Sexy Witch Costume From Hell

Lucy was tromping and harrumphing a stormy path through the aisles of the costume shop. She looked askance at one plastic-trapped costume after another. Her green eyes narrowed and her freckled brow furrowed into an angry stamp of rejection. Over and again.


We were on the hunt at the local temporary Halloween store that pops up every year. Like a mushroom. It just appears one day. I don’t know why I bring my daughter in there every year. It’s like I get holiday amnesia. The kids’ costumes are, of course, completely divided by gender. And the girls’ costumes…talk about scary. They are totally mislabeled. The tags should say: Child-Prostitute-Vampire, Child-Beauty-Pageant-Princess and the old standbys: Slutty-Witch, Sleazy-Witch and Sexy-Witch ….all beginning with size 4T.

At first, I was in shock. Even though we’ve seen it every other year I still get completely flabbergasted by the fact that there are people out there who want to make money off of sexualizing my daughter and other young girls. So I’m following Lucy around like an idiot mumbling soothing things to her about how she and I could sew things onto this costume here and glue gun stuff onto that costume there and totally transform them into whatever we want. Doesn’t that make her feel better? She's clomping up and down the aisles, ignoring me. Meanwhile, motorized headless zombies are popping out of cardboard coffins at us as we walk by and a grey rubber corpse keeps revealing its pink guts to the sound of agonized moans every time we round a certain corner. And I’m thinking…I am in hell. I don’t know why I didn’t just grab my kid and scram.

Luckily, Lucy, for one, was actually using her brain in the midst of this madness and just got plain pissed. She clucked her tongue a several times in disgust. Pushed at a couple of the hanging plastic bags impatiently, folded her arms across her chest and announced, “Mama, there’s nothing here I want to be.”

Silently, I scream: Yessssss! Thank god! Thank god! Thank god! Go back to the fires of hell you-sexy-witch-costume-that-fits-an-eight-year-old! Take that!

To Lucy, I very calmly and coolly say, “Oookay, sweet pea. What do you think you might want to be?”

“A goblin.”

In between scooping guts out of pumpkins and kicking up storms of leaves, we stare into the fire after supper in the weeks before Halloween and talk endlessly about what kind of costumes the kids should wear this year. I, of course, miss the days when the boys wriggled happily into spider and ladybug costumes, running around with pompom antennae flopping in their eyes. And when Ruby happily let me dress her in layers of tulle and silk leaves in my own rendition of an autumn fairy costume. Those days are long gone. Along with baby teeth and car seats. The kids have developed minds of their own. I seem to remember that was the general idea. This has lately become their time of year for playing at feeling powerful, for trying different identities on, seeing how they feel.

In this nonviolent household, where they’ve had to make their own guns if they wanted to play war, this is the one time of year our kids can get swords if they want to. This is a big deal. So we’ve had a lot of ninjas in recent years. One grim reaper with a scythe. A Darth Vader with a light saber. One year, Lucy wanted to be Lucy from The Chronicles of Narnia because for one thing, in the movie, the courageous, diminuitive character got to carry a dagger. I draw the line at blood and gore but otherwise the kids get to experiment with evil for just that one night. All these weapons are miraculously “lost” as soon as Halloween is over and life goes back to normal.

This year Finn has decided to be an ancient martial arts master. With swords. Why a martial arts master needs swords I couldn’t tell you. Sam has chosen to be some kind of horror movie killer. The one with a chain saw. I think he was attracted to the noise the chain saw made. This is the closest to gore we’ve ever come in this house at Halloween. I feel we’re walking a fine line. The boys were with their father when they picked out their costumes. I wouldn't have gone for the horror movie killer thing or the bloody knives that the martial arts master has. Finn keeps pointing out that the "blood" is contained inside the knives as if this somehow makes a difference. Henry is not as anti-gore as I am and, well, I pick my battles. I'm trusting that years of parenting will not be undone by one night of madness.

But, as for Lucy, that's a battle I won't lose. It turned out there was a woman who worked at the nefarious Halloween store who had tons of ideas for costumes beyond what they had hanging in those plastic bags. She pointed us towards some elven ears we could stick onto Lucy’s wee round ones, a tube of green goo for her face, some green clawed fingers to stick over her own and we were off! Lucy doesn’t want to be some cute and friendly little goblin either. Far into the sixth book of the Harry Potter series, Lucy wants to be a cranky, kind of mean goblin like those that inhabit the tunnels beneath Gringotts Bank. A little ugly, maybe a little smelly, definitely scary, she wants to creep around the edges of Halloween, freaking people out like a true Halloween spirit. Not prematurely sexing it up like the marketers of those costumes want her to.

There is really something evil out there that wants us to accept the sexualization of our children. Not just at Halloween. And it’s seeping into our culture to the point where some perfectly well-intentioned moms and dads are getting confused and thinking it’s okay to send our daughters out into the night in corsets that suggest cleavage in 6 and 7 year old girls. It must be okay if that’s 95 percent of what’s for sale at the costume shop, right? But those costume manufacturers don’t care about kids. They care about making a buck. And Halloween shouldn’t be about sexy for little kids. It shouldn’t be about off-the-shoulder pirate blouses, ripped mini-skirts, thigh-highs and high-heeled boots for elementary school girls. That’s a different kind of power that we’re leaving kids to play near when we're allowing them to dress up like that. Kids don't even know the rules of the game they're playing at that point. Or who else is playing (watching). They’re not the ones in charge of their play when they put on those outfits.

