It Must Be Halloween!

I peer outside...
There's something there!
Makes me shiver...
Spikes my hair.
It must be... 
HALLOWEEEEEEEN!

Elsie has been repeating this dozens of times a day for a week now, leaning way in and whispering the refrain.  Every time she gets to the punch line, she slathers on the spooky.  She leans way back.  Her eyes widen.  She makes a mouth like an O and wriggles her fingers in the air.  "Halloweeeeeen!!!!"

***

Elsie and I love Halloween.  We have been preparing for weeks.  We made her a beautiful costume.  We bought big orange pumpkins.  We decorated our front yard with bats.  We were both beside ourselves with excitement.

So, naturally, when the day finally came, we got in a really big fight and almost ruined the entire thing!

It feels funny to say that I got in a fight with my preschooler.  This is not the dynamic I should have with a three-year-old.  Three, going on thirteen.  I should be above that -- both more powerful than she is, and also more patient and understanding.  This feels like weakness, like a personal failing.  And it is. It certainly is!

***

Elsie stays at school until 3:00 on Thursdays.  I picked her up and brought her home to carve pumpkins.  When I peeked in her lunchbox and saw that she, yet again, had not so much as touched her food.  She hadn't eaten anything since breakfast but pretzels or graham crackers or goldfish -- or whatever the snack (aka: empty-carb-de-jour) was at preschool.  She was starving and grumpy. 

The food thing is a huge soft-spot for me.  Elsie is all over the board when it comes to pickiness -- sometimes she is adventurous for her age, and other times she is extremely conservative.  But it seems, recently, that she just doesn't want to eat anything that I -- I, personally -- put in front of her.  Frankly, it hurts my feelings.  Every meal I prepare, I think of Elsie first.  I try, I mean really, really try, to cook foods that are healthy and that she will like.  Healthy eating is a personal point of pride for me.  So is cooking well.  It's something I'm good at.  For better or for worse, my skill as a cook is all tied up in my identity as a person and in the way I value myself as a woman.  Lately, Hub has been working really late every night.  He comes home having already dined on takeout at work.  So I am cooking for myself and for a kid who turns down everything I make on principle.  What principle?  I don't know.  Maybe she can read my paranoia that if food becomes a battle ground I will be a failure as a mother and bestow an eating disorder on my child for life, so she is staking her flag RIGHT HERE, ON HER DINNER PLATE.

After three hours of her sitting in front of her plate, hungry-grumpy, and after the third meal I prepared for her went ignored, I lost it.  I brought out the big guns.  Something along the lines of,

"Elsie, when we are not hungry for lunch OR for dinner, it means we are sick, and little girls who are too sick to eat their meals are too sick to go trick or treating.  You will eat this in the next ten minutes, or NO TRICK-OR-TREATING AND NO CANDY FOR YOU!" 

As soon as I had said it, I wished I could take it back. "Oh please oh please oh please just eat your F-ing dinner and don't push me on this one!"  I silently begged.  "I do not want to have to follow through on this!"  Another entire year until Halloween loomed in front of me as Elsie commenced her meltdown.

***

When he walked through the door, Hub found us here, in this tearful, angry standoff.

"I need a time-out!" I yelled.  "I told her 'no trick or treating' if she doesn't finish her dinner in 10 minutes.  We have been at this for three hours.  THREE HOURS!  THREE HOURS OF MY LIFE THAT I'M NEVER GETTING BACK!"

Then I stomped up to my bedroom and slammed the door.  31 going on 13.

***

I don't know what Hub did to get her to eat her dinner, or if he had to do anything at all.  I just know that he wouldn't undermine my credibility by eating it for her.  I know he'd back me up in whatever crazy threat I'd made, and extend his patience where mine was used up, the same way I would back him up so that we maintain our integrity as The Parents, joint rulers of this little family. 

When I came back downstairs, the food had disappeared. 

I put her costume on, painted her face, and took her hand.  We set out into the marvelous, magical world of Halloween night, among the ghouls and the fairies, the jack-o-lanterns and the headless horsemen.  She danced and pranced and flew on her butterfly wings up and down the street, filling her basket to overflowing.  And I walked off the regret and guilt of knowing what a terrible job I had just done in navigating my mom-duties!

***

As Elsie and Hub and I sat on the front steps, eating candy, I wondered if maybe Halloween was the best night of the year for this ridiculous fight.  After all, it's the night where kids everywhere gorge themselves on high-fructose-corn syrup.  Once a year won't do any lasting harm, we tell ourselves.  And it's true: once a year isn't going to turn any healthy child diabetic.  Maybe one night of turning dinner into an epic power struggle won't turn her anorexic, either.