Your Monthly Momecdote, Issue 18: October, 2025

This blog post was originally published in my October monthly newsletter. Subscribe to receive next month's essay along with book and music recommendations.

Halloween is one of those expectation/reality things, a holiday I've always loved that became an entirely new, better holiday as a result of parenthood. Second only to Christmas, I looked forward to The New Halloween with what I can only call relish, but the reality is that I've gotten unreasonably depressed every year since finally having a baby to decorate for and dress up. I guess because Halloween as I remember it doesn't seem to exist? For reasons I'm not even sure how to explain. The way I remember it—bearing in mind that I grew up in the suburbs of San Francisco, so maybe it still is this way there, I don't know—is that my siblings and I would go around our own neighborhood trick-or-treating, literally to the houses on our street. When I lived in Chicago, I used to stock the apartment with candy because the family who lived a few doors down in our building would come by trick-or-treating. When we later moved to LA, I was ready to do the same.

Over the course of my son's life, we've lived in three different neighborhoods in LA, and though I come prepared every year with a bowl of candy just in case, not a single trick-or-treater has ever come to my door. And there have always been kids who live around us! I've never understood what the problem is, and it still breaks me a bit every year, even though you'd think I'd just get used to it. Now that my kid is in the public school system, I'm told that the information I've been missing all this time is that the kids all go to one specific place now, or they trick-or-treat in their school parking lots... And pardon my rage, but what the fuck? I know there are concerns about pedestrian safety, but okay, then hire a crossing guard, close the goddamn streets, who cares! Losing Halloween feels like losing the most basic remaining tenet of community. If I don't have a child at my door asking me for free candy, then The Neighborhood, proverbially speaking, feels officially dead, you know what I mean?

That's the part that hurts me, cuts me somewhere low. I've already talked before about how we don't have a "male loneliness epidemic," we have a loneliness epidemic—under capitalism, and certainly under conditions that put weird white guy cronyism above public services—and this particular loss of community, even such a silly, tiny instance of it, fills me with melancholy every year. I will provide the caveat that yes, I live in a very urban area, so maybe the kids are still going directly next door in other places, but I still can't help feeling something's been lost on a larger scale.

One of my parent friends is from Spain, and something she remarked on recently is that in the United States, it isn't appropriate to address someone else's child. She specifically meant that it's not okay to try to discipline someone else's child—if another kid pushes my kid on the playground, for example, I am only "allowed," socially, to address my own child, not the other one who did the pushing—but I also agreed with her on her instinct that American parents often don't want you to interfere in a positive way, either. If a child is hurt or crying and you try to comfort them, that may not be well met by the parents. There is a certain gingerness to the way we have to coexist with kids in public spaces, even if we approach the situation with the best of intentions. I often find myself keeping one eye on the child whose parent or nanny is out of sight or distracted—but being a mother on the playground has implicitly taught me that unless the situation gets really dire, there's no way I can actually intervene.

I've been thinking a lot about my friend's observation. I think my mom also felt a similar way, being Filipino, that there was a strange invisible barrier she couldn't cross, although she usually meant it in terms of addressing someone else's misbehaving kid. I can't speak for her, but my interpretation was always that she felt othered by the situation—too visibly an immigrant in our predominantly white community, and therefore someone who didn't belong. Now, I think it's something even bigger than that. I really think the loss of community that I sense in something as silly as Halloween trick-or-treating is the same problem as the unspoken rule where I can't engage with another person's child—it's because I'm a stranger, not a neighbor. I don't belong to them, they don't belong to me. So if I were to do something like scold a kid who's playing too rough or acting too dangerously, the interpretation would only be an attack—not an attempt to uphold a duty of care to the community at large.

When I took my public policy courses in college for my major, we spent a long time on fiduciary responsibility, which in the context of public policy is a matter of ethics. Someone with a fiduciary duty toward another person is held to acting in their best interest, with the highest possible degree of care. A politician or government worker has a fiduciary duty to their constituents. Believe it or not, the point of public service is to act as if your citizens' well-being is as important as your own.

Being a mother has made me see myself with a sort of fiduciary responsibility toward all the kids who happen to be at the playground with my own at any given time. I'm not necessarily supposed to be intervening or teaching them anything, but I still feel it's my job as a person who is present to make sure the playground as a whole is as harmonious as it can be, as safe as it can be, as fun as it can be. And the funny thing is that I also think the kids feel this way toward each other, to some extent, even if the parents don't. My son will awkwardly shout HEY ARE YOU OKAY??? to a kid who just tripped up the ladder or stumbled on the rope bridge, and in those moments, I feel not just a tenderness toward him, but a desperation to prolong it beyond the halcyon haze of childhood.

I want to live in a world where everyone, not just me, cares about what kind of person my son is becoming. I want to live in a world where the neighborhood kids know they can come to my house for candy because in some broader way, they know it's safe here, they know they will be welcomed. My education is in urban planning, so I can say with requisite authority that meaningful safety does not come from locks and alarms—it's from eyes on the street. The front porch grannies, the dog owners on their daily walks, the mothers with strollers, the people who occupy the same spaces, this is the safety that comes from community. The persisting myth of the stranger has robbed something from us, and continues to do so, more so with each myopic policy decision. With each bizarre narrative about immigrants who destroyed your community or stole your job when there's no doubt the real culprit was a billionaire. Or the spooky story of the looming trans bogeymen when it's your lawmakers and their cowardice, their greed, who routinely compromise your quality of life.

If you're here in my newsletter, you probably don't need me to say any of this. You probably already know. But since you're here, I just want to tell you: even though I know nobody is coming, I will stock my house with the good sour gummies for the big kids, Annie's bunny cookies for the little ones, just come on over. I will be dressed, per my son's request, in a green dragon onesie, and I swear to you, I care.