Dear Mom,

First I would like to thank you for always dealing with my relentlessly active, sugar-filled, post trick-or-treating, body as a child. I didn’t show the correct appreciation then, so I would like to thank you now. Not only did you dress me in incredible homemade costumes, but you also kept me warm in the frigid cold we call a Dakota fall. You dressed up and walked around the town with me. You bought pumpkins to carve, candy to hand out and even helped me make caramel apples even though they were a disaster to eat.

I would also like to thank you for never putting an offensive costume on my body. I was a ladybug, an iPod, a cupcake, a hippie, the bride of Frankenstein, a fairy, a ninja turtle and many, many more. There weren’t any racially, religiously or sexually offensive costumes placed on my innocent body.

Thank you for having the common sense to know where the line is drawn. Thank you for not turning somebody’s lifestyle into an outfit for me to wear as I wander about, naively, asking for candy and hoping that nobody else was wearing the same costume as me. I can now proudly state that I rarely matched the other kids’ costumes because you didn’t conform to the norm.

There were always kids dressed in offensive costumes when I was younger and we rarely thought twice about it back then. The fact you were able to avoid these things shows a lot about your character. You could have stuck me a “homeless person” costume that year we were way behind, but you didn’t and instead came up with something witty that got all sorts of compliments at the annual Halloween party.

You never put a feather in my hair and war paint on my face. You never encouraged me to be a princess that year simply because I am a girl. You never smeared blackface on my body; there were never any fake weapons involved or racist hairdos. I was simply a child whose mother may not have known what she was subconsciously doing, but dressed me in the best outfits anyway.

Thank you for being so thoughtful,

Love Cierra