The Year He Was a Skunk

I keep telling myself that he’ll never remember this. He’ll never remember that we dressed him up as a skunk and walked around the house saying, “Trick-or-Treat” instead of going door-to-door in search of candy that he couldn’t eat anyway. But he already missed out on so much — going to daycare and socializing with kids his age, leaving the house to run errands together and seeing people’s smiling faces, and having a big first birthday party with all our friends and family. His first time Trick-or-Treating would be nice to be normal. Instead, we get in the car for the twenty-minute drive to my grandparents’ house where one of us will each stand in a different room and he’ll get something to put in his pumpkin bucket which is bigger than he is. This kind of trick-or-treating feels like all trick and no treat. The whole escapade is done in twenty minutes and then we’re out of ways to make the night anything other than every other pandemic evening. 

Back in the car, Ronan babbles in the back as I pop his Halloween candy in my mouth, fun size piece by fun size piece. My husband is driving us home, so I do him the courtesy of unwrapping pieces of candy and plopping them in his mouth for him. It’s only 6:30pm and it’s already dark out. Daylight savings is coming too, which means it’ll be even darker earlier again. The weather has been mild this fall, which is one saving grace, but winter is coming. How will we get through it? We will actually be stuck in our house all day without the respite of a morning and early evening walk. As if reading my inner thoughts, my husband turned to me, gently put his right hand on my left knee and gave it a squeeze. As I looked to meet his gaze, he gave me a smile. That smile that always made me feel like I was home, now just feels rife with empty promises — promises that parents make to their young children to assure them that everything will be alright, but knowing deep down they have no way of knowing that. I can no longer suspend disbelief and find comfort in that false sense of security. I smile back lamely to acknowledge the gesture. But I just keep thinking about all the false promises, all the lies we tell ourselves and each other to motivate us to keep trudging through. When do the lies start? With the tooth fairy and Easter Bunny? I remember so keenly being an anxiety-ridden child from a young age and just craving reassurance — constantly needing to hear “it’s okay, everything is ok.” Once I heard those words, the weight on my chest was cleared and I could breathe deeply again. Are we as parents just liars in chief? 

I’m jostled out of my contemplative inner dialogue by the sound of our garage door opening in front of us. We’ve arrived home without me even realizing it. The baby is half asleep in the car seat and my lap is full of empty candy wrappers. Shoving the wrappers into the plastic food store bag, I gather the baby’s things from the back of the car and walk heavily through the garage to the basement door. I fumble in my purse for my keys, but my arms are so full of all of our crap that I drop the keys on the dirty garage floor. It’s the straw that broke my ragged nerves’ back, and I just start silently shedding tears. 

I find myself doing that a lot lately. A big part of me really believes that my hormones will never go back to normal again, and I’ll just always feel this way — helpless, sad, overwhelmed, and so damn tired. It’s easy to blame hormones, but in reality my whole reality is forever altered and I can’t come to terms with it. My mantra has been “just make it to nap time.” After nap time it’s “just make it til bedtime.” It used to calm me, but now the days fly by so quickly that those brief respites aren’t restorative enough. 

Finally in the door, I drop all of our crap on the kitty-littered basement floor. The laundry baskets are overflowing, the whole room wreaking of cat piss and poop. Even in the midst of a crying jag, my foggy brain reminds me I can’t leave the opened bag of fun-sized candy here or the three-legged cat will eat it. I pick up just the bag with the candy and walk upstairs with my husband carrying Ronan and the diaper bag following behind me. Once upstairs, my husband puts Ronan down, which is immediately followed by a whining cry which is building up to a full-fledged tantrum. All he wants is to be held all day and watch TV, and do whatever else he knows he isn’t allowed to do. Some highlights of those activities include: climbing the baby gates, opening and shutting the cabinets, pulling the cats’ tails, and trying to pull the full length mirror off of the bathroom door. Even diaper changing has become an Olympic feat. Now I just hand him my phone with some god-awful kid show playing just to keep him still. 

Saying he’s strong willed would be putting it kindly. He’s a 16-month-old dictator. My in-laws lecture me every time I see them that I need to discipline him and “get him under control.” When he was in daycare, the workers there swore he wasn’t like this. I even pressed them on it — I told them how he gives me such a hard time at home and they seemed genuinely surprised. Instead of feeling relieved by that, I was just angry. He saves the good behavior for strangers meanwhile I get tortured. Now that we’re weathering the pandemic, we decided to pull him from daycare, which means my husband is taking temporary parental leave to watch him on the days I go into work. 

I try to remind myself this is temporary — that everything is temporary. But this temporary seems safer than whatever the next couple of months will bring. Come January we’ll have to reevaluate it all again. Do I quit my job, which keeps me sane? Or do we put Ronan back in daycare and risk exposing him to COVID-19? Either choice feels like the wrong choice. Every day feels like I made the wrong choice. There’s a saying that happy marriages are made by two people choosing to be with one another every single day, but they never said that would apply to motherhood. Being a mom to me means forcing myself out of bed every morning and willing myself to stay — not to run away to a new city, get a cute apartment, and start a new life. 

As I put all of our coats in the hall closet, my husband takes our skunk-clad son upstairs for a quick bath and then bed. I get to quickly decide what to do with the next fifteen minutes while they’re upstairs. My options are: unload and reload the dishwasher, fold laundry, clean up the millions of toys all over the house, or change our bedsheets. My stomach hurts probably from too much candy, so I choose folding laundry since I can sit down on the couch while I pick from the pile on the seat next to me. 

I only make it through a quarter of the pile before I hear them above ready and waiting for me to finish the bedtime process by nursing him one final time for the day. I never imagined I’d nurse this long, but it’s the only thing that’s easy for us. He took to it well from infancy and has done well ever since. That’s not to say that breastfeeding is easy, because it isn’t. It’s physically taxing in a way I never even imagined, but it’s also the only way I feel like a successful mother, so I keep doing it. Plus, the mental picture of weaning Ronan is pretty traumatic for everyone involved. 

I made it to another bedtime. And overnight it’ll all be reset again. I’ll lie to myself and Ronan that it’ll all be okay. I’ll fold laundry, do dishes, make food. I’ll eat Halloween candy and imagine a day where I won’t shed silent tears. I’ll choose to be here another day without guaranteeing another day past today. I’ll continue to weather the many tricks this year has served us and try to savor the fleeting treats — giggles, smiles, the occasional cuddle. Maybe I won’t even remember this day years from now. Maybe Halloween in the years ahead will wash away this first time. One can only hope, anyway.