Fighting Monsters with Glow Sticks

And other acts of courage.

Like a big, dumb idiot, I bought my three year old some glow sticks. It was to coerce her into the bath. I saw some mom on Instagram using them to get her little ones excited about bath time, and I thought that would be just the thing! for my daughter, who, at this time, suddenly and completely out of nowhere, with no inkling of logic attached to it, began refusing to take a bath.

Photo by Nick on Unsplash

Parents of toddlers will relate to this specific breed of agony when I say: On Sunday, she was bath-time raging as hard as a Dead Head at a Jerry Garcia tribute concert. Practically so obsessed with splashing and playing and flinging bubbles that she’d marry bath time if she could. On Monday I went to run the bath, per usual, and she flipped. the. f*ck. out. Screaming. Crying. Flailing. Running away. I didn’t understand. I tried asking questions (dumb). I tried reasoning with her (hopeless). Nothing worked. We skipped the bath that night. Two weeks went by, and the only way I could convince her to bathe was by showering with me, which required its own rearranging of routines and expectations.

Then one day a Momfluencer intervened and showed me the magic of glow sticks! Perfect, I thought, and purchased a pack of 200 from Amazon, arriving between 4–8 a.m. if I purchased in the next 2 hours and 46 minutes. Just in time for the next day’s bath.

It worked! She was intrigued, she was back in the bath, she was clean and having fun again. Then she began bringing them to bed with her.

The glow sticks became a thing. For months now, if my husband or I forget them (usually me), she’ll cry out, sobbing, when she realizes they are not there. She falls asleep clutching them, and from the monitor we can see her listless body, arms drooping into wads of sheets and stuffed animals, with an iron grip around three illuminating rods, like the last man standing at a rave.

Jesus, I think to myself, what if she starts chewing on them, they bust in her mouth, and she is poisoned by whatever toxic goo is inside them? What if there is some strange radiation emitted from their neon glow, but it’s so minor it would only cause damage if, say, someone slept with them every night for a year. What have I done?

It was around this time that my daughter began having nightmares for the first time. Developmentally, her imagination was finally at a level which she could conjure the scary images she saw in books or from stories told by friends on the playground.

Just the other day she said, “I can finally tell you about my bad dream I had last night,” as if it had taken her a day to find the strength.

“Ok,” I said, and sat next to her on the bed. “What happened?”

“Two monsters ate Snoopy.”

“Oh dear. That does sound pretty scary,” I said.

“Yeah, it was a big monster and a baby monster, and they were bad guys. Charlie Brown tried to save Snoopy, but the monsters ate him.”

This is just one example (there is a recurring lion who roars at her). Some nights my husband and I are jolted out of a deep sleep to the sound of her wailing from her bedroom or, worse, sobbing three inches from my head in total darkness.

She says she uses her glow sticks to fight the monsters. Now I can never take them away.

I think often about how children are constantly experiencing something for the first time. All day, they are confronted with words they don’t understand and put in scenarios which they are unsure how to handle. To be a child takes a great deal of bravery.

As adults, we are less accustomed to such frequent assaults. We hold the control, after all, (dumb) and we choose to keep things as routine as possible to avoid any unwanted surprises (hopeless). Unless a job demands it, adults can sometimes be adjacent to bravery, employing courage only when necessary. Children swim in it each time they leave the house.

Then something happens. A loved one dies or there is an illness or we lose our job (sometimes all at once?). We are forced to give up our comforts. We are scared because we’re the ones in charge. We have to shove our hand into the darkness and reach for, grab at, and blindly snatch bravery from some dormant abyss within ourselves.

I encourage my daughter to be brave. I always assure her that her dad and I are here to help. But I struggle with the narrative that she needs to be “tough.” Though I tell her this when I comb her hair and she whines, incessantly, at every minor tug.

“There are times to be soft and times to be tough,” I tell her. “This is a time to be tough.”

“I cannnnnnn’t,” she whimpers. “It’s too hard.”

“You can do hard things,” I tell her, ripping through a knotted tangle as gingerly as possible.

Yes. You can do hard things. You can be tough and also soft. You can be brave.

Between my family there is a shared digital album full of photos and videos of my mother. Every now and again, when the grief bubbles up and pulls me under, I look through it and cry.

Photos and videos of my mother smiling, dancing, laughing. There she is. She is alive in these photos. I can hear her. For a brief moment, I forget she is dead. I want to live, suspended, in that moment. But as I scroll through the album, and the realization that she is no longer alive becomes me, I do not feel brave. I am not tough. I feel scared. I am lost. Sometimes I feel like life is pointless without her. What does anything matter if she is not here to witness it?

I allow the grief, the sensation of being eviscerated, to envelop me. I sit in stillness with it. Then I let it pass. I let the sadness burn off like Los Angeles morning fog. I soften. I acknowledge that this year has been difficult: New baby, dead mother, lost job. I feel panicked about how things are going to work out. We are working tirelessly, we’re trying, we’re trying so hard, we’re hustling, we’re exhausted. It’s overwhelming. But soon I’ll go to bed. Tomorrow will be better, I tell myself.

I look at the monitor to check in on my children. My son is blissfully dozing in his sleep sack, his head pressed to the top of his crib, his fat fists curled next to his cherubic mouth. With the press of a button, I flip to the view of my daughter’s room. Somewhere within the heap of sheets and 10,000 stuffed animals, she is there, still clutching her glow sticks. She is peaceful and still. I shove my hand into the darkness and rummage around. She reminds me: We can be brave.