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Giving Up the Ghost
As I get older — and as my kids approach adulthood — I’m haunted by my increasing awareness of the passage of time.
When one kid decides he doesn’t feel like going trick-or-treating anymore, and the other kid is out with her best friend.
And you’re left holding the damn bag of your life, wondering where the years in between disappeared to.
— my Facebook status, 10/31/2014
Moreso than any other, this time of year supercharges my nostalgia meter into overdrive. It’s a combination of reasons: lots of holidays jam-packed into a few weeks, my kids’ birthdays, the anniversary of The Husband’s cancer diagnosis.
Even without the obligatory Facebook photos, I remember my kids’ first Halloween vividly — not for its Norman Rockwell qualities, but because it was a scene befitting Norman Bates.
Halloween 2002 was a nightmare of preparing and feeding 11-month old twins their dinner and cleaning up two food-encrusted high chairs (no small feat, that); a husband coming home from a demanding job; visits from doting grandparents with cameras in hand to document the occasion; neighborhood kids ringing the doorbell, and squeezing two squirmy kids into too-small costumes which (being a one-income family in those days) I had…
