Final Mom
By Melanie Dale
@melanierdale
My mother made the best Halloween costumes. One year I went as a bunch of grapes. I looked straight out of a Fruit of the Loom commercial, and I loved it. Another year she made me a full Tweety Bird worthy of official mascot status. This was before Amazon and ordering anything you need so she RIT-dyed a pair of tights bright orange for my Tweety legs. It’s no wonder I fell in love with dressing up and went on to get a degree in costume design. Costumes are magic. You can be anyone you want.
My early love of Loony Tunes and bunches of fruit transitioned to more macabre subjects, and for the last few years, I spent my down time when I wasn’t writing shambling around film sets as various monsters. I loved being undead. I don’t know what it says about my parenting skills that being a monster was a welcome break from motherhood.
One time I played a background zombie in a horror movie and for two nights, I ran around in the freezing cold in a latex onesie pretending to scare teenagers at a haunted house. (Listen, some fortysomething moms paint tulips on wine night with friends to blow off steam. Self-care is different for everybody.)
The onesie zipped up the back and I couldn’t get the costume off without help, so on this particular shoot I learned to manage my liquids. One thing I discovered about being a monster is that sometimes the monster really has to pee.
After my cancer diagnosis last year and as the ramifications of treatment continue to upend my life, my monster days are over (although during chemo I looked undead for realsies). But I still have Halloween. Oh, how sweet is this time of the year when spooky lovers like me are briefly considered socially acceptable. “Great skeleton shirt! Very Halloweeny!” “Uh, yeah, I totally only wear this for Halloween and not also Valentines and Arbor Day and days ending in y.”
Our house is decorated with skeletons and monsters year-round. A bloody hand reaches out of a hole in the ceiling in the bathroom. Skull throw pillows adorn the sofas. A golden skeleton lounges in the living room, and in the family room, a raven perches atop a skull. We keep our insides creepy, but in October the pumpkins come out and the skeletons spill onto the lawn.
Colleen, our eight-foot ghost bride who lives in my office, floats ghoulishly into the front hall to startle visitors and we hear the screams each day as people come to the door. My husband likes to prank our teens by setting Colleen right outside the bathroom so when they finally come out after, what—five and a half freaking hours?—they shriek like tiny babies and have to go right back in to change their pants. Parenting teens is hard, so we take what payback, I mean enjoyment, we can find.
I’m very polite to Colleen, just in case she’s real and wants to suck out my soul while I’m writing. I always greet her, ask after her health, and thank her for keeping me company. Sure I bought her at Home Depot but what if she’s cursed by a toy maker to murder the first person who’s rude to her? I can’t take any chances.
And this is what’s fun about Halloween. The what-if of it all. We don’t want real monsters lurking about our neighborhoods but the excitement of decorative monsters and spooky shadows that won’t really hurt us bring us the joy of jump scares and the welcome safety of home. Halloween is my favorite because it’s a portal into possibility, the time of the year we all agree to celebrate what’s beyond this mortal plane and welcome the shiver down our spine.
I love pretending to be monsters, but when it comes to watching horror movies, I identify with the final girls the most, those scream queens who limp, bloody and exhausted, till help arrives, the sun comes up, or the monster lights up in flames. The ones who keep fighting till the very end.
This month Jamie Lee Curtis ends her run as Laurie Strode in the Halloween franchise that began in 1978. She goes up against Michael Myers one last time. She’s the quintessential final girl and I’ve loved seeing her grow from the frightened teenager to a badass grandmother. In each movie, she escaped and thwarted her nemesis tirelessly. She fought evil and won, over and over, but evil just kept coming for her.
I feel that so hard, and that’s why I love watching her fight. Michael Myers is relentless and just when she thinks she’s free, he’s back. But she never stops fighting.
I’m in a season where the bad stuff just keeps coming. Thankfully I don’t have Michael gunning for me, but it’s cancer, and it’s a new diagnosis for one of my kids, and it’s heartbreaking decisions by someone I love, and it’s nonstop advocacy for all my kids’ needs and the pharmacists know me by name, and the poor, overworked, undervalued teachers email me about all the issues, and we are THAT family and not a week goes by where I’m not at the cancer center or various physical and mental health appointments for my people. The proverbial Michael Myers keeps coming at me, and I’m not sure yet if I’m the final girl in this story or if I’m only Act Two and they’re about to find my bloody body shoved in a closet.
Are you running on empty, limping through the neighborhood, about to do the run-and-stumble as the monster chases you? Same. Some days it feels easier to just lie there and let the monster get us. The evil is too strong. The headlines are too scary. Our kids’ challenges are too hard.
But Halloween is for believing in the impossible. It’s for fairies and princesses and dragonslayers and feeling powerful with our plastic swords and shields bought at Walmart or made from a cardboard box. We stumble but we can get up. And maybe the monster has to pee.
So when you see the decorations, the skeletons and scary clowns and bloody knives, tell yourself “I am the final girl.” We are the final girls, the final moms, and we will make it to the end, limping, traumatized, maybe needing some serious therapy, but we will make it to the ends of our own stories. We will not be defeated by our lives, our kids, or the evil around us. We will keep fighting. The monsters don’t stand a chance.
Melanie Dale is the author of four books, Women Are Scary, It’s Not Fair, Infreakinfertility, and her latest, Calm the H*ck Down: Let Go and Lighten Up About Parenting. She hosts a podcast, Lighten Up with Melanie Dale, enjoys speaking at events around the country, and her essays are featured in the Coffee+Crumbs’s book, The Magic of Motherhood. She and her husband of 20 years spend their days in the Atlanta area trying to survive the teen years. It involves a lot of coffee and sarcasm.