Bunny Blues

I miss the Easter Bunny.

To be perfectly precise, I miss being the Easter Bunny. And Santa Claus. And the Tooth Fairy. I miss the whole “Easter Theater” and “Christmas Theater” quality of it all, the behind-the-scenes planning, the skullduggery, the hiding places, the fear of being found out. But most of all I miss being the Easter Bunny.

Let’s face it, being the Tooth Fairy didn’t have a lot of emotional payback. Two minutes of “oh look what the Tooth Fairy left me” was kind of a paltry reward to balance out the fear of discovery as I tiptoed into the bedroom to make the tooth-for-money swap, the circles under my eyes the next morning from staying up late enough to make sure the kid was asleep, and the anxiety over worrying that I’d fall asleep and forget to play my part. (I did forget once, but covered the lapse by going back to my daughter’s bedroom to help search one more time and accidentally “finding” the dollar that had “fallen” between the bed and the wall. Good save, eh?)

Christmas with little kids around of course is the Sistine Chapel of maternal deception and orchestration, the prime example of why I’ve long said that one of the qualities of being a really good mother is the ability to lie like a rug. Approximately two months of planning and shopping and hiding and wrapping and decorating and, closer to the big day, ornament hanging and cookie baking and “Secret Santa” shopping for school buddies and last minute presents for teachers and calendar juggling for family get-togethers. Acres and acres of emotional payback—just feel the warmth of that crackling fire, watch the tinsel glitter and gleam when the tree and a few candles are the only things lit in the living room—in exchange for a time commitment something akin to planning the Normandy invasion.

But Easter, ah! Religious origins and overtones aside, a holiday devoted simply to the pursuit of chocolate bunnies and chocolate eggs and jelly beans and the riotous fun to be had when a half dozen people sit around the kitchen table vying for the most creative ways to dye and decorate a bunch of hard-boiled eggs. Pastel plaid has always been my favorite.

With my youngest now approaching sixteen, taller than me, and getting into the pole position for taking his driver’s license test in a couple of months, I haven’t had any true believers around the house for quite a while. Although for a few years after the youngest finally got clued in on the game, I still had even the college kids in their pajamas running around the yard looking for plastic eggs on Easter morning...and pealing with laughing while they did.

To my credit, my “caboose baby” actually made it to ten before I finally lowered the reality boom. It would have been tempting to see how long I could keep it up—his older siblings were all gamely in on the deal—but the day after Easter that fateful year was going to be his first day of baseball practice. I foresaw him showing up on the playing field happily sharing “oh, this is what the Easter Bunny left for me!” and then the older guys on the team would just eat him alive.

So, reluctantly, I took a deep breath that morning, steeled myself, and fessed up. I was the Easter Bunny. And the Tooth Fairy too. He seemed to take the news in stride and walked off. But he came back a few minutes later as I was fixing my hair in the bathroom, his eyes wary.

“You’d better not be Santa Claus too!” Ooooooohhhhhh, now the jig was really up.

For roughly the next six months, even more, I could see that his universe had shifted to absorb the magnitude of the truth and the scope of the life-long trickery. He’d hold up a favorite toy, game, book with a mixture of discovery and reproach. “So this came from you and not from Santa Claus?” Huh. Maturity’s a hard thing to watch evolve. Though he didn’t let his newfound enlightenment interfere with his glee the next Easter at egg decorating again and searching for his Easter basket before church and combing the yard with the older kids for his share of the treats hidden there.

Easter for the past couple of years has been a bit more subdued, the Easter Bunny noticeably absent. Last year I took the boys to Germany with my father over the Easter break. The year before that was the year of the divorce and new arrangements. This year I’ll be in Ireland with the youngest, traveling around for a week and visiting with my cousins. I’ll still leave the baskets behind, chock full of chocolate, but it’s just not the same. Children living away from home and over the age of being hoodwinked are one thing, but even the cats have taken their toll on the holiday in that time too.

The centerpiece of Easter decorating had long been my “Easter tree,” which sat in the living room window, hung with fragile eggs I’d blown and hand-painted back in the day when I baked a lot more cookies and read bed-time stories and still watched “Sesame Street” with the kids. I haven’t brought the Easter tree out of hiding since we got the first kitten two years ago—I’ve seen what that demented maniac does just with Christmas tinsel—and certainly not since the retriever has come late to the realization that the sill in the bay window is a fine place from which to stand and bark at the world when I’m not at home.

Life’s very good right now, even though none of the Easter toys have come out of the box yet this year. All the kids and I will get to happily reconnect at my niece’s wedding soon, and share in the optimism of new beginnings. I have great kids, great friends, a great job, and after a couple of near-death experiences, I’m still appreciatively walking around freely on my own steam and swinging a hand saw or a cordless drill on occasion. Nothing really to complain about when you look at it…

But…DAMN I still miss the Easter Bunny!