Between tennis, and school, and editing a manuscript, and trying to find out where my daughter had vanished to, I hadn't even thought about Halloween, at least, not until I was hanging out with a couple of Millie's friends after school and one of them looked at me nervously and asked if it would be weird if we did KPop Demon Hunters as a group costume.
Which I should have seen coming; much as a tween like Millie isn't going to get that excited about a cartoon, or at least isn't going to show it, a thing everyone was watching that was all about Korean girls was a big deal, especially since, between Ray and myself, we kind of get frustrated in terms of finding stuff a Korean-American girl her age would like that doesn't position girls like her as a sidekick. Her tastes don't really match up with ours, and both Ray and I will look at a lot of the Korean import stuff on Netflix and think it's too violent. It's kind of a reminder that, while I may be closing in on 20 years as a woman, I did it without ever having been a girl, and a lot of this is new to me.
Also? It's kind of cool that her friends asked if this would be weird, given that Millie's the only ethnically Korean or Asian one among them. I'm not sure that 13-year-old Arthur would have really given a lot of thought to appropriating something like that. Blackface probably would have been right out, but a cool costume? Maybe not.
We could have gotten pre-made costumes easily - I think half the girls in Millie's class are dressing as KPop Demon Hunters this year - but I made the suggestion that it would be more fun to make our own. I've kind of gotten used to doing this; as Penny, I'm about six feet tall, which means I'm kind of limited in terms of options when I just go shopping for regular clothes, but for Halloween, anything short and sexy is going to show off my entire ass, which was kind of fun as a younger woman but kind of inappropriate when chaperoning a party for kids or answering the door for trick-or-treaters. So I've gotten pretty good at making my own costumes, although I'm not any kind of expert cosplayer who goes to comic book conventions to show them off (and I've attended conventions to promote my book, so I know of what I speak). There's a whole blog post about guys who become women and have to learn how to alter clothing or otherwise sew and then feeling strange because it's one of those gendered activities that might be a blind spot for a lot of women, too.
The point is, though I have made an effort to train myself to be good at it and find it a lot of fun, I vastly overestimated how much a couple of twelve-year-old girls would maintain interest in this and wound up doing most of it myself. Which was fine; it gives me something to do after school and Millie's friends think I am/she is cool for doing all this, so I'm doing what I can to maintain her friendships while not actually hanging out with a bunch of kids. Millie's friends are, by and large, pretty cool kids, but it gets very weird when they start talking about boys in their/our class. I'll come home and think, do all of these costumes need to include crop-tops? Am I worried about this as a mom because it'll be chilly in the evenings all week or because I know boys are going to be looking at our waists?
I did a pretty darn good job, though - I think we definitely will look better than the folks who went to Spirit Halloween, and kind of wonder what Millie will think when/if she sees the photos Ray took last night to post on social media. That was maybe the most surreal thing, striking superhero poses with the girls and finding myself giggling along with them. It's not entirely a tween thing - adults who get dressed up for Halloween do the same thing - but I was definitely vibing with them in that moment in a way I'm kind of wary of most of the time, knowing how the Inn can mess with your head.
The most annoying thing: Harmon being a jerk about me borrowing some of my own boots for the costume, or when I ordered a couple things online. She acts like she's teasing me, but even where Halloween costumes are concerned, I think it's really important to not rule play mother and daughter in the apartment unless there are guests.
Anyway, I hope Millie sees the pictures her father is posting and likes them, and maybe even wants to try the costume on once we're back to normal
- Arthur/Penny/Millie
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