We want kids to be able to tell their own stories, feel their own power and make up their own endings. Girls and boys. Not be objects of someone else's fantasy. Kids need to be able to choose from a multitude of identities to try on and play around in; not a narrow, gender-rigid selection that is trying to foist a premature, adult sexuality onto kids. That's not only gross but just wildly unfair.  But kids aren't the ones pulling their wallets out at the cash register. And kids don’t know what is really being sold in those plastic packages hanging from the costume shop wall. We do. We know what it is. And it’s a nasty trick.

Stirring Things Up For Halloween

Grammy and Papa drove over two rivers and through the woods to be at our house every Halloween that I can remember growing up. We would gather for a somewhat fancy family dinner, my sister and I keeping our eyes on the clock throughout the meal, not wanting to be a minute late for trick-or-treating. For one of those suppers, my mother took an adventurous culinary left turn, serving a meatloaf that featured a bright orange carrot mash rolled up into its center a la an autumnal buche de noel. My poor mother. We still talk about that meat loaf. Not kindly. Then my grandparents would see us off trick-or-treating with our friends, exclaim over neighborhood kids' costumes, help my parents pass out candy (it seemed like a big job) and, the night would end, every year, with my nearly deaf grandfather rumbling how, boy, he remembered how far our father used to go trick-or-treating when he was a kid. I thought that was what all families did on Halloween. Maybe that's what first planted this magical time as a major holiday in my mind. Lately, it's become my favorite.

There's so much to love. I love the quiet magic of the season the most. But I also like that there's not a lot of pressure involved with Halloween. There is no gift-giving to stress about. No major feast to prepare. (I didn't follow in my mother's footsteps there. I don't have family over on the big night. Just my mom. I'm too excited to entertain.) There is decorating to be done...which I love. But this time of year, most of the design work is done courtesy of Nature. The world is gloriously disheveled in fall. Talk about shabby chic! Piles of leaves in your yard? Fine. Kale wilting and tumbling out of your window boxes? Au courant. The crab apple tree that is so out of control as to look menacing? Perfect for tapping trick-or-treaters on the shoulder. Gourds fallen over by your front door? Abundance right on your stoop. My house, which looks just slightly worse for wear, never looks better. As though I planned it this way all along.  And best of all, no one's trying to dictate your emotions on Halloween. No one's trying to force you into a feeling of togetherness with your family, trying to make you grateful for anything, trying to get you to believe in Jesus if that's not your thing or invoking a prescribed version of patriotism. There's nothing worse than trying to call up feelings on someone else's time schedule. That's not on Halloween's agenda. Halloween is just for playfulness, magic and wonder. Anything goes.

Our family takes its cues for our Halloween countdown not from the poor sucker in the neon-colored ape suit waving the Halloween Sale sign on Rte. 6 but from the weather when it cooperates and from our own seasonal rituals. First to arrive are the pumpkins. I love the fatness of pumpkins. The plumpness that sums up the fecundity of this time of year. They come home from the farmers' market and the grocery store where they're cheapest. These orange orbs are chosen based on which are the weirdest-looking, longest-stemmed and which we feel the most sorry for. By the time Halloween arrives, we have enough to fill a small patch. When we're done with them, the remains rot in the garden and the deer eat them in the winter. The birds and field mice snatch up most of the seeds we haven't roasted in the spring.

As soon as the first cold wind blows, I brew up my first batch of Carrot Sweet Potato Soup on the stove in the biggest pot I have. Then I just wait for my brood to come in from the weather. Adapted from the Moosewood cookbook, this concoction is my family’s truest sign that fall has been let in the door.  This soup's as orange as the pumpkins piled up on the stoop. It tastes like no other soup you've ever made.  I add a sweet potato instead of a potato. I use at least half a cup slivered almonds, 1 cup milk, 4 cups vegetarian vegetable stock and no other seasoning or garnish. You must eat it with warmed-up, crusty wheat bread. Everyone loves this soup.

Next, when I have time, I set up my funny little Halloween village. A mixture of dried moss and gourds, curly willow branches and a generous helping of glitter, it’s a wee land that I made by hand for any fairy folk who wander into our home. The kids have loved it since they were little and ask when it’s going up every year but I think I love it more than anybody. It reminds me of when Captain Kangaroo had people who lived in the bookcase near his desk on his show. Remember them? Every few episodes, not nearly often enough for my taste, Captain Kangaroo would say, "Let's go check in on our little friends..." and pull the book aside. There they'd be..these tiny people...busy living their lives in the bookcase. That transfixed me as a child, the idea that there could be people living right inside my world that I couldn't see...that their whole world could fit inside a SHELF. I don't think I ever quite got over it. The other day when I left the back door open for the dog, a bird flew in. Straight inside the kitchen and made a beeline for the shelf that I've cleared this year for the gourd houses and curly willow branches. The bird started scuffling around in the moss among the Halloween houses and knocked down some of the little fencing I'd made. I don't know what she was looking for. She poked around the gourds and moss for a few good solid minutes, darting with intent. Then, satisfied, she flew back out the way she came. Just checking, I guess.

