A Practice of Avoidance.

It’s that time of year again.  I know some of you are sighing and thinking about warm drinks and cool evening walks complete with leaves crunching beneath your feet.  Others of you are picking apples and pumpkins and crazy looking gourds to decorate with, to carve, to eat.  If you’re american you may still be dreaming of pumpkin pie which we canadians had weeks ago already.

For us, it’s the season of not being able to take our youngest anywhere.  ANYWHERE.

I forget about this every year.  Every.  Year.  I had forgotten again until  the other day when we quickly bolted into the local pharmacy to pick something up and there it was, standing mid-aisle, complete with wart on nose and blood red eyes.  A witch.  I stopped as soon as I saw it and I held out my hand for him to grab knowing his eyes hadn’t gazed quite as far up ahead as mine had.

I turned to him and lightly said, “Hey bud, I just want you to know that there’s some Halloween decorations coming up.”  He looked up at me searching my eyes to know if he could trust them.  We locked.  I nodded.  “It’s a witch.  It’s kind of creepy but not really gross.  More like silly creepy.”  His eyes never left mine because he knew I was there for him.  “Okay Mom,” he answered.  “I’ll just walk looking down at the floor and I’ll hold your hand so you can guide me, okay?”   Okay.

It seems that every year I forget that this is coming.  Every year I think maybe this year he’ll be okay.  And every year he’s really not.   But we’re learning how to navigate it together.  We’ve built a trust through it.  An, I’m-right-here-with-you, sorta thing.  And every year we choose where we shop or where we even enter based on how they decorate.  Because we love him.

We love his imagination that takes him to crazy places.  We love that we can be out for a family walk and he’ll declare that sometimes he thinks that everyone in the world are just robots and he’s the only one truly alive.  We love that he finds elephants with glasses speaking spanish in the shapes of the clouds.  We love that Curious George is still his favourite movie, though everyone around him has already moved on to Harry Potter.  And we nearly died laughing the other day when he asked why someone would ever want to store themself.  (as we passed a self-storage place)

We love him for all that he is and part of what he is is discerning.  Part of what he is is a lover of good and a hater of evil.  Part of what he is is so pure and lovely that he can’t imagine why suddenly for a month there is such ick in the world.  We love all of these parts of him and so we warn him.  We turn his attention away before he has to see.  We assure him when it’s safe and when it’s not.  He knows we’d never lie.

So as he lays in bed these nights, he’s fine because of the adjustments we’ve learned to make.  He doesn’t have yucky images of skeletons and ghosts filling his thoughts or battling for a place in his mind.

Many people have suggested that we try to get him use to it.  Expose him to it so that he’s not so fearful.  But the truth of it is, I don’t want to.  I’m fine with him being afraid of skulls with spiders crawling out of them. I’m okay with him not wanting to see a mask with blood dripping out of the eyeballs.  I’m totally good with him never needing to dress up as frankenstein or a witch or anything creepy at all.

We’ve chosen to protect him rather than expose him.  Sure, there are times when it takes away from his fun.  Like at my hubby’s work party where they served jello brains and cookies with fangs.  He would have been fine with those except the deli meat was adorning a skull.  None of us caught it until we were right there.  And it did ruin his night.  But it’s a minor price to pay for a child who wants no part of evil, of death or of gore.  I rather prefer it this way.

And when moments like that happen he’s learned not to dwell there.  But to turn his gaze on things that are lovely.  On things that are of God.  It turns him to Jesus as he prays these images out of his mind.  It draws him to rely on His saviour and that’s exactly where I want him to be.

If you’re interested in Halloween related posts from years past and how we celebrate you can find them here  and here.