Whenever I asked about their childhoods, my siblings gave me a “you had to be there” look. But on Purim I could pretend I knew something about it
I have a deep love of (read: obsession with) Purim costumes. As a kid, I had a different costume for Purim night, Purim day, the school party, and any other opportunity I could claim I was getting in the Purim spirit. I would never be caught in the same costume as someone else. (I once found out a classmate planned to come to the Purim party as an Indian — my getup — and I regrouped overnight.) My favorite Hebrew month is Adar — and it’s not because I was born then.
My costumes were not bought. Instead, each year, I would rummage around in the unoccupied bedrooms upstairs in our house, telling my mother I’d put everything back (20 years later, I haven’t). Then I’d deliberate: Should I make an 80s costume out of my sister’s high school outfits? Or maybe I could be a little schoolboy, in my brother’s old sweaters and socks. A Math Teacher — with a broken calculator, an outdated pair of glasses, and a textbook that belonged to I-don’t-know-who.
One year I went as a bride, wearing my mom’s wedding gown (which thankfully she had no real desire to preserve because it tore halfway through the day). There was the time I was a little old lady; I bought the cane but everything else was homemade, including my short gray wig made of plastic pre-curled locks. And I can’t forget the year I made myself into a mishloach manos (I couldn’t sit for the entire carnival but it was worth it).
I’m the youngest of five, a bas zekunim, and as I’d search through boxes of accessories, dusty suitcases, and garbage bags filled with clothing, I touched something of a past I didn’t know. When you’re raised in a family where the childhood experiences happened so long ago, where everyone moves on to their own new homes and families before you’ve had a chance to grow up, you’re cheated out of the rich history your siblings are blessed with. I treasured those yearly forages into my siblings’ lives as kids and teens. I loved the old yearbooks, my siblings’ school projects from nursery school, my mom’s handwritten letters from her camp days.
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