Lastly, down from the attic, dear Henry lugs the boxes full of cool weather clothes and Halloween treasures. Most sought after are the Halloween books. Some of them date back to my mother-in-law’s days as a teacher. Favorites include The Night the Scarecrow Walked and The Littlest Pumpkin. The Littlest Pumpkin is about a little, misshapen pumpkin who waits the entire day on the last day before Halloween to be taken home and made into a jack o’lantern. He dreams of being placed at the center of a happy party and danced around by children in costumes. But no one chooses him because he's too small. So the Littlest Pumpkin is left all alone on Halloween at the pumpkin stand, lonely and sad. But wait! He's not really alone! The mice are there! and they bedeck and bedazzle him and make him the center of their celebration! This oft-repeated story has forever convinced my children that pumpkins have feelings too. (Hence, the strange-looking pumpkins we end up with every year.) The pen and ink drawings of The Night the Scarecrow Walked show a to-be-pitied scarecrow stuck on his pole at the beginning of Halloween day. Later, he looks so much like a strange, raggedy man that the brother and younger sister see walking a country road that same night as they return home from trick-or-treating. It just couldn't be.... But when they pass the scarecrow's field on their way to school the next morning, the scarecrow's pole is empty!  Unsure they want to hear it, my kids insist on having this one read and reread anyway. It captures the duality of Halloween: excitement and creepiness- two sides of the same sweet candy treat. Somehow that feeling goes down this well only at this time of year.

Lucy was born the day after Halloween. There is a picture of me sitting at home that Halloween night, swathed in a long, tight brown stretch of a warm dress waiting for my two tiny trick-or-treaters to come home, two firefighters that year, my own belly a ripe pumpkin. The look in my eyes that the camera captured that night is one of expectation, impatience and more than a little discomfort. And yes, I’ll say it: it’s half-crazed. With power, hormones and a tetch of panic, the way we women are in the hours just before we push a fully formed human being from our pelvises. Somehow it didn’t register as discordant that it was on Halloween that I was preparing to push Lucy out into the world. In fact, it seemed just perfect. To me, it’s always been such a magical night. The one night a year so many of us seem to feel comfortable acknowledging the thin veil between this world and the next. When it’s okay to smile about spirits swooping around the night. Spirits entering and spirits leaving. It's the night to acknowledge that death can be frightening, yes, but that we can be friendly with it too.

On a different October evening, six years earlier, my Grammy had a fairly peaceful death on a hospital bed in the home of her daughter, Helen, and her daughter’s dear partner, Emma. They had cared gently for her for weeks in their small, wallpapered dining room where, years earlier, Emma's brother had also come to die. It was kind of becoming their specialty. I was walking through the gate into my small yard and climbing the stone steps towards my porch some 140 miles away in Somerville, Massachusetts when I felt her go. I knew before the phone rang.


On Halloween, a few weeks later, I asked some of my women friends to come to dinner. I stirred up a pot of my soup and left it slowly bubbling on the stove. I set out a plate of lemon squares on my porch. I ironed one of Grammy’s outfits. The iron must have been unnerved to find itself in my hands but I had to. Grammy was never wrinkled. I hung the clothes on a hanger on my trellis where it was sheltered a little from the autumn wind and where the lattice also held a creeping autumn rose. Grammy loved roses. The wind blew strong that night and a little warm for October.

I wanted Grammy to know she was invited too. That she was always invited. I set the table with care. I used her dishes: Briarwood Rose Spode. Her wedding china. A year or so before, when she was still in her own home and her spindle bed had first been moved to then dining room, we'd talked about her china in the hutches that were then surrounding her. These were her diamonds, her pearls. She wanted me to choose which ones I wanted. There were multitudes of dishes, china patterns and glassware that she registered for or bought on a schoolteacher’s and Southern New England Telephone electrician’s salary and on which she'd served recipes clipped out of Gourmet magazine. Each piece had a story. I'd sat and listened to so many. Now she wanted me to pick. I chose the sweet rose-covered pattern that she chose herself, as a not-too-young bride in the 1940‘s. She watched from the bed as I wrapped each piece in newspaper. Twice. That Halloween night I carefully placed the lemon squares I'd made for her on a Briarwood Rose dessert plate and put them on the porch under her fluttering clothes. I knew she'd be pleased.


 Throughout the season, as our family's Halloween preparations build, I love to step out into our back yard at night after dinner and breathe deep. I inhale the sweet decay of fall. I listen for the humming rumble of our furnace and the rhythm of my family's clothes flapping in the dryer behind the cellar wall. Time seems like such a long story back here behind the house at night where the stone wall, built by long-gone hands stretches down into the woods until I can't see it. But looking back inside the warm, litup house is like peering in on a movie and the story, it feels far too brief.

