Creating Family Closeness, One Horror Movie at a Time...

Despite the unrelenting hard work of parenting and the backtalk and emails to teachers, the toughest moments sometimes come with the realization that they only need you, for now.

That realization may come with the announcement that the timid 9-year-old is walking herself to school, thank you, or the mommy-adoring son has been playing various ball games at the park for 6 hours and still doesn’t want to come home. Not even for dinner.

The best solution for this is a horror movie.

Now, I’m not such a genius that I came to this through pure logic. No, I stumbled upon it while suffering through Alvin and the Chipmunks in order to be near my kids. (You can tell that I love the kids. Horrid movie.)

In looking for a movie that both kids and adults would enjoy, I looked back in time to Alfred Hitchcock and rented “The Birds.” The brave 10-year-old athlete sat close through the movie, asking a lot of questions about whether the birds menacing the town were real. Daughter crouched behind me, peering over my shoulder once in a while.

But when it was all over, we had a good laugh. We joked about how fake the birds looked when they attacked the town’s schoolchildren. And, seriously, what a lame ending. The birds just flew away? That’s it? No reason? No hero?

Last October, with the kids a year older and the summer swimming season behind us, we rented “Jaws.” (Actually, I did. My husband thought it was a terrible idea.)

I have to explain that when I saw “Jaws” the first time I was a teenager living in Minnesota who would not see the ocean for another two years. A menacing shark was about as real to me as a Martian invasion or an attack by a 50-foot woman.

So, while tourists on both coasts trembled in fear after the movie, I and my lifeguard friends thought it was a total hoot. We giggled through the whole thing and slept just fine that night, thank you.

I was convinced my kids would be equally sensible.

Did I mention this column is about rebuilding lost family closeness? Daughter sat on my lap the whole movie, and let me hug her. (She also apparently got so frightened at one point that she almost peed on my leg.) It was equally a success with son, who sat on the floor by us and cuddled up. LSH (long suffering husband) kept suggesting after each frightful occurrence that the movie should be turned off.

As the gore and mangled bodies piled up, I  refused, arguing that once the kids saw the end they would no longer be frightened. And, I argued that I had seen it and he hadn’t and it just wasn’t that bad.

Pretty much then we hit Quint’s graphically bloody end. (Spoiler alert). Yes, I forgot the closeup of his face as his legs and torso were gnawed off by the shark. LSH shot me a dirty look. “I forgot that part,” I said.

That night we had no end of family closeness. Our normally crowded queen size bed -- two people and two cats -- attracted a third person. Daughter decided to just sleep on top of me. It wasn’t comfortable but I deserved it.

Son -- seeing nowhere for him -- laid on the floor next to me, tapping me awake every 45 minutes or so and saying, “Will you hold my hand?”

I did.

Our newfound closeness lasted for days, but soon we were back to normal with Daughter walking to school and Son playing at the park all day.

To paraphrase Roy Scheider, who played the town police chief: ”We’re going to need a scarier movie."