eleven of the field trips between now and the last day of school? Don’t worry, I no longer have time to hold down a job. By the way, remember all that time between January and April? What happened there?

  Are you sure there isn’t some sort of spring concert / adorable play / other emotionally manipulative school event to go to now or every night until the last day of school? You know, something where maybe one of the boys can wear a too-big tie or the tallest girl in class can shyly stoop down in the back row? Maybe it could be a third-grade dance or a fifth-grade graduation? That sort of thing.

  Are you sure 273 art projects couldn’t be sent home all at once? Preferably stuffed into a flimsy about-to-split-open plastic grocery bag? Are you sure you aren’t giving me some other kid’s stuff too?

  Are you sure there can’t be some sort of complicated theme weeks my kids can get all whipped up over even though they could barely manage to pair a shirt with pants the other forty-one weeks of the year? If possible, could it be something where we’ll have to gather an incredibly random assortment of props on extremely short notice? Maybe an orange wig, two different colors of the same style of shoes, and a sports jersey from 1991? Just spitballing here. Can you make sure any errands related to each theme can be spread out among multiple locations across town thereby obliterating one entire day from the scoreboard of my life?

  Are you sure a room parent can’t come up with one or three end-of-year classroom projects like that one time when we had two days’ notice for each kid to cut out thirty-eight two-inch-by-two-inch squares for a paper mosaic project? And I mean two inches by two inches exactly; it said so in the e-mail. Something complicated and requiring extreme precision is exactly the sort of thing I’m in the mood for right now. Got anything like that?

  Are you sure I can’t get you a teacher gift? Are you sure I can’t read some shitty mom blog posts about what an appropriate teacher gift might be? Are you sure I can’t just get you a nice bottle of wine? I have one right here; it’s already open.

  Are you sure you need to give me that summer reading list / library flyer / academic camp brochure? Are you sure I can’t just let my kids get dumber by one-third until they come back here in the fall like we all used to?

  Are you sure you can’t make me panic more about how little time I have until the school year is almost over? So I can be reminded the only thing that allows me to approach my work with any sort of mental and structural stability (not to mention without going bankrupt, ha!) is about to go away for ten weeks? I’m not panicking enough about that. Can you help me?

  Schools

  The Walls That Define Us

  I showed up to my son’s kindergarten tour same-day hungover. Because as it turned out, it was also the day I lost my job of six years. The job we had moved across the country for. I never saw it coming.

  Mostly what I remember about that night — aside from the deep existential panic, throbbing headache, and the fact I was grateful I didn’t know anyone because maybe my face was always this splotchy and my eyes always this bloodshot? — was seeing all the artwork on the walls as we walked around. I wasn’t sure when I had last been inside an elementary school, but it was an amount of time measured in decades.

  The art-filled bulletin boards swooped me back to my favorite elementary school teacher, Miss Slozak, who indulged my obsession with Snoopy by letting me draw him over and over again for her classroom walls. I reflexively smiled at the self-portraits bursting with Chiclet teeth and spider-lashed eyes, yarn hair and names carefully written out in blocky letters. I eventually fell behind our small tour group, staring at a papier-mâché solar system through increasingly tear-blurred eyes and wondered, Will my son even go here? Will we have to move? Have I let everyone down?

  But we stayed, I started freelancing two days later, and he went to that school — Vermont’s first arts magnet elementary school — and so did his sister. What had been a failing school in a poor neighborhood was entering a transition period of becoming something different, something greater. And, I hoped, so were we.

  What struck me every morning I walked through those doo
rs and every afternoon as I lingered, waiting for the bell to ring, were those walls. A construction-paper pumpkin patch with a Van Gogh sky. Family portraits and abstract trees, windows covered with tissue-paper stained glass and a hallway populated with kraft-paper penguin families, made to scale. And while it was an arts-focused school, every elementary school was supposed to feel like this. Learning and creativity made visible, a safe place to wear your heart on the outside.

  But it seems life is never that simple, not always what the brochure promises. My son had a slow-motion train wreck of a kindergarten year, where I heard about his horrible day almost every day, how he crawled under tables crying, clapped his hands over his ears and shook, his behaviors new and awful. His school not knowing how to parse a bright boy with unpredictable freak-outs.

  In one memorable meeting, I watched politics play out between the principal, teachers, and the special ed staff while my temper slowly rose like a cartoon thermometer. My son discussed as a problem that didn’t fit neatly into their process. I sat there bewildered and on the edge of tears, finally hissing, “Why won’t you help him?” If a public elementary school wouldn’t help my kid, I reasoned, who would? Aren’t these the schools for everyone? For every child? No matter what?

  For every valley, there was a peak. A new principal was eventually hired — and, most important, stayed. This school we took a chance on took chances on us over and over again, even as we left for a year to homeschool and worked hard to get him to a place where he could reenroll. He found his champions every single year and with a depth of gratitude I’ll feel for the rest of my life—they found him too.

  My daughter found her own favorite teacher, one who indulged her with an entire day in her honor before we moved to another town. She stoked her kindness, kept her eye on the already complex labyrinth of girl friendships in her class, and challenged my daughter with a firm hand and loads of love.