Back in 2004, before I had enough children to accidentally form my own small school district, there was just Jacob. My Boo Bah. For a few precious years he had me almost entirely to himself. No siblings interrupting us, no one screaming from another room, no tiny person demanding a snack twelve seconds after refusing that exact same snack.

Just me and Jacob.

And Jacob loved Harold and the Purple Crayon. Except he didn’t call it that. He called it Baby Crayon, and he’d crawl up beside me and sweetly ask for it, and because he was my first baby and I had absolutely no idea I’d someday become the exhausted ringmaster of a traveling circus disguised as a family, we watched Baby Crayon approximately eight million times.

This was also 2004, which means watching television required considerably more commitment than it does today. Streaming wasn’t really a thing yet. Netflix existed, but Netflix mailed DVDs to your house. For anyone too young to remember this, I need you to understand how advanced we thought this was. You picked a movie on the internet. You waited several business days. The United States Postal Service physically transported your entertainment to your home. You watched it. Then you PUT IT BACK IN THE MAIL. And somehow we were all standing around thinking, “My God. The future is here.”

Jacob had other favorites too. There was The Little Rascals, which he lovingly called Little Bastards, a title that frankly wasn’t entirely inaccurate. Then there was Oswald, which he called Asswod. So my sweet toddler routinely wandered around asking his mother to watch Baby Crayon, Little Bastards, and Asswod. Parenting was magical.

Baby Crayon was different, though. We didn’t just watch it, we talked about Harold’s adventures and made up our own. Jacob would curl up with me and we’d imagine where that purple crayon could take us next.

Those memories have always been especially precious because I wasn’t supposed to have Jacob. Actually, according to doctors, I wasn’t supposed to have any of my children. I was told repeatedly that getting pregnant would be difficult, and even if I managed it, staying pregnant would be another story entirely. My body simply wasn’t built for this particular assignment. Apparently my uterus took that personally.

Did I get pregnant multiple times? Yes. Did seven of those pregnancies eventually place beautiful babies in my arms? Also yes. Was every single one of them a fight? Absolutely. Pregnancy never became easy for me. If anything they got progressively harder, like my body kept saying, “Ma’am, we discussed this,” and I kept responding, “I understand your concerns and have decided to proceed anyway.”

I would do it all again. Every miserable second.

Then somehow twenty years passed. I don’t know how, because I’m pretty sure I was twenty-five approximately last Tuesday, but suddenly Jacob was grown and there was a new Harold and the Purple Crayon movie. And I had little girls. Naturally, nostalgia kicked down the front door.

I HAD TO SHOW THEM BABY CRAYON.

Lynnlee was maybe a little old to fall completely under its spell, but Harper was three. Three was perfect. She watched Harold, we read the books, and she discovered the same strange little world her Boo Bah had loved all those years before her. Somewhere inside me, twenty year old Mom and forty something Mom got to exist at the same time for a little while.

It was sweet. It was sentimental. It was beautiful.

Which should have been my first warning, because nothing beautiful in this house is allowed to exist without eventually becoming a property damage claim.

Weeks passed. Life moved on. Then the girls decided they needed lipstick. Fine. They picked their favorite colors, and naturally Harper chose purple and black, because apparently I am raising a tiny woman who is either going to become an artist, a rock star, or the mysterious widow everyone suspects in Act Two. I wasn’t going to judge. I barely wear makeup myself. I’m lucky if everything lands approximately where cosmetics traditionally go, and I still line my bottom eyelid. I KNOW. Apparently that’s a crime now. The beauty industry moved on without me and I wish everyone involved the very best.

Anyway, one evening I was cleaning the house and working on schedules when I heard Kris getting increasingly upset. Something purple was on the wall. Then the questions started. Who did this. What is this. Why is this on the wall. Meanwhile I’m in another room thinking, sir, we have two small children and only one recently purchased purple lipstick, I believe we can wrap up this episode of CSI: Staircase fairly quickly.

But I stayed out of it. I’ve been doing more field work lately as our company expands. For years I mostly handled the office side of the business while homeschooling the girls and running the house, because apparently at some point I looked at my schedule and thought, this seems dangerously manageable, I should add more responsibilities. So I’ve been trying to let Kris handle more of what I usually handle. This was his moment. I kept cleaning. I may have even smiled. Not because I enjoyed his suffering. I just felt it was important for his personal growth.

Then I finally saw the crime scene. Harper had taken her purple lipstick and drawn a line along the wall. Not a little line, because that would demonstrate restraint. She’d started along the stairway, continued up the entire staircase, wrapped around the pony wall, and carried that purple line straight into the game room. This wasn’t vandalism. This was infrastructure.

Harper admitted immediately that she’d done it, but she wasn’t defiant, wasn’t even particularly guilty. She just looked genuinely upset.

Later, once everyone had calmed down and the Great Purple Lipstick Incident of 2026 was no longer being treated as a felony offense, I sat down with her and asked why she’d done it. Her answer destroyed me. She told me it didn’t work. Her purple line didn’t take her on an adventure like the bald baby’s did. Her lipstick wasn’t magic. Even though it was purple.

Well. Shit. What exactly was I supposed to do with that. Put her in time out for attempting to access another dimension. Explain to a three year old that fictional transportation systems aren’t covered by Maybelline. Send Harold a bill.

I couldn’t be mad anymore. Mostly I was sad it hadn’t worked, because she believed it might. She believed that if she found something purple and drew the line far enough, maybe the world would change around her. Maybe an adventure would appear. And there’s something almost painfully beautiful about being little enough to believe that.

So later that night, exhausted well past the point where rational adults should be making decisions, I made her an adventure. Because suddenly I wasn’t the mother of a three year old in 2026. I was twenty again, with a little boy curled up beside me asking for Baby Crayon. I could almost hear Jacob’s tiny voice. I could remember the adventures we invented and the ridiculous amount of time we had together before our family grew and grew and grew some more. Before Boo Bah became an adult. Before I knew how fast children stop mispronouncing words. Before Little Bastards became The Little Rascals. Before Asswod became Oswald. Before Baby Crayon became Harold and the Purple Crayon. Before I understood that one of the cruelest parts of motherhood is getting exactly what you desperately prayed for, and then watching it grow up anyway.

The lipstick eventually came off the walls. Mostly. There’s still a faint purple line in places. This winter I’m planning to repaint, and I know Kris will be thrilled when those walls are clean again. Fresh. Put together. He’ll probably stand there admiring them.

And I’ll smile too. But I’ll also be a little sad, because right now, if the light hits that wall just right, I can still see where a three year old girl tried to draw herself an adventure.

Someday Harper will know purple lipstick isn’t magic. She’ll know crayons can’t build moons and boats and entire worlds. She’ll know houses cost money, walls aren’t canvases, and Netflix doesn’t arrive in the mailbox anymore. She’ll grow up, just like Boo Bah did.

But for one night, she believed magic might be as simple as finding the right shade of purple and drawing a line until something wonderful happened. And when it didn’t, her mom made sure the adventure came anyway.

Maybe the purple was magic after all.