“When my youngest daughter arrived in foster care, she was five years old. We were getting close to our first Halloween together when I realized that every time I brought up the impending holiday, she and her nine-year-old sister would freeze in terror. When I eventually asked the girls if they had ever celebrated Halloween before moving in with us, I was shocked by what they said. They alternated in telling me stories of how they had previously received candy for Halloween, only to have it taken away and consumed in front of them by an adult who forced them to watch. The adult cruelly gave the girls a physical taste of what they were missing out on that Halloween night when they started to cry. The brown paper wrappers that had been containing the chocolate peanut butter cups were delivered to them, and they were made to consume them.
I realized that I had to be careful when spending our first Halloween with them in light of this tale. My suspicions were validated when I saw the girls, dressed in their gorgeous costumes, walking from door to home, stealthily counting the pieces of candy they were given. Upon arriving home, I gave the girls instructions to count the candy pieces they placed in the two plastic bags I had provided, along with a black marker. After they had completed counting, I assisted them in labeling their bags with the exact number of candies inside, and I assisted them in labeling their bags again after each candy bite. The girls begged to recount the pieces before bed for weeks after Halloween, even after we told them we would not consume their candy. One lollipops at a time, I would gain their trust by sitting with them and counting their candies night after night.
That was in the autumn of 2014. Although they have been adopted and are doing well in our house, their early memories of the Halloween they were made to consume empty candy wrappers reappear every October. During my post-dinner cleanup in our kitchen last night, I caught my youngest daughter rummaging around the pantry. She came up to me with a bag of candy she had picked up at a recent Halloween event as I was cleaning our countertops. It was obvious that she was giving the bag to me as a gift because she had wrapped it in paper. Her lovely handwriting from third grade was written with these words as soon as I took the piece of paper out of the bag:
“Mom, I want to give you my sweets so you can taste how much I love you.”
Give that some time to register. This child—who had once been made to eat empty candy wrappers—selected bits of her Halloween candy from her bag that she thought I would like and offered them to me.