"Oh my God! You're there!"

“Oh My God! You’re There!”

Yesterday I was watching almost thirteen year old Luna’s volleyball playoff game. I was standing next to a good friend who has four kids ranging in age from seven to eighteen. It was the day before Halloween.

I casually remarked, “This is the first Halloween when I won’t be organizing costumes and trick or treating in almost sixteen years.” I realized this because our twelve year olds were going to a Halloween party clad in onesies that required zero prep or effort by us moms. And Dylan, almost sixteen, is away at school.

“Oh my god!” my friend said. “You’re there!”

Whoa. I am. I am there.

The days of Halloween prep, decoration, costume mind-changing, last minute errands, tick-or-treating, candy binging, expectation managing, all of it. Done.

It dawned on me yet again that in motherhood one phase ends and another starts without us even realizing. No fanfare. One is over and a new one begins. Usually without warning.

Sometimes it’s jarring. Like I thought we had a few more simple years left in one part, but then overnight we were suddenly thrust into conversations way far beyond Halloween costumes and what to put in lunch boxes. These simple decisions were replaced with intricate hypotheticals about consequences, self-esteem, the role of girls and women in the world. We have been having a million little conversations like these through the years but suddenly these hypotheticals border on real life choices with real life consequences my girls are navigating.

So I guess I knew I was “there” without having taken the beat to realize it.

Halloween is a huge deal for kids. Dylan and Luna would plan waaaaaaaay in advance when they were younger. Sometimes even beginning to hatch plans on November 1st. And then, suddenly, Dylan is out of the house, and Luna no longer interested in a big costume and our annual ritual of weaving our walk streets in Venice with hoards of other local kids celebrating, for many, the best night of the year.

It’s done.

“But isn’t it so sad? They aren’t babies anymore,” I hear many other moms lament.

Nope. Not me. Not sad.

Maybe slightly wistful, but most definitely not sad.

And here’s why. We did it. We did it fully, whole-heartedly, with more enthusiasm than I thought possible with years and years of my adorning the outside of our home with spider webs, creepy, stupidly expensive decorations of decapitated ghouls, skeletons, witches, scared cats, you get the idea.

Do you think I can empty the garage of that stuff now???

And I am extra NOT sad about being done with cutting up jack-o-lanterns. A messy and, frankly, dangerous activity that raged against the part of me that hates a messy house as well as the possibility of my kids chopping off a finger. I’m fairly sure my husband managed to escape that task every year, although that would have been a great one to delegate.

But I really LOVED a whole lot of it. Dylan was a princess year after year and then discovered Lady Gaga at seven, and then rocked a version of her for the next three years. Luna always had some incredible get up with her best friends and walked the Venice Walk Streets like she owned them. The years transitioned from Dylan being scared of even answering the door as a way little girl, to now, when she glams it up at dances and parties far, far away from me. I held their sweet little hands for years, followed them through dark sidewalks always with an eagle eye, stealing their Reese’s peanut butter cups along the way.

But we truly did it. All out. For a long time. 

I showed up fully as a mom for all of those sixteen Halloweens in a row.

So, yes, that one part is over. I’m there.