monsters

I try to keep my children fed on a steady diet of fairy tales, usually at night just before bed. I’ve found that is the time of day most conducive to the imagination—the darkness, the shadowplay on the walls, the warm covers. That small period of time between awake and asleep is when all things seem most possible, both the good and the bad.

I tell their stories separately. My son usually goes first, as those fifteen minutes or so provide ample time for my daughter to discuss “girl things” with her mother. By the time I sit upon the edge of her bed and in the outer reaches of her Disney princess lamp, she’s more than ready to participate in a bit of reverie. But though these two sets of fairy tales involve two very different children, there is much in common as far as plot and characters go. These are, after all, fairy tales. They know what to expect.

Things like danger, for instance. Damsels in distress and princes in peril. There is lost treasure and hidden lands. Adventure and, at times, the very slightest hint of romance. And monsters. Usually monsters.

I’m sure there are a lot of parents out there who join me in these nightly visits, many of whom do so with this one goal in mind—to get their children to sleep. That is the goal. This isn’t always easily accomplished, but it usually works well enough. Better than threats, at least in my experience.

But I will say that getting my kids to sleep is only one of the purposes of the fairy tales, and not even the most important one. To me, the important one is that they become introduced to the power of story to shape their lives.

For thousands of years humanity sustained itself upon the very sorts of legends I read for and tell my children. They are our shared connection to the past, back to a time when they were shared to our forefathers around campfires and in great gathering halls. Stories not merely of King Arthur and Lady Guinevere, but also of Grendel and Achilles.

To speak of them and pass them on is to preserve the very best part of what it means to be human. They grant my children an education they sadly lack in their public schooling. I truly believe that. I believe that I not only entertain them, I teach them.

I teach them the values of things such as sacrifice and perseverance and honor. The healing that is found in forgiveness. The necessity of love. All virtues that make life not only more beautiful, but worth the living.

This past weekend brought alone with it the first of October and the promise of Halloween. That means both of my kids will require more scariness in their bedtime stories, an extra dose of monsters and witches and ghosts. I gladly acquiesce, even if that means the odds of a late-night bad dream increase.

The monsters have their own place in the stories that shape our lives, and that is a lesson I wish to teach them, too. Because truth be told, fairy tales aren’t really that far removed from reality. There really is treasure in this world; I’ve found some of my own. And there really are vast hidden lands, though they’re for the most part inside of us than out. My children will find their futures littered with danger and adventure and romance. I want them to know that ahead of time.

And they will confront their own monsters. I want them to know that ahead of time, too.

Not just that those monsters exist.

But that they can defeat them.

I was a pretty good kid, more or less. Aside from breaking my arm by falling out of a tree when I was eight and thus ruining our family vacation to Busch Gardens, I only once heard my parents utter anything resembling What are we going to do with that boy?

That one time wasn’t when I fell out of the tree, though. It was when I decided to finally do something about my monster.

My monster was twelve feet tall and covered with green slimy skin. Four sharp horns, three gray and one black, jutted out from its forehead (I can’t tell you how many times those horns nearly impaled me). But it was its breath that was the worst—fiery and pungent, as if it had neither eaten nor brushed its teeth in a very long time. That was where I came in. I just didn’t know whether it wanted to eat me or use me as a monster toothbrush.

It lived in the dark recesses beneath my bed, which made sleep impossible. At night I could hear it moving around down there, stalking me. All attempts at prayer seemed useless. So did my attempts to get my parents to look for it. Parents can never see anything.

So in a fit of sleepless desperation, I took matters into my own hands one night and tucked my cap gun under my pillow. Sometime around midnight—breakfast time for my monster—it began stirring. I counted to a hundred and prayed, then leaped down onto the floor and fired off six shots beneath the bed.
I didn’t know if I’d managed to wound it or, even better, kill it outright. But I did succeed in scaring my parents half to death.

They came running (staggering, really, since it was the middle of the night). After threats of everything from grounding to eternal damnation, they finally looked under the bed. Didn’t see anything, of course. But I thought I spotted monster blood in the carpet.

Whether I had winged it or killed it or simply scared it away, my monster left me alone after that. All the monsters did, really (there was one in my closet and one in the crawlspace of the house, too). I found out what those monsters were really—a clump of toys, clothes that I didn’t hang up, the rumblings of an old furnace. Knowledge goes a long way in battling monsters.

That small but important fact proved itself true over and over again as I grew. There were no monsters, just reasons.

Today, September 10, marks the ninth anniversary of the last day I believed that. Because the next day was September 11, 2001. The day I learned the truth.

There really were monsters in this world.

They didn’t have slimy skin or horns or fiery, pungent breath. But they wanted to kill me just as much.

Maybe more.

I sat on the edge of my bed that day for seven straight hours. Watched as the towers fell and the Pentagon burned. Watched as a plane when down in a Pennsylvania field. And I remember looking down at my hands sometime that afternoon and finding a picture of my first child’s sonogram in them. I’m still not sure how it got there, but I still know what I was thinking. I was thinking about the world my daughter was about to be born into, one that had just turned a darker shade of black.

That was one day I swore to myself I would never forget. Not just what happened, but what I felt while it was happening. And I haven’t. I remember it all.

It was a horrible day. And I guess like most horrible days, the temptation is to move on. To let the past be the past and look to the future.

I suppose that sort of thinking accounts for a lot of what’s going on nowadays. I won’t get into that. All you have to do is turn on the news. It’s everywhere.

But me, I still choose to remember. I’ll let the past be the past. I’ll look to the future. But I’ll still cast a wayward glance behind me while I’m walking on. I’ll still remember that day. Because that’s the day the monsters reached out and grabbed us all.

And that’s the day I vowed that my children wouldn’t just be raised to believe in them, but to fight them as well.

Of fairy tales and monsters

When the monsters reached out

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