The twelfth reason for not crying during your daughter’s senior year of high school is matching Halloween costumes.
This is an utterly absurd reason to cry because we have never once worn matching family Halloween costumes—not one time in the 18 Octobers we have spent together with our beloved girl. We have had lots of conversations on this topic—usually over mountains of Halloween candy as we ambitiously pontificate on the following year. From this safe duration—over 300 days before we might reasonably expected to actually do anything—we have had some very aggressive plans. I recall one hilarious conversation about a potential “Shrek” theme. The discussion went something like this:
Grace: “Dad can be Shrek and Mom can be Fiona. Sam can be donkey, and Claire can be the gingerbread man.”
Me: “What about you, Grace?”
Grace: “I want to be Puss in Boots.”
Sam (whining): “Noooooooo. I am way more of a Puss than Grace!!”
Chad (with a wicked sideways glance at me): “And there you have it.”
I can almost understand crying over actual memories that I have with my daughter, but I’m certainly not going to cry over memories I don’t have. We have never been one of those cutesy families who come to school events all decked out in matching, themed gear. I’ve never been the creative, artsy type of mom who delighted in such advance preparation and adventurous costuming. Nearly 100% of Halloweens have found us trudging to Party City and hastily scanning the posted costume options, choosing individually, and purchasing rapidly after a brief trip through the plastic and Styrofoam prop aisle. I have spent hundreds—probably thousands—on their costumes over the years, but I’ve never once insisted upon a family theme. Not crying.
This year, the elementary school contest featured a darling family of pandas, an adorable stewardess/pilot/airplane combo, and an Aladdin ensemble (including a genie dad whose face was painted such a vivid blue I’m guessing he was scraping face paint out of cracks and crevices for a month). I accompanied the two remaining elementary school Luekens in our obvious theme of “exhausted mom, a ninja, and a cowgirl”. Shockingly, we did not win the contest.
When I snapped the photo above, I clearly wasn’t crying because Halloween, like most holidays for a mom of five, has felt for years like something I just wanted to get through. All the magic making falls so heavily on the mom’s shoulders, and it’s generally all I can handle just to make sure each child has something (anything!) to wear and that our Halloween candy isn’t purchased so early that none remains when the doorbell starts ringing on the 31st. Cajoling my dreamy princesses and warriors into something family themed (and, most years, warm enough) was generally beyond my powers of persuasion and negotiation. It is true that I was a bit more engaged early in Grace’s trick-or-treating career. I never know whether to lament or celebrate the fact that she got the youngest and most energetic mom of all my offspring. I hadn’t quite surrendered all my aspirations and visions for how holidays should look in the earlier years of her childhood (it took several of her less cooperative siblings to finally break me of some of that), but for some reason we just never went the route of a family theme. Not crying.
And now it’s too late. She has no costume this year, at least to my knowledge, and if she ends up needing one she will happily collect my credit card and best wishes to outfit herself. We have no family events to attend in matching costumes this year, anyway, and even if we did she probably wouldn’t be available to join us. It is looking increasingly likely that she’ll be on a college visit with her best friend the night of trick-or-treat anyway. Not crying.
When Grace was tiny, I first heard the song “Slipping through my fingers” by Abba at a live performance of Mamma Mia. I don’t think Grace could even walk at the time, and since I took her well-behaved little self everywhere with me that first year, she was perched on my lap, eagerly watching the performance right with me. When this song played during a sentimental mother/daughter scene, I clutched my girl even tighter and choked up (I was so much more likely to cry about her back then). The refrain contains the following line “What happened to those wonderful adventures? The places I had planned for us to go? Well, some of them we did, but most we didn’t, and why? I just don’t know.” This song plays through my head at random, inconvenient times in this season of a thousand tiny goodbyes with my precious girl. We never dressed in a family themed costume, and now we probably never will. Why? I just don’t know. I’m not crying, you’re crying.
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