That's just a piece of the magic of the season. In the everyday. The regular.  In remembering. In birth. Death. Plates. Pots of soup. The extra ingredient is this: infusing them with whatever meaning you want to find there. In a bird. On a shelf. Leaves on the ground. Clothes blowing in the wind. A gate banging shut and your step on the path. The phone rings and you already know. We read the same stories together each year savoring the unchanging endings, their familiarity serving as both the mystery and the comfort we crave. Halloween holds them both like a fat, ripe pumpkin, like my belly held Lucy ten Halloweens ago this year. I still like to be at home on Halloween. These days, I'm greeting trick or treaters in my cobweb-strewn witch’s hat at our door, exclaiming over their disguises, handing out candy in my chocolate-infused hall, wondering how far my kids will go this year. Waiting at my post, I'm listening for the telltale sound of shuffling feet through the fragrant leaves across our yard. And for whatever else is out there.

Wild Things! You Make My Heart Sing!

Unless this story has become dislodged from your subconscious since childhood and you've forgotten that Max doesn't get eaten by any Wild Things, then there is only one suspenseful moment in the film version of Maurice Sendak's story. Spike Jonze's "Where the Wild Things Are" is hardly a plot-driven movie so there's no need for any spoiler-alerts in this quasi-review of mine. For me, the suspense comes only when the most deeply mournful and mute Wild Thing finally speaks. Shuffling around in the shadows for the whole film and grunting from time to time, the melancholy and rather threatening Bull, seems to stand for the saddest part of the main character, Max. Or, more precisely, for that creature inside all of us. That's what that stuff would look like if it had fur, horns and feet. As the hurt we all carry around but shove into cramped corners and hate to have to look at, he was the scariest Wild Thing of all. But when he speaks, it's not to say what you'd expect.

The film is book-ended by the same two scenes that wrap around Sendak's magical book: wild Max in his wolf suit chasing his small dog around the house at the start and then eating his dinner in the warmth of his home in the end. In the middle is Jonze's intense but playful riff on kids' inner lives. I loved it and so did my 8 year old. His rendition of Sendak's dark childhood fantasy was pitch perfect to my ear. I mean that figuratively, as well as, quite literally. So often, when children's books are translated onto screen, as soon as the characters open their mouths, I cringe. The tone is usually all wrong. The characters' voices are almost always higher-pitched than what I had heard in my head as I read. So off-putting. Catherine O'Hara, Forest Whitaker and James Gandolfini, as you might imagine, kvetch, demand, moan, chuckle and even snore as Wild Things in voices that are the stuff childhood dreams are made of. Not the dreams that Disney sells. Or the ones you can buy at Toys R Us in a plastic box. Spike Jonze's dreams are the ones that you can't remember clearly in the morning. The ones that leave only a vague feeling behind. You know the ones.

The dreams brought to life in this film include all the old childhood standbys like sleeping all together in complete warmth and safety...and nobody is left out. Except this version takes shape as a fantastical furry pile of overwhelming, chuckling bellies and snorting noses and the king of this hill of love is in minor danger of suffocating to death. And then, there's that old anxiety about not wanting to let any new people in...the new people here being two know-it-all owls named Terry and Bob. These are the kind of dreams where you're a fantastic builder and a destroyer both. A world where you can go around licking people in the face if you feel like it! Where someone will even let you climb inside of them to keep you safe. Even if it is hard to breathe in there. You'll have to see the movie to believe that one.

Jonze never calls these creatures Wild Things in the movie. At least not that I heard. Well, they're not Wild Things to Max and the story is told from Max's perspective. They're his royal subjects and friends. And, as in the book, the film never suggests that Max has fallen asleep when he sails off to the island where the Wild Things are. That's up to you to decide. I saw this movie with my daughter, Lucy who still travels freely between these two worlds: the imaginary and the solid. She saw this film as very straightforward. "Max got in his boat and sailed to the island and came back when he was done and went home."  Of course.

You'll watch this film partly as a kid yourself remembering the story, simple as it was, and thinking, Hey, I think I know what's going to happen next and feeling satisfied when it does. But I also felt it wash over me as a mother. I thought a lot about my 2 boys who are leaving some aspects of very young Max-hood behind. Although, I'm not clear on the status of their wolf-suits. I remember so clearly the surety I felt when each of my children was born that they were perfect and would live to lead charmed lives. Not because I wanted superstar children but because I just couldn't imagine any heartache befalling these perfect vulnerable beings the Universe had bestowed on Henry and me. Too bad for all the other people in the world. These little glowing fragile infants were perfect and would have fairy tale lives. Not rich, not famous, none of that ..... just untouched by suffering. And then came the first cold. The first croup. The first brattiness. The first time they said no and meant it with all their might. Then the first trip to the ER. The first tantrum at the grocery store. The first lie. The first heartache. And it turned out..as it does for every parent who silently promises their child, the moment they lay eyes on them, a life free from suffering...that there is no such thing. No child would be better for it even if there was.

And luckily, it turns out, kids have something much more useful in tow as they set out in life. Something more than any parent could ever promise. Every child carries a whole world around inside them, an inner world that helps in their navigation of this overwhelming outer one. And Jonze lays out Max's interior world in a magically moody way that basically unscrolls as a news flash to big people across the big screen: Hey! It doesn't look like Disneyland inside kid's minds. It's a place where it's all or nothing. Until they learn it's not. It's a pretty tough part of town. It's dark in there sometimes. That's a truth Maurice Sendak understood perfectly and that's why his book had a real edge to it. It wasn't the sweet bedtime pablum so many children's books are. And guess what? Kids loved it. Kids aren't the ones who need the fairy tales. It's the grownups.

