Halloween

On Costume Boxes, Lessons in Chemistry, and Life in Your Thirties

Toward the beginning of October, when there was still time to find/order/borrow Halloween costumes, I brought up the idea of a family costume to my kids one morning on the way to school. I should clarify here that I mean the kids dressing along a theme, not me. I now also want to detour and tell you that last year, when I had a one-month-old, a four-year-old, and a six-year-old, I answered my four-year-old’s “but what are you dressing up as, mom?” question with: “a tired mom.” Lucky for me, that costume still fits this year.

Back to my family costume idea, which originated with our hand-me-down cow costume. It’s size 12M, and it’s a Holstein cow (or dairy cow for all you non-cattle people), not a Black Angus cow, which honestly disappoints me, but probably helps distinguish it as a cow better than an all-black Angus costume might. When my oldest, Royce, wore it, I put a tag in the ear of the costume with our livestock brand and the number “1.” (I planned to swap out the number for each subsequent kid who wore the costume, but in reality my middle child, Maggie, was an adorable toddling unicorn the year the cow costume would have fit because we had recently moved and I couldn’t find the cow costume.) This year, I was determined to not only have my one-year-old, Reid, wear the cow costume, but also hoped to convince my big kids to dress up as a cowboy and a cowgirl to match.

They reluctantly agreed (I mean, dressing up as cowkids isn’t really a costume for them), on the condition that I let them wear whatever costume they wanted to their school halloween parties. So, that afternoon, out came the costume box.

For the next week or so, at any given moment, I could find Maggie curled up on the couch with a book wearing the kitty costume she wore when she was 2. I’d walk by a window and see a firefighter and a unicorn kicking a soccer ball in the yard. I would walk out of the bathroom only to be handed a scribbled post-it “ticket” by “Officer Royce,” as he instructed me to call him.

I loved to play dress up as a kid. There are entire years of my childhood during which it would appear from pictures that I exclusively wore a prairie get-up, complete with a bonnet and lace-up boots. I loved the way clothes and hats (and, later, makeup) could make me look like—feel like—someone else for a while. What was it like to be Laura Ingalls Wilder? Anne of Green Gables? What did it feel like to drink a milkshake from a soda fountain in a poodle skirt or tend to wounded soldiers a ‘la Florence Nightengale? 

I recently finished Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus, about a female chemist in the 1960s. While I loved the story, and found myself identifying with the main character, Elizabeth Zott, in many ways, I finished the book feeling like a bit of a failure. See, there was a time in my life where I thought I would be a brilliant chemist, making a name for myself in a world that was still, for the most part, male dominated. 

So far removed from that time in my life, it feels a bit like the lab coat and safety goggles I used to wear—like the experiments I used to run and DHP-Synthesis reactions I used to know backward and forward—were all just part of a costume I pulled out of the bin and tried on for a while. 

While my joke about dressing up as a “tired mom” was mostly just that—a joke—I sometimes feel similarly about this phase in my life, like I’m just trying on the latest in a series of costumes, trying to figure out which one feels right. 

I once heard Jamie from The Popcast poke fun at women whose Instagram bios only list titles that describe their relationships with others, like “So-and-so’s wife” or “Somebody’s mom.” I laughed, and then cringed a little, because my own Instagram bio isn’t all that different from the one she described. 

The thing is, I am tremendously proud to be Royce, Maggie, and Reid’s mama, and still thrill a little at being Levi’s wife even after 10 years of marriage. I like describing myself as a “ranch wife” and “work-at-home mama.” Those are titles that tell you a lot about my life and how I spend my days. 

I just… well, I want to be more than just those titles. 

If you had asked that little girl in the prairie costume—or heck, that twenty-something lab tech for that matter—who she would be at thirty-three, I’m not sure what she would have said. But I think if you had pressed her, and really listened to her response, it would have been clear that she expected to, at the very least, be someone by then. I don’t mean someone important (noteworthy, maybe?), I mean someone, a fully formed person. 

Yet, here I am, closer to thirty-four than thirty-three, still digging through the proverbial costume box, trying to figure out who I am underneath the latest rendition of myself, wondering when I’ll become who I’m supposed to be and what the next phase of my life will look like. 

What I’m learning, though, is that “who I am” is so much more dynamic than I expected. I’m not a static individual, who will become “someone” and stay that way for the rest of my life. I am ever changing, in a near-constant state of flow. 

I might not ever be a groundbreaking chemist or don a lab coat again. My “tired mom” costume might be replaced with a “career mom” or “ranch mom” outfit. I may reinvent myself and my work a half-dozen times before I die. 

But as I watched my kids delight in trying on outfit after outfit from our costume bin, it occurred to me that this process of figuring myself out, of pondering who I am and who I will become, doesn’t need to make me feel like a failure. In fact, maybe, if I let it, it could even be a little bit fun.  

Hope your Halloween was just the right level of spooky, and that the post-holiday hangover was, at the very least, manageable. 

Cowgirl Maggie (5) & her mount, Sparkles; Reid the Holstein (1); Cowboy Royce (7)