Vampires, Letting Go, And Other Scary Things
By Callie Feyen
@calliefeyen
Mary said to him, “Son, why have you treated us like this? Your father and I have been anxiously searching for you.”
“Why were you searching for me?” Jesus asked. “Didn’t you know I had to be in my Father’s house?”
– Luke 2:48-49
“Tonight I learned that you can take care of yourself.” Joyce, Buffy Summers’ mom.
I am watching “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” in our basement when I hear Hadley and Jesse in the room above me. We were all watching “The Office,” a show I admit is hilarious, but I can only take so many episodes before I start to get depressed, and so I came downstairs, turned on the twinkle lights, and settled in with the vampires and other dark things.
The two of them are discussing Snapchat. Hadley, now the ripe age of 14, believes she should be on it. She’s stopped asking me because to say I don’t respond well is like saying Elsa figured out how to make a few ice-cubes for cocktails the day she sang the song, “Let it Go.”
I press pause and eavesdrop. I hear things like, “I know mom thinks,” or, “I know mom says,” and then, “It’s just that …” and, “But I …” The hardest to hear is, “My friends …”
It’s been years since I’ve watched the series. I think Hadley was 5 when Jesse, hearing me talk nonstop about the Twilight series, thought I might like Buffy, Willow, Xander, Rupert and the gang. This was back in the day when our Netflix subscription came in the mail in red envelopes. Hadley had started Kindergarten, Harper was in preschool, and I had just started graduate school—all of us after spending several years together, were off separately learning something new about the world and our place in it.
One day back then, it was just after lunch, I was standing on our back deck wondering if I stilled myself enough, if I could hear what was going on at Hadley’s school. An impossibility, I knew, but I was missing Hadley and wondering what she was up to, and so I stood there, I suppose, listening to my imagination. A few moments later, I received a phone call from her school.
“Hello?” I said.
“Callie?” the voice on the other end asked.
“Yes.”
“Hadley’s OK,” the voice said.
“OK,” I said. “When was Hadley not OK? And who is this?”
It was the assistant principal. She explained that at recess, right at the time the class was lining up to go back inside, one of Hadley’s classmates charged her and tackled her to the ground.
What I could see from our back deck was a glimpse of Sugarloaf Mountain—about a 45-minute car ride west of our town. I wondered with a bit of a thrill if I could make it there alone for a day before the kids got back from school. I didn’t know what I’d do there—certainly not hike—but the thought of being able to go alone was thrilling.
I thought about this with guilt as the assistant principal went through the incident. What if I had gone to Sugarloaf when this happened? Does the school even have my cell phone number? Do I get service out in the wild? How could I be so irresponsible?
I was so flustered and anxious by the time pick-up rolled around, I could barely keep myself in the car when I saw Hadley. We drove straight to get ice-cream. I figured we would hash all this out over a twist cone with rainbow sprinkles. I would apologize that she’d gotten hurt, while at the same time explain the problem of evil and also the need for grace. I would fix this. I would give Hadley all she needed to go back to school the next day.
“So,” I bravely began, “I heard about what happened at school today.”
“What happened?” Hadley asked, slurping a spot of ice-cream that dripped from her cone onto her finger.
“You got knocked down? At recess?” I said it gently, quietly, so as to ease her in and let her know it’s OK to talk about it. We could do hard things.
Hadley looked at me, confused. Then said, “OH!” She licked her cone again. “Yeah. He made the wrong decision.” She swiped an enormous bite of ice-cream and sprinkles from the top of her cone, then said, “Mom, do you know about tundras?”
“Tundras?” I asked.
“Yeah. Do you know about them?”
“I think so?”
We finished our ice-cream while discussing the vast, flat, treeless Arctic regions where the subsoil is permanently frozen.
Watching Buffy at the day’s end was inspiring. I admit there doesn’t seem to be much in common with a stay-at-home mom who kind of fell into writing, and a vampire-fighting teenage girl, but what I found inspiring about Buffy was that every episode was a question, a search, a battle. She showed me what being called feels and looks like. It wasn’t about whether you were qualified, or that you know what you’re doing. It’s that you exist, and that you are willing to try.
I know Buffy killed many vampires and other creatures of the night, but she also saw their humanity. She even falls in love with a couple of them. Early on in the series, those two vampires, Angel and Spike, discuss Buffy’s demise and Spike tells Angel that the only way to kill Buffy is to love her.
It’s an insane statement. How could you kill a person you love? Then again, how could I send Hadley into the world where she will get knocked down?
It is Spike, the fiercest, baddest, most vile vampire that I love the most. He’s funny and smart, and yes, he seems to be all bad, but it is Spike who uses his life in a pivotal, redemptive purpose. What’s more, he uses his life—all that he is and all that he has—willingly.
It is Spike’s face I am staring at while I listen to Hadley and Jesse discuss Snapchat. I think about Hadley and I eating ice-cream and her telling me about tundras, and I’m wondering now what it means to be permanently frozen and treeless. What does it mean to become so protectively hard nothing can grow? Nothing can become?
It is Hadley’s bedtime, and so she comes downstairs to say goodnight, and sees Spike.
“Ew,” she says sitting down next to me and looking at him. “Who’s that?” She turns toward me and looks me in the eye, waiting.
Hadley, after learning about Amelia Earhart, asked for prayers for the pilot in Sunday School. She wanted her teachers and her other fellow 6 and 7 year olds to pray that Ms Earhart would be found. I didn’t know then and I don’t know now how to explain that she won’t be remembered for being found, but for the fact that she flew. I’m not sure how to live with this concept, and I don’t know if I have the strength to let my daughter live with this concept. Though, I don’t think I have a choice.
“That’s Spike the vampire,” I tell her.
“He’s scary,” she says, and puts an arm around me.
“Yes,” I say, hugging her close. “He is.”
Photo by Lottie Caiella.