I remember vividly the mental landscape of childhood. Even as a 6 or 8 year old kid. Don't you? In between the escape of Saturday morning cartoons and my favorite books, running around with friends and playing with my Barbies, there was more than the occasional stark thought. How did I end up in this family? Are my real parents somewhere else? If I got really good at gymnastics and a bad guy came to the playground at recess I could do backhandspring after backhandspring and kick him in the face and I would be really popular. If I stare at that dot on the ceiling without stopping then daddy won't die bringing the babysitter home. What lives behind the paneling in the rec room? If there's such thing as God, why did he let Nanny die? What's behind me if I don't run up the cellar stairs fast enough? The world looms large to a child. Shadows take different shapes depending on what storms a child is riding out at the time.

Children. We really watch from the outside from the very start, you know. Hoping our love goes with them when they raise the sails and set off in their own small boats to romp with the wild things in their own heads. Because, in the end, it's their world in there. And that's okay. This movie is a lovely reminder of that.

Soft bellied Woman

One of the many things that distinguished Nanny from all the other grandmothers in the world was her belly. Nanny's arms and legs were really skinny but she had this belly. It wasn't large but it was soft and a little rounded. And every once in awhile, she'd flash it at us. Yup. Nanny was nothing if not mischievous. And, at some point in her hard-working adult life, she had herniated her belly button. I never knew how. Pushing furniture around? Gardening? Working in the little grocery she wasn't too fond of? I don't know. But what had once been small and whorled was now blown out like a smoothed over jelly donut. That big. I don't think it hurt her. A perfect oval in the middle of her belly. All she'd had to do was show it to my sister and me and our three rolicking boy cousins once. That was it. We were hooked. We'd plead with her to let us see it. Over and again. She'd be laughing and protesting the whole time. Calling us crazy kids. Telling us no, no, no. As she peeled up an edge of one of her countless mock turtlenecks (sleeveless if it was summer) and quickly tugged it back down again as if she'd changed her mind and was going to walk away. After immediate squeals from us, she'd look smile at us from under her salt and pepper forelock of grey curl and relent when we least expected it. Up, she'd yank her acrylic top in barely a flash of pale stomach in a corner of her red-carpeted livingroom. It always was a little shocking to get to see a part of Nanny that looked so...vulnerable. But she'd quickly turn the moment light and make that jelly donut belly button growl at us the closer we peered at it as if this mutation of hers was somehow a menace to our youthful physical perfection. We'd scream obligingly every time, then fall into giggles-at least my sister and I did- I think the boys might have just stood there and stared. Nanny would gather us in her arms, squeeze us and give out glamourously-red-lipstick kisses. It was never scary. It was just our Nanny's belly. And we loved it. 

                                                                                                                                                                                                        

I can't lay claim to a belly button quite like Nanny's but I do have a round soft belly all my own. Like many of the women in my family, I've got long skinny legs and lots of middle. That’s me! Between my breasts and my belly, I couldn’t find my waist if my life depended on it. Haven't seen it since about 5th grade. And my sweet daughter seems to have inherited my build. Her legs just go on and on. And she can rub that beatific bulb of a belly of hers for good luck. It positively blooms when she’s in her bathing suit. A perfect half moon of warmth. It waxes and wanes depending on how fast she’s growing. Just like mine did. Right now, it's a slight crescent. In between growth spurts it fills in again. But, so far... fingers crossed... at almost 9 years old, Lucy is perfectly content with her body. In our size-zero-worshipping society, where girls start dieting in elementary school, I count that as a victory.

                                          

I love her body. I love her confidence. So different from mine at her age. She walks like she’s imitating a child on a city street playing at being cool, acting tough in order to keep up with her two older brothers. Actually, with Lucy it's not so much an act. This kid would have kept even Nanny on her toes. She plays basketball at the hoop on the side of our uneven driveway like she means it, rides her bike down our hill at frightening speeds and shoots herself in powerful bursts through the water of our backyard swimming pool. She owns every inch of that body. Other times, she’s just grooving to her own beat. She's all arms and legs shooting out in four entirely different directions. Head going. Feet churning. Oooh, ooh, hoo! she sings at the top of her lungs. I want to cry when I see her like that. To get to watch my daughter grow strong and uninhibited is a greedy joy unmatched by anything else I've yet to experience. Always feel that free! Love that body you‘re traveling around in! I just want to imprint that decree onto her little brain. Ignore everything else you hear.


Because lord knows, she will hear a lot.

