The Audacity of Growing Up

Halloween is a week from today, and somewhere in a house near you, a mother is standing in the middle of a costume aisle holding a package of matching family accessories and feeling a grief she did not see coming and cannot fully explain to the teenager working the register. I'm not saying that mother is me. I'm saying she's wearing my yoga pants.

Nobody warns you about this stage. They warn you about the newborn stage, with the sleep deprivation and the sound a baby makes at 3 a.m. that has no business coming out of something that small. They warn you about the toddler stage, with the biting and the tantrums in the cereal aisle. They even warn you about the teenage years, with the slamming doors and the eye rolls and the sudden, mysterious disappearance of every spoon in the house. But nobody sits you down and says, "Hey, there's a weird little window in the middle where your kids are still young enough to need you for absolutely everything, but apparently old enough to be mortified by your existence in public." That window is real. I live in it. It has terrible curb appeal and the rent keeps going up.

Let me explain what I mean, because I think the specific cruelty of this stage lives in the contradiction. In the same afternoon, the same child who cannot locate their own shoes without my assistance, who needs a ride to everything, who has asked me to find the thing, the thing, you know, the THING, will also look at me like I've suggested we perform a musical number in the grocery store if I offer any enthusiasm about a family costume. I am simultaneously the most essential person in the house and the most embarrassing person in the zip code. I'm the Wi-Fi. They need me. They also would prefer nobody knew we were connected.

Now Halloween is where this contradiction goes to put on a cape and take a bow.

Think about what that holiday used to be. For years, it was the one night a year when everything I did was cool. Everything. I was the mom who made the costumes, or at least the mom who ordered them with such confidence that it felt like making them. I could say, "What if we all go as a theme," and the response was pure, unfiltered delight. Not negotiation. Not a counteroffer. Delight. There was a window of time when a child would hear the words "matching costumes" and react the way you'd react to finding forty dollars in your winter coat. I took that for granted. Everyone does. You think the delight is permanent, like a load-bearing wall, and then one October a child looks at you with the weary patience of a tiny diplomat and says something like, "Do we have to match?"

Do we have to match. Four words. No notice. Zero ceremony. I was not emotionally prepared to be dismantled by a question that polite.

I'll tell you what nobody mentions about this particular heartbreak, which is how quietly it arrives. There's no announcement. Nobody sends a letter that says, "Effective this year, your family will no longer be a unit in a coordinated ensemble." It just sort of happens in the space between two Octobers. One year you're negotiating whether to be a group of farm animals or a group of crayons. The next year you realize that the conversation is shifting, that someone has opinions about "cringe" and "being too old" and the very specific social math of being seen walking next to your mother on a night when every other kid in the neighborhood is also doing social math. It's a lot of math for a holiday that's technically about fun-size candy bars.

The trick-or-treating itself is its own little emotional minefield. At some point, the whole thing starts transforming into something else, and you can feel it coming like weather. The walking-together part becomes the walking-near-each-other part, and then the walking-ten-paces-behind-each-other part, and you find yourself strolling along like a very tired Secret Service agent with a flashlight, pretending you're a stranger who just happens to be headed in the same direction at the same speed with the same last name. You learn to read the unspoken signals. You learn which porches you're allowed to approach and which ones require you to hang back by the mailbox and become one with the shrubs. You learn to say nothing at all when someone gets a full-size candy bar, which is the hardest part, because the instinct to squeal "OH MY GOSH LOOK AT THAT" is deeply wired and has to be physically suppressed like a sneeze at a funeral.

Meanwhile, the candy tax is still in effect, because I'm going through a lot and the good stuff is not going to eat itself.

Here's the part I want to be honest about, though, underneath the jokes, because the jokes are my favorite way of walking up to the thing I'm actually feeling without having to look directly at it. It's not really about the costumes. I know that. Even in the costume aisle, even while I'm holding that ridiculous package of matching accessories, I know that what I'm actually mourning is something much bigger than a theme. It's that the world where I was the center of their universe is getting smaller on the edges, quietly, a little more every year, and the universe they're building instead is getting bigger, and I'm still in it, I'm just not the sun anymore. I'm more like a very reliable moon. Still pulling the tides. Still visible at night. But no longer the thing everything orbits.

I know that's what's supposed to happen. That's the whole point. I would be genuinely concerned if my kids wanted to match with me forever, which is a sentence I never thought I'd type but is, in fact, true. The goal was never to raise children who stay small. The goal was to raise people who eventually walk away from me, confidently, on their own legs, toward their own lives, and I'm just emotionally unprepared for how much that looks like a teenager rolling their eyes at my suggestion of a pun-based costume. Success, it turns out, looks a lot like being slightly rejected in a parking lot.

Which is its own kind of audacity, isn't it. The audacity of growing up. The sheer nerve of these people to become themselves, right in front of me, without once checking whether I was emotionally ready. The audacity to develop opinions. The audacity to have taste. The audacity to look at the costume I was so proud of and say, with a small, kind smile, "Mom, I love you, but no." I raised them to be honest and confident and to know what they like, and then they went and did exactly that, and now I'm standing here holding a package of felt animal ears like a woman who has been outsmarted by her own parenting.

There's a small mercy tucked in here, though, and I think it's the thing I'm trying to hold on to this year. The stage where kids stop wanting to match doesn't mean they've stopped wanting me. It means the shape of wanting me is changing. Sometimes it looks like a kid who lets me stand at the end of the driveway with a flashlight and doesn't say anything about it. Sometimes it looks like a kid who surprises me by asking to come along on a candy run even though nobody's dressed in a theme. Sometimes it looks like a kid who rolls their eyes at the costume and then, an hour later, comes and sits next to me on the couch with their candy haul and quietly trades me the good stuff. The love didn't go anywhere. It just got a new outfit, one that doesn't coordinate with mine.

If you're standing in your own costume aisle right now, or scrolling through old family costume photos at an unreasonable hour with a feeling in your chest like someone's quietly sitting on it, I want you to know you're not being dramatic. Or you are, but it's the good kind, the kind that comes from loving people so much that even their growing up feels like a tiny goodbye. You're allowed to feel that. You're allowed to grieve a ridiculous, tiny tradition. You can also order the matching accessories anyway and just leave them on the counter with zero pressure, like a bowl of candy nobody's forced to take. Maybe somebody will. Maybe nobody will. Either way, you put out something that said, "I'd love to be part of this," and that, in its own quiet way, is what a lot of parenting is.

I've been thinking about how God handles this, actually, because I imagine He's been through the same thing with all of us. He sets out an invitation, over and over, and then lets us decide. He doesn't force the matching costume. He doesn't guilt us into the family photo. He just keeps the porch light on, and waits, and shows up at the end of the driveway with a flashlight, ten paces back, pretending He's just a stranger who happens to be going the same direction. I find that strangely comforting. If the Creator of the universe can stand patiently at the end of the driveway while I wander off to do things my own way, I can probably survive a preteen who doesn't want to dress as a crayon.

So here's my plan for this year. I'm going to show up. I'm going to wear something ridiculous, whether or not anyone matches me. I'm going to walk ten paces behind with a flashlight and say absolutely nothing when someone gets the full-size candy bar. I'm going to enforce the candy tax with the quiet authority of a woman who has earned it. And when the night is over and everyone's tired and sticky and pretending they're too old for any of this, I'm going to sit on the couch with a bowl of sorted candy and let them tell me, in their own time and their own words, which houses were the best.

Because the audacity of growing up is real, and so is the quiet joy tucked inside it, and both of them are standing right next to me in the dark, holding a flashlight.