I think my desire to find the best get-up for Halloween matured from a lack of playing dress-up as a child. While the other girls would tiptoe through ballet and flip over the balance beam in gymnastics, I would field grounders in the softball field, and ask for it slow and smooth from the boys on the blacktop during kickball. For most of my elementary years, I went as tomboy.
As I grew up and gained confidence in my femininity (which, coincidently, arrived around the same time as boyfriends), dressing up in funky costumes came quite naturally to me. It wasn’t as if I learned it from my parents, though I fondly recall putting on my mother’s heels and one of her floppy hats at the age of eight, mimicking my sister, Anne, while she practiced Ethel Mermen’s, “I Get a Kick Out of You,” from the play, Anything Goes. I belted out the memorized lyrics, including the line about kicks and cocaine, into a glass top of a wine decanter. But while I could sing that song word-for-word right now, I couldn’t tell you one costume I wore for Halloween as a child. And neither can my mother.
My list of adulthood costumes is like the list women make of past lovers to eliminate any self-loathing and remind ourselves that we’re just more liberated than our mothers. The early costume list that I want to pull from, like how cute I may have been as a cowgirl, or as a daisy, or one of those foul-smelling plastic ensembles that came in the cellophane box with the mask that had that stupid rubber string, simply doesn’t exist. I can’t remember and my mother only sewed when it came time to decorate our rented house. She can tell me exactly what happened when she went into labor with me. She can tell me that she was glued to the television watching the World Series, and that my dad initially thought I was a boy (he mistook the umbilical cord for a boy’s package he may have been proud of) once my body came through the canal. She can also tell me that I came out like “a greased piglet” (which she does every year this week on my birthday), but when I emailed her to recall my costumes during the Halloween parades at McKenzie Elementary School, her response reminds me as to how much my working mom actually missed.