My sister, Mary, and I weren't much older than little Lucy when we started obsessing about our own weight as kids. We hopped around religiously to Richard Simmons many elementary school and junior high school mornings trying to get rid of our “pots”. Our exercise ensembles consisted of leotards, shorts and tights. We felt the tights were absolutely key to our efforts. Somehow, we had taken in at a very young age that these bellies of ours had to go. In our livingroom, Richard drove up to his set in his shiny Cadillac with the license plate that read: YRUFAT. We pondered dutifully. We watched as he strapped on roller skates, slapped on some angel wings and accosted some unsuspecting elderly woman at the deli counter of her local grocery store. You had to admire his style. We watched when he had women (always in leotards and matching tights - no shoes- it’s a miracle no one broke their neck!) exercising behind grocery carts while he was exhorting them not to reach for snacks! Oh, that Richard. He was one adorable little sadist. But the creme de la creme was at the end of each show when the lights would dim, one spot would alight on him and Richard would perch on the stairs to his little stage and give his mandates. He’d bite his lower lip, furrow his somewhat earnest brow, shake his halo of light brown hair and chant some version of, “You can do it! I know you can! I used to be 300 pounds!“ Then he’d sign off, music swelling, blowing kisses and doing some jumping jacks. I’ll always love Richard. I can’t help it. But when I look back at pictures of me and my sister from those days I don’t know what the hell we were thinking. I mean we were two skinny ass kids. I may not have had a waist but I was skinny. It didn't matter. We felt fat. Richard spoke to us.

When Henry and I first got married, he’d roll over and slide his hand around my warm belly and I’d…suck that belly in! Every time! So often did my stomach recoil at his touch that it became a reflex. And, poor girl, back then, I didn‘t even know that I barely had anything to suck in. It didn't matter. I wasn't concave. And this person is my partner. My best friend. It's me and him against the world. But this is how I know I’ve gotten better, softer with myself. Because, now, 3 kids and 17 years later, I have enough sense to simply move closer to that warm embrace.

It started happening around the time I had my babies. I had them all three close together and, very quickly, Henry and I were surrounded by all these orbs of baby and toddler bellies. Buddha bellies we called them. We doted on them…. loved them and kissed them and gave juicy raspberry kisses all over those delicious tummies. Round bellies meant we were feeding them right. We were actually figuring out how to take care of these marvelous creatures! Meanwhile, my belly was stretching and deflating three times in a matter of 3 and a half years. And my rotundness meant my belly was working right too. I was growing the baby inside me right. I felt filled up with the power of my own body. Three times over. Look what I can do. Watch me! People walked right by me in the street, unimpressed, while I felt like shouting: I'm a freakin' miracle over here! Hey! Don't mind me...just growing a human being!! I remember going to a public meeting in the small city we lived in when I was pregnant with Finn. It was about McDonald's wanting to move into our rapidly gentrifying neighborhood of Somerville, Massachusetts.  Representatives for McDonald's were there looking smug. I remember wielding that bulging belly of mine like a weapon. You want to put what where? I stood up and showed them my belly. Did they realize who they were dealing with? I was going to be a mother now. This was serious. I had a whole new identity I was trying on and a whole new investment in the world. That was powerful. And I felt so beautiful when I was pregnant. A lot of the time anyway. Stretch marks aside. Huge and beautiful. Imagine that.

Those early years with 3 children under four, we were home-bound in so many ways. Nursing, feeding, napping. It was a cozy time. And me, as Mama, I was a big, soft cushion. (This was also a claustrophobic and insanity-inducing time that made me want to scream when anyone else even tried to touch me by the end of the day but that’s a story for a different day.) My belly was the safe place for Finn, Sam and Lucy to bury a head into when the light was too bright or the noise too loud or when the world just seemed a little too much. I was someone to push against when they tried to stand. Someone to fall into when that didn’t work out as planned. I was the warm place to nurse. I loved it when they would sigh after they'd settled in to drink for awhile as if to say, “Yup, that’s the stuff.” My lap was the softest place to drink a bottle...their bright, round eyes intently locked on mine. And when they were colicky, as two of mine were, nothing soothed them more than walking around- a hard, tense, tiny baby-belly pressed against my big, soft, warm mama-belly- doing the circuit of our small kitchen to living room and back again. How can you not love a belly your children so clearly love? Like Nanny's, my belly didn't have to be perfect for my children to love it.


And now, Lucy is still young enough that she rushes off the bus and down the driveway towards me every day after school. The boys used to do this too: break into a run as soon as their feet stretched down to touch asphalt from that tall school bus step. Backpacks whacking their sides to the rhythm of their gallops. Now it's mostly just Lucy who performs this ritual. The boys have usually already come home on the middle school bus and are inside doing homework. So it's just her but, man, she goes at it full blast. She tears at me, red hair whipping behind her. She flings her whole body against me and presses her face right into my belly and stands still and silent while I stroke her hair. “Sweet pea,” I always say. Eventually, Lucy’s reassured face will emerge and our eyes will lock, “How was your day?” And as she answers, her strong little arms will squeeze tight the waist that she somehow always manages to find. She knows where she comes from. And so do I.

Wednesday, October 21st is Love Your Body Day. It's aimed at doing for all little girls and mamas and daughters and Nannys what I'm trying to do for Lucy. Help us know that we are more than what the media tells us our separate parts are worth. Remind us that our beauty lies in our strength, our softness, our diversity and our intelligence  ...both as we wax and as we wane. What will you, dear Internet, do to celebrate Love Your Body Day for yourself or the women in your life? They have amazing ideas at http://loveyourbody.nowfoundation.org/ Please come back and share what you do to celebrate your shape. Me? I'll be reminiscing about Nanny's fantasical belly button, rubbing my little bodhisattva Lucy's tummy and snuggling with Henry. I most definitely will not be wearing a belt.

