Ghosts & Goats & Chocolate Milk

With my taste for the eerie and askew, I’m going to have to learn how to tone things down a mite for a tot’s taste.  Especially around Halloween.

Don’t misunderstand me – I draw a broad line between what thrills and what nauseates.  I don’t enjoy entertainment or costumes that are downright grotesque – monsters, spectres and suspense are much more alluring than seeing innards turned outward.  As the wife of a mortuary student, I have to maintain a healthy mindset about these things.

 

…which brings me to this Halloween’s thought of weight: What’s the best way to teach a child about confronting the potentially terrifying things in life?

When I was young, I adored tales involving anything out of the ordinary.  Whether from the pages of a book or the mouth of an uncle gifted in weaving stories, I hungered to be told of netherworlds populated by freaks, aliens, roadside apparitions, vampires, or secret societies.  By the invocation of mere words,  I could safely flesh out these characters in my mind to suit my comfort level.  I could handle these fears within the boundaries of my own capacity to cope because the terror they influenced was controlled by the limits of my imagination.    

 

 

Media images evoked a different reaction altogether.  Growing up in the age of Freddy Krueger and Michael Meyers, a trip down the video store’s horror aisle during their heyday could send me reeling for months.  I don’t know why I felt the curious compulsion to turn those tape cases around and gawk at the violent film scenes they featured, but I could have gone my entire life as a sufficiently well-rounded individual without those images trapped in my impressionable young brain.  I couldn’t understand – and I still don’t – how such gory scenes could be a source of pleasure to anyone.  Maybe I never reached the point where I was desensitized with enough regularity to enable me to stomach such “thrills”.  I’m thankful for that.  Life can provide enough graphic shocks without me having to seek them out for entertainment. 

In a society where children are increasingly expected to be tolerant of such entertainment, I resist accepting this norm.  I can’t do that in good conscience to our daughter.  Growing up around family who work in funeral homes and raise farm animals, she’ll see plenty of death and hopefully grow in the wisdom of how to accept it.  Being raised in the south, she’ll encounter plenty of eccentricity and legend.  I would rather these be her early acquaintances with such things rather than the sensory assault of onscreen violence.    

Besides, if we crave a little horror-induced excitement in our lactose-intolerant household one late October evening, there’s always chocolate milk and homemade ice cream night. 

 Oh.  The terror.