This Is Us
Imagining My Family’s Way Through the Pandemic
Parenting through the reality of Santa and divorce and Covid-19
‘I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.’
― Albert Einstein
When I was a little girl, maybe four or five years old, my mother was a witch. Well… she wasn’t always a witch — she was only a witch when my friend from up the street, Leigh, came over to play. She was only a witch when we begged her to scare us. And if she agreed, we ran to hide in the same place every time — in her closet behind her satiny robes, inhaling the smell of Chanel No. 5.
When my mom was a witch, she extravagantly pretended she couldn’t find us, cackling like Margaret Hamilton in The Wizard of Oz, pretending to hunt for us all through the house. She stomped noisily at times so we could hear her, or sometimes she would be eerily silent so we could not. Leigh and I would shiver and giggle as we felt her approach. We hushed ourselves, confident we would outwit her.
