It’s official: I’m on a break from my legal career. If I didn’t know it before, I know it now: I bought a hot glue gun yesterday. I resisted buying one for years because I knew owning one was a sure sign I really was on a break from my career. Darn gun did not even work. To make it worse, the attorney who drafted the package warnings failed to mention you can burn your pinkie off simply by flipping the gun on then turning your back to make school lunches with whatever inedible scraps are in the fridge (do potato chips smeared with peanut butter count as a ‘protein’?), and brushing up against the gun ever so casually. That attorney should be shot at dawn or disbarred.
Yesterday, my son Zack announced with fanfare, after weeks of excruciating indecision, that he would be a candy jar for Halloween, with tons of candy glued all over him. I spend hours (together with my neighbor, an immigration lawyer) with her glue gun gluing vinyl to wooden staves to make the jar. Zack tapes tons of candy all over the contraption while I protest that it’s too heavy for trick or treating and the candy load will rip the vinyl. He gives away all the taped-on candy at a Halloween carnival in an admirable burst of generosity that warms my heart. Then, he announces the costume was indeed too heavy, he can’t run from door to door at Halloween, and now he wants to be a soldier with a machine gun.
Ever the politically correct nonviolent parent, I say, ‘Nope, no guns’…again. He begs for a new costume that’s lighter. At dinner, trying for a level tone of voice, I say the stores are all picked through now, and he is going to be a jar whether he likes it or not (while wondering whether there is real fish or only a fishlike substance in fish sticks, a critical parenting question). Unbelievably, he concedes. I help tape another 10 pounds of candy onto his costume.
I wonder whether I’m being too indulgent. I’m sure lots of mothers on career breaks manage to make it to the teen years without a darn glue gun. I eat lots of Snickers to console myself. I had forgotten how good Snickers are.
Then I remember the horse’s costume is not finished and rouse myself off the couch to get the glue gun. Yes, a horse’s costume. For Leo, a pony. At my daughter Elizabeth’s stable, there is a Halloween competition: you dress up your pony and yourself in matching costumes and the horses go bobbing for apples. Truly, they bob. The horses. Well, also the apples. I have pictures as proof. Elizabeth won the prize last year, so the bar is now set very high. They are going to be zebras, which require lots of glue-gun shenanigans and zebra fabric.
Some people have an arts and crafts gene. They ‘whip up’ cute quilts for baby showers in about an hour. I hate these people. I didn’t get that gene or maybe mine was a mutant gene.
I long for Hanukkah, which doesn’t require costumes, glue guns and a special gene. I long for a Restraining Order or a Motion to Dismiss -– any rotten kind of motion – to launch me back into court and far from glue guns. I remind myself that we haven’t yet carved the pumpkins.
That’s it for this year. Tune in for next year’s Halloween. If I make it that far. I’m too busy eating candy.
