ummm, can i talk to you guys about this?

my daughter has this book memorized. it’s kinda freaking me out. she chose this book at the library almost 2 weeks ago. she disappeared into the stacks for a minute and then came running out, hair wild, yell-talking “WE HAVE TO GET THIS!” and shoved this in my face. how could i argue with that? she also demanded we get a book about day of the dead, halloween poems and beowulf.

yes, my daughter is reading 10th grade lit.

now, all these books have been extremely wonderful. she chose some more normal things like greek mythology, ali baba and the 40 thieves and something called the legend of ohio so i haven’t had to read only dark literature to her for the past two weeks but it brings me to something that has been haunting (literally but in that figurative way) our lives for the past 2.5 years.

my daughter is obsessed with dead people.

you may now understand why i try to push artistic outlets for her as much as i do. we’ve got to have some kind of direction for the macabre in this household or else she’s just going to turn into a goth and we all know that besides chris angel and dave navarro no goth person has ever had that much of a promising future. and i think those guys were kinda fringe anyway and yeah, those examples really just sum up my point.

an artist who is obsessed with dead people has a very promising future. all other interested parties just turn goth. so we’re pressing for artist here, people, or possibly mortician.

ghosts were her first repetitive subject for drawing. she broadened it to “dead guys” soon thereafter and i’ve been told numerous times over the years “ghosts and dead guys are my friends.”  does this also explain a little about the tent bed, too?

she used to tell me she saw them all the time. she would climb up on our toilet and look out the bathroom window in our old house, which was in a very old part of town, and say “yep, he’s there again today.”  i finally asked her about it after it had gone on for over a week and what she described to me was a man who had been hanged from a tree. she was only 2.5 years old and didn’t even know that was what she was describing so sometimes I tend to believe her on this. Oh, there was the time that it had been raining for almost a week straight and she then asked me “mom, why is his body all puffed up now?”  apparently ghost bodies react to current weather conditions.

what i’m getting at is that we’ve been walking this road to the dark arts for a few years now. (yes, that is a harry potter reference because our horizons have broadened to anything involving magic, wizardry, witches, mystical beings, fairies or the like. and hobbits. lots of hobbits.) i wish i could say i’m flabbergasted by it but i’m not because i was the same way when i was younger.

i once formed a club in my elementary school devoted to turning all the 3rd grade girls into witches. i would make my friends lie down on the ground while i conducted rituals to lift their souls out of their bodies and then we would all sit around and oooh and ahhh at their souls floating 6 feet above their bodies. the principal got word of our play and quickly put an end to my heyday as head of the waverly coven. when i was in the 9th grade the senior girls told me i dress like a witch. they thought they were dissing me but in my head i was all “score! finally…” {ps. this was due to a couple of times wearing a grey a-line, knee-length skirt with my combat boots. it was a boss match up but definitely not that witch-like. they were just THAT dumb.}

so i guess we’re just in this space where my daughter is really invested in something that might be termed “socially abnormal” but i’m going with the flow because i’ve been there. if she wants to check out books on mummies, ghosts, witches and goblins then i’m all for it because she’s really invested in learning about this subject matter. who am i to squash this? learning about mummies has broadened her horizons to egyptian culture. my 4-year-old knows how to pronounce paankehnamen. do you?  i’m sure someday she’s going to take it a little too far and start a small scale cult or something but at least i’ll have the previous life experience to understand and be cool about it instead of feeling i need to step in and direct her liferiver’s course.

and, as previously stated, i’m willing to do whatever it takes to keep her from going goth. since subversion is a main principle of that i’m thinking we’ll just keep this freak flag waving out there in the open.

solid plan. yep.