I have already told you all how I tortured myself by watching scary movies as a kid (Friday the Thirteenth).  I watched almost every scary movie they made.  I did it by myself, in the dark, and usually while babysitting.  As a result, I was SO FREAKING SCARED of everything, all the time.  Scared to be home alone, scared to open the shower, scared to close the medicine cabinet, scared to go camping, scared to go to sleep, scared to swim, scared to drive at night, scared to make out in a parked car (just kidding… I still did that).

But over the years I have gotten smarter and I stopped watching the scary movies.  I saw The Blair Witch Project and The Sixth Sense (those were really the last horror movies I intentionally sat down to watch all the way through), but they were from last century.  I won’t even look at the previews for Paranormal Activity, or The Ring, or Mama, or the one where there is a really creepy old lady in Harry Potter’s window.  I just won’t watch them anymore.  And – funny thing – I’m not as scared of everything as I once was.

Except that I am.

I don’t know who I’m trying to fool.  I am no longer a teenager driving around the woods in the back of a pickup truck, looking for the Jersey Devil.  I am no longer the girl kissing a boy in a Nissan Pulsar in an empty church parking lot.  I am no longer the babysitter who answers the phone and fears that the call is coming from inside the house.  I am no longer any of these people.  I have evolved and changed.  I am different.  Now, I am a grownup.  Now, I am a wife.  Now, I am a mother, five times over.

And parenthood is by far the scariest thing ever.

“It’s not like my mother is a maniac or a raving thing. She just goes a little mad sometimes. We all go a little mad sometimes.” – Norman Bates, Psycho (1960).

Happy Halloween!

Wish me luck for tomorrow…