Parents’ Most Common Stress-Induced Recurring Nightmares About Spirit Week
1. Spirit Week continues into perpetuity. No theme will ever be repeated, and your children will need unique costumes every day for the rest of their lives.
2. Out of nowhere, you have another child you have no memory of giving birth to. He’s in third grade, and tomorrow is the first day of Spirit Week. He tells you he needs a toga to wear to school and that you have forgotten to vaccinate or feed him for the past eight years.
3. You are contacted by the middle school you attended. In 1998, you failed to return the Paso a Paso Spanish-language student learning CD-ROM companion set to the library and, therefore, never graduated eighth grade. If you do not redo the semester, it will invalidate all subsequent education you ever received. They are expecting you tomorrow at 8 a.m. It’s Spirit Week, and you have a major project due. You are forty years old, and tomorrow you will give an oral presentation in Spanish in your wackiest pajamas.
4. The decade-themed days now include the naughty aughties, and you find yourself back inside the eerily familiar fitting room of a Hollister, helping your daughter buy ultra-low-rise jeans and a going-out top. The song “Ocean Avenue” blares at 120 decibels. You reach the register to pay. There’s Matthew McConaughey. “Time is a flat circle,” he whispers as his face melts like a Dalí clock.
5. Your child’s school emails you at 10 p.m. to say that tomorrow’s Pirate Day is now Historically Accurate Irish Pirate Day. You have ten overnight hours to build a Grace O’Malley costume with square-toe brogues and worsted trews.
6. The themes have become increasingly abstract and esoteric, and Friday is now Dress Like a Viral Think Piece Day. You must quickly find a way to outfit your child as the kidney from “Bad Art Friend.”
7. The school has taken “Spirit Week” literally, and the children have opened a portal to hell via seance. You are now arguing the merits of Japanese automobiles with the ghost of your racist great-uncle who fought in World War II.
8. The school has taken “Spirit Week” literally, and the children have split a handle of Southern Comfort and somehow set fire to a mattress on the blacktop.
9. The spirits have formed an interdimensional panel of judges who have called you and your child forward. They are not pleased. They say your child’s hairdo for “Wacky Hair Day” does nothing to quell their ancient fury. It is simply not wacky enough. You fall to your knees and explain that mornings are really hectic at your house, and you ran out of hair spray, and if they could just give you more time…
“SILENCE, PROGENITOR,” the spirits bellow. “This hairdo has never questioned reality. This hairdo is able to navigate the blurry boundary between the actual and the imagined. This hair has never known the terrifying depths of madness. For it is not wacky. You have failed, and now we will reclaim the hair.”
“SPIRITS, NO! Take my hair instead!” you wail.
You jolt awake screaming as they surround the child with their ghostly razors.
10. All of your teeth are falling out. And it’s Spirit Week.