Lemon Squares in the Loop

I had a small secret this Summer. Remember all those unseasonably brisk days we had early on? When the clouds obscured the sun on the East Coast for weeks on end and the temperature dwelled in the low sixties into early July? When it rained grey and claustrophobic day after dank day? I coveted each of those days. Just savored them. Maybe it's all that moody English blood I have in me. The few drops of Scottish. Or those morose Irish genes my grandmother left me. It's just in my nature to revel in murky days. Where's the nearest moor?

But now, having survived the miasma that was the rest of this Summer, I am in my glory: Autumn! The wind! The hues! The change! There’s a thickness, a different kind of adhesiveness to Fall that I love. It’s a season of bounty for those of us who tend toward the ruminative . It's a season of layers. Suffused with memory, it's Fall, I feel sure, that is the truest time of the year for beginnings and renewal.

Let me explain. It was my own erstwhile, early childhood school days that marked this season, not January, as the real beginning of each year for me. That permanent imprint of my own first days of school was what sealed it. Wearing pulled up knee socks and carefully chosen, thin-ribbed corduroy skirts, clogs from Thom McCann with a braid of leather that encircled the bridge of bones on top of my foot, I was a quiet, but sharp, observer in ribbon-encased barrettes. There were chalkboard- mornings and rolling-down-the-hill-home afternoons, kicking my way through the piles of leaves neighbors had raked into the street. The days were shortening each week further into the Fall and I ran faster to get home before the dark could catch me. These scenes play on a permanent loop in my mind every year, somehow getting more techno-color with every leaf-fall I live through. I look forward to hitting the play button every Autumn. That's how I know. Not from looking at the calendar tacked to the kitchen wall. Another year has started. Isn't it the same way for many of you?

Now, in my fortieth year, when the geese appear in the sky in their V, it’s as if, somehow, the fast forward button has been pushed. Another school year begins.The big yellow buses tug up the hill. Stop and pull away again. This time, spiriting away three children to the brick buildings a mile up and down the hills of our former hat factory town in the New England woods. This time, I have a new part to play: I am the mother in the story now. I wait at our worn wooden table to give them a soft landing when they tumble in the door, words, bodies and book bags falling over each other in their rush to be the first to reach me, to be the first to touch home. I am the mother now. Yes. But somewhere, I persist as the girl in ribbon barrettes. Each Fall, the loop rolls again. Except, it's playing on two tracks now. Renewal and memory, side by side.

Fall is the season for change and permanence in the garden too. I don't do much of anything but stay out of nature’s way out there in the Fall. Not in my live-and-let-live patch of earth. This is when Nature shows you its plain, working parts. I think this is when it's at its most beautiful, making every other part of the year feel like an overly done-up illusion. This is the real stuff. Now, we see plants begin to strip down. Fruits hang low and full. I love the colors. Not the bright pinks and yellows of summer for me. I’ll take the dark maroons, deep purples, dark greens, the browns.

I love the smells too. It’s as though the Earth is taking deep, satisfied sigh, after sigh. The smell of the dirt and leaves getting messily reacquainted after being kept apart for a year by the trees. That loamy musk! The apples in our backyard are on the ground and getting into the mix. At least, the ones the deer haven’t eaten. There are a few acorns in there too. Some rose hips. It’s the aroma of a wonderful decay. And then the Autumn wind stirs it all together. Some days, gently. Some days, hard. On especially quixotic afternoons, the gales of Fall blow right under the door of our somewhat sound, little house. Through the cracks in our cellar windows and in through the keyholes. Our foxhound lifts her nose to them. She sniffs at scent-stories travelling from the next hill over. The fox in the woods behind us. The dogs next door. The cider donuts at the mill two hills over. I smell other stories on those same currents.

My grandmother often flies on the Fall wind. For me, she does. I'll get glimpses of her around the turn in the road when a brightly lit yellow tree is just coming into view. There she is. She's improbably riding her bike down New Litchfield Street in her navy blue Keds and brown-rimmed plastic glasses. Waiting for me in her kitchen. White hair. Just so. Glass jar of collected matchbooks sitting on the dryer behind her. Open smile. Bright yellow teeth, but no one minds. Long skinny nose. Little blue eyes. Arms wide. Lord & Taylor costume jewels to match her blouse. Skinny belt to match her pumps. Missy, she says and squeezes me tight. Somewhere lemon squares are cooling in wax paper with dots of confectionery sugar popped on top. I can taste them just as plainly as I can see that tree. Memories travel easy like that on the Autumn wind.

That is Fall to me. It’s memory and it's beginnings. It’s both. Something old. Something new. It’s harvest time. Winter is coming. The children are at school. The dog and I both smell memories on the wind. For her, maybe it’s days in the fields of West Virginia, her home before she came to us. Chasing foxes across the field? Does the wind blow that far? This is the time for reaping what we’ve sown. For fruition. We think of Spring as a time for birth but truly fall is the time when things come into fullness. We plant in Spring. We pluck in Fall. I’ve been thinking about writing for so long. Just these little pieces. Thinking. Thinking. Not doing. This Fall, I finally began. I don't know what they'll yield. Maybe not much. A person's stories may not mean much to anyone but themselves. Maybe it's just between me, my dog, my not so-long-gone grandmother, the Fall breeze and a few lemon squares. But I’m chasing them down. My nose is to the wind. I’m running down the hill. I’m kicking up the leaves. This Fall, I’m harvesting some of those thoughts. Or I’m trying anyway. I’m chasing them down where they’ve been wheeling in the wind, lingering by the side of the road, and muttering beside my stone wall. It just seems like the right season to bring them home.

