Parenting (A Witchling) is Not for the Faint of Heart

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If you’ve known me long enough you’ve heard me say something along the lines of the following—I like my horror in fiction, not real life—I don’t have main character energy. I don’t do roller coasters; I don’t do haunted houses. I like my chills and thrills contained, safely meted out and of my choosing. Despite my earliest introductions to the genre—watching The Birds (1963) alongside my grandmother and Candyman (1992) with my older cousins—I can’t even watch horror films as an adult without peeking through barely parted fingers. But my oldest child didn’t get the memo about me. 

Caring for young children is not for the faint of heart in any sense of the phrase. By the time I became a parent, Paranormal Activity 2 (2010), Insidious (2010), and the like had already weaponized baby-monitors into tools of the supernatural. Without even seeing those films in their entirety I knew I did not want a video monitor. I never wanted to see anything on the small grainy screen that I couldn’t make sense of. No video means no jump scares. No niggling sense of the uncanny valley that has you racing across the hall to make sure your baby is still your baby, confirming that those night-shine eyes you thought you saw were, in fact, a trick of technology. The audio-only monitors weren’t much better. I came to loathe that moment of anticipation, when the monitor would crackle to life and nothing but silence followed. What if the sound I heard next wasn’t an infant gurgling or fussing? What if I heard something else entirely? It was a relief when we could get rid of monitors completely. I thought we had turned a corner. I thought wrong.

Come with me, dear reader, on a journey.

Imagine this: Your poorly sleeping infant is now a poorly sleeping tot, straddling the threshold between toddler and small-kid. And more often than not, she still cries for a parent in the night. Your typical routine is this: Hear a sound. Bolt upright. Listen into the darkness. If she turns over, and quiets, you immediately fall back into sleeps’ waiting embrace. If she doesn’t, if she cries again, you stumble out of bed, down the hall, to her room, to provide quick comfort and hopefully, return to your own bed sooner than later. But this time is a little different. 

In the threshold of your child’s room you pause, peering into the gray light. She’s not in bed. You take two steps into the room, to see her bed clearer and decipher the many lumps (stuffies) and bumps (laundry) that are scattered throughout the room. Your gaze travels from the smooth sheets on the bed towards a tangled blanket and on towards the floor. And there she is, belly down on the carpet. She’d either rolled out of her low bed, or fallen asleep halfway between bed and the door. 

She snuffles sleepily. You’ve learned from past mistakes, and now you know better than to try to move her. The chances of returning her to bed without her waking are too big a risk with too small a chance of success. She snores again. You turn to go.

All fairly ordinary, right? Well, that’s where things changed. In my story, I heard another half sound and turned back towards the doorway, only to find my child was no longer where I saw her last. No, dear reader, my half-sleep toddler had Samara-lurched forward, seemingly disobeying all established laws of physics and space to my sleep-addled brain. On hands and swaying knees, she stumbled towards me again, head lolling between her shoulder blades, a motion I caught this time and I confess, I screamed before I made sense of the situation—she was my girl still, just half awake. Her limbs clumsy and uncoordinated with sleep. 

I’d love to say that was my first midnight foray with her. But it wasn’t my first or my last time drawn from sleep into a strange situation.

Just the year before, I woke to the sound of her crying only to find she hadn’t woken up at all. After leaving her room I made my way to the bathroom and sat on the toilet, eyes shut, trying not to be any more awake than I had to be. I opened my eyes to find a cat sitting in the hallway between the bathroom and her room. Reader, I do not have a cat. I have never had a cat because I am desperately allergic to them. The cat and I, we blinked at each other, long enough for me to be sure I was seeing what I was seeing. Then I screamed and it bolted.

My spouse and I searched the house asking increasingly crazy questions—how long has that cat lived here with us? Days? Months? Years? Was it real at all? The following morning we found a window in the living room wide open. Perhaps the guests we’d had over the day before opened it and a neighborhood stray decided to come say hello at midnight.

Perhaps.

Much later, around age four, many weeks after watching YouTube videos of strange birds, this same child called me into her room at the witching hour (remember when I said she was a poor sleeper?). I entered.  She sat up, looked me in the face, tilted her head back as far as it would go and unleashed the most accurate shoebill stork impersonation I have ever heard before or since. Then she smiled at me and fell back asleep.

Are you familiar with the shoebill stork? As if it were not quite bad enough that these birds look like they could be emissaries of the devil himself, their call is otherworldly. Not only did she have zero recollection of that incident, she hasn’t been able to make that bird call since. (And she makes many, many bird calls.)

I didn’t know I was raising a spooky girl. But clearly, there were signs. Sometimes the crows tell her where to find shed deer antlers, and there was definitely a summer where she carried around vole bones in a small pouch, “just in case.” It’s far too easy to imagine her as an Ofelia, following a strange insect to an ancient stone labyrinth, a portal to a mythical world. I’m not saying I’m raising a little witchling, but I’m not not saying that either.

My big kid told me once that her belly had too many eyes, to which I replied, “I’m sorry, can you tell me more about that?” Turns out she was referring to a cupcake she had just eaten—heavily decorated with green icing and eyeball sprinkles (Halloween themed treats year-round in this house), and I got an entire short story out of that odd observation.

Parenting is not for the faint of heart or the closed-minded. It requires you to both embrace a deep well of imagination and curiosity, to wonder right alongside your child and still be able to step first into the poorly lit basement. Being a parent made me step into the role of protagonist; nothing but a child’s cries would get me to investigate strange noises in the middle of the night. It’s a good thing I know the difference at this point between the sound of my children crying, and the imposters that yowl outside the window on the darkest of summer nights.

K.S.Walker writes speculative fiction. They are a Viable Paradise alum. You can often find them spending time outside with their family or starting a craft project but probably not finishing it. If you enjoyed this essay you might enjoy their fiction in Apex, The Deadlands, Uncanny, and FIYAH in particular. They are online at www.kswalker.net and Instagram @kswalkerwrites.