Hop Dad

My Child Scares Me

October 25, 2011 at 3:45 pm Leave a comment

With Halloween fast approaching it’s appropriate that I talk about how my two-year-old daughter sometimes scares the crap out of me.

I don’t mean scaring me by jumping off the back of the couch or falling into a bath tub filled with sanitizer. I mean by mimicking something you’d see in a horror movie. The kind of behavior that just for a split second tingles your spine, then makes you feel completely ridiculous. If you combine her antics with our cats and their penchant for jumping on the piano in the middle of the night sometimes I feel like I live in a haunted house.

Creepy Crying

Most often these moments are just the result of circumstances. A common event, for example, is hearing my daughter wake up in the middle of the night because she’s had a bad dream. If you’re asleep, too, that can be startling enough. But sometimes it happens when I’m at home at night and my wife is still at work. I hear Little Boo’s cry winding up to full blown wailing and rush to her room.

In her bedroom is a night light that casts the room in a rather creepy green glow. It can make the place look as though you’re seeing it through a night vision camera. Having to step into that dimly lit, greenish room and go find a crying baby can sometimes freak me out. One night as I walked toward her I could see that she was standing up in her bed facing the wall. Then, when I gently said her name, she stopped crying and slowly turned to me. Her eyes were closed so she was probably still asleep. Then she reached out her arms and started walking toward me. AAA! I didn’t know if she wanted a hug or she was going to bite my face off.

There have also been those times when she has awakened in the night, crawled out of bed, and walked in to our bedroom to spend the rest of the night with us. I’m usually wakened by a quiet thump but then hear the squeaks and creaks of the hardwood floor as something comes ever closer. I can’t see her if I’m laying in bed but what I can see is our bedroom door appearing to open on its own.

These spooky events just arise from common situations and they are going to continue for a long time. Sometimes, though, my daughter does something spooky and it’s completely all her own doing.

Ghost Child

One evening while my wife was away at work I was washing the dishes and Little Boo was comfortably resting on the couch, wrapped up in a little white blanket. It was late and I hadn’t heard a peep from her in a while so I assumed she had fallen asleep to one of her Barney videos. I’m not sure why I thought that because the only way I could fall asleep to a Barney video is if I hit myself in the head with a mallet.

When I am washing dishes I can see the kitchen doorway reflected in the window on front of me. In that doorway suddenly I saw a shape slowly, silently moving into the kitchen. I froze for a second, then turned tentatively to see what I hoped was my daughter with her blanket over her head, only her bare feet showing. She was steadily walking into the room, not making a sound. I didn’t think it was possible for her to see through the blanket so I thought she was rather lucky to make it into the kitchen without running into something. But then as I was about to warn her of the cabinet directly in front of her she eerily turned right past it and began creeping directly toward me.

“What the…?” I stammered. As soon as I spoke, she stopped and stood perfectly still.

Having never seen anything like this from her before my overactive imagination went nuts. I was envisioning all of those horror movies with demonic little children that have stringy hair or glowing eyes and speak Latin in a ghoulish voice. Of course, none of that is real, right? Right.

Unsteadily, I said, “Hey, you – what are you doing?” So brave, I am.

Still no response from the blanket.

So, here I was standing in the kitchen late at night, in the dim glow of a single bulb, facing what should be just my daughter with a blanket over her head and not something much worse. This was by far my wierdest parenting moment yet. She wasn’t moving, talking, or responding in any way to me. Meanwhile in the background a maniacal, purple dinosaur was laughing and singing something about us being friends. It was all too creepy and I had to end it as soon as possible. I gingerly took a hold of the blanket between my fingers and pulled it off to reveal… a two-year-old girl with messy hair and the biggest, most mischieveous grin on her face. She squealed “PEEK BOO!” and ran out of the kitchen.

I dropped the blanket, turned back to my chores, and spent the rest of my dish washing contemplating the fact that I had just been completely owned by a two-year-old prankster.

Children are creepy. Happy Halloween, Hop Dads!

Entry filed under: Being Dad. Tags: Being Dad, Fatherhood, Kids, Parenting.