A Few Rounds with Mother Teresa

I really didn’t want to yell. It was such a nice day. The sky was clear. The birds were chirping. We’d had so many days of rain this past summer and then, finally, a beautiful day dawned. When I left the house that morning bright and early, I promised myself I wouldn’t yell. I’d be civil and dignified. And I was. I was...for a whole two hours. And then, he had to do it. My Congressman. That cutie pie. Chris Murphy. He just had to call on the woman a few feet in front of me to the right. The one who looked like she usually only left the house on grey, cloudy days and then, only if she really had to. The one who looked like the sun hurt her eyes. I mean, was she actually wearing a mantilla? Or am I just embroidering the memory now? She was dressed in black from bun to pumps except for the dull cross weighing down her neck. I don’t know why he did it. There were so many more normal looking people there…stretching their arms up to that clear, happy sky, just waiting to be called on. People who wanted to ask questions about the public option and Tort reform. But no, he called on Lady Gloom and Doom. And so she began.

“Oh, I’m very worried,” she labored. “I just don’t know. I think the new health care..it will make people pay for..ABORTION when they don’t want to.”

“That’s not true.” I civilly and politely corrected her. What, dear Internet? Yes, you're right, it was her turn to talk and not mine. I was just trying to be helpful. I didn’t go into all the ways in which it wasn’t true but I could have. I just didn’t want to take up too much of her turn. Wasn’t that civil and dignified of me?


“Yes! Oh, yes, it is so true!” This scolding, nasal voice came from a burly man who appeared to be accompanying Mother Teresa. I looked up at him. His arms were folded and his tone was similar to that of my little brother, if I had a little brother. I made a civil and dignified decision not to talk to him.


For one brief moment, the woman in black looked as if she couldn’t decide whether to go on. Alas, she decided she could. “And, as a Christian,” she quavered. Here we go, I thought silently. To myself. Silently. How civil and dignified was that? “I’m so worried that people who don’t want to…you know….doctors and nurses and those people…those people will have to do abortions even if they don’t want to. Even if it goes against their beliefs!” She clutched her chest when she said beliefs. Then shot me a look and said, “And there will be vivisections!” her voice rising.


“Oh, come ON!” I interrupted loudly. This was too much! Civility and dignity could take a flying leap! I looked around me for support. I couldn’t be the only person who was outraged by this. But no one would meet my eyes. Maybe they were all trying to look dignified? Instead, another rather rotund man turned around to tell me helpfully that it was, in fact, true and that I should go home and look up vivisections in the bill myself. Rrright, I civilly scoffed.


“And,” she said triumphantly, “ I just don’t believe in abortion.”


“THEN  DON’T  HAVE  ONE!” I yelled. At the top of my lungs. As loud as I could. I had crumpled up civility and dignity and fashioned them into a megaphone.

Maybe it was the loudness. Maybe it was the fact that I yelled this at a woman, obviously, well past her childbearing years...I don’t know, but that’s when that cutie pie Chris Murphy told us both to pipe down and reminded us all that he was pro-choice. Well, dear internet, at this news, Mother Teresa kind of tottered over to the edge of the stage where Chris was speaking and just collapsed right against it. Mind you, this woman had already stood through about two and a half hours of the town meeting on healthcare reform with the stamina of a workhorse but apparently the last two and a half minutes were just too much for her. A small crowd gathered around her in sympathy. She leaned into the middle of it, all the while giving me the evil eye.  I don’t know how civil that was.

In the meantime, another quite elderly gentleman next to me (they just kept appearing!) spat at me: “Why don’t YOU have one?" Then he appeared to stew for a moment before he spat out some more, "Maybe it’ll make you less angry!” Huh. Wiping away the spittle and wondering if this fellow had oatmeal for breakfast, I thought to myself, I’ve heard many reasons given for terminating a pregnancy. All personal. Never that one. I looked at his unshaven face and unfocused eyes and decided I wouldn’t discuss my family planning options with this particular gentleman in this particular venue.

So, in case you were wondering, as you were sitting on your sofa this summer watching the images of irate folks at town hall meetings across the country on your television set…who were those crazy people? Exactly who were those lunatics standing up and yelling at each other? Well, now you know. One of them, at least, was me. I didn’t want this whole healthcare debate to end without identifying myself. Just your average, everyday woman: a mom of 3 who shops at Target, drives a beat-up van, walks her dog, volunteers at her kids' schools and watches way too black & white movies on TV. And who also happens to believe with all her heart that women’s bodies belong to us alone, along with all the decisions that come with them.

And, yes, when it comes down to it, I will make a lot of noise to protect women's rights to make those decisions ourselves even if you do come to the fight dressed like Mother Teresa.

Me and that Pro-Choice Cutie Pie!