Creative Commons, photo by Jeff Christiansen

I rashly went out Halloween costume shopping a few days ago. I’m not sure what I was thinking. Well, I know I needed to pick up a costume for my daughter — Yes, a few days shy of Halloween. I’m totally on top of it as a mom. — but for some reason I thought maybe I could find something cute for myself. You know, something suitable for a 40-year-old mother of two married to a recovering sex addict. There must be tons of costumes to fit the bill, right? At the very least there had to be a nice Hillary Clinton, complete with businesslike pants suit.

Instead, I prowled through the store grimacing, rolling my eyes and blowing exasperated puffs of breath like some kind of crazy person. I wasn’t fussing, like most of the other customers, at the cost of the costumes (although, yeah, ouch! Shouldn’t those things be marked down with just moments left to go?) but at the sexuality of nearly all the costumes for women and girls, with the exception of those for infants and toddlers. (Boys and men, I noticed, had a variety of different costumes available. Most of these were neutral in terms of sexual content, while even those with a sexual element (I’m thinking the orange “Department of Erections” jumpsuit with penis prosthetic) comfortably covered their bodies.)

The womens’ and girls’ costumes were a veritable Fredrick’s of Halloween catalog. There were tens of different variations on the same micro-mini barely covering the buttocks matched with the same plunging, cleavage baring neckline; I could choose to be any number of porn star characters: the cop porn star, the nurse porn star, the super-heroine porn star, this hippie porn star, the movie star porn star… It was like looking at Carvel ice cream cakes back in the day; Fudgie the Whale would look like a whale, while Santa would come out sporting a red cap topped by a suspiciously untraditional two tassels. (Apparently, Tom Carvel didn’t get to the top of the ice cream game through extravagant purchases like molds that would be used only once a year.)

Needless to say, all those droopy eyes, pouting lips, fishnet clad legs and ample bosoms can be triggering for sex addicts and their partners alike. I can’t dress up like that: not after the way it’s been mixed up with feelings of trauma and degradation. My husband can’t look at anything like that: not after the way he’s used it as a drug, an escape into fantasy. I found myself wondering if there was a special Halloween store for Mormons and if they’d let me shop there. (You make the costumes yourselves, don’t you? Sigh!)

Hanging out with my kids all day, going to their Halloween parties at school, watching them dress up with their friends, I sometimes forget (even having had experience with it in recovery) what a sexual (sexually objectifying?) holiday Halloween can be for adults. I think that I, married to a sex addict, with all of my complicated issues around sexuality, can just pop into a store and pick up a fun little costume for myself, not have it trigger the shit out of me. And I’d be wrong. Halloween is just too scary. Next year, I’ll stick to eating cupcakes and shopping for modest pantsuits on the Internet.