I need to open with a disclaimer, because apparently that’s the rule now if you’re going to publicly drag a clown: my children had the time of their lives. Harper was mesmerized. Her siblings had a blast. Kris had a blast. Memories were made. Cotton candy was consumed at a rate that will require its own line item in next month’s dental budget. It was, by every measurable metric, a wonderful night. I just need everyone to understand that going in, because what follows is going to sound like I hated it, and I did not hate it, I am simply grieving.

I am grieving Bobo.

And maybe this is on me. The last time I went to a circus was around 2015, with my first batch of children. Yes, batch. I have so ten kids, and somewhere around child number six you stop saying “back when the older ones were little” and start referring to them like cookies came out of the oven in shifts. First batch, second batch, and honestly there may have been a quality control issue with both, but that’s a different essay.

The circus I remember from the first batch was an absolute fever dream of bad decisions. There were elephants. There were lions. There was a man riding a motorcycle inside a giant spinning metal ball while every mother in the stands did the math on how many motorcycles it would take to kill a man and whether tonight was the night we’d find out live. People dangled from the ceiling using body parts that God, in his infinite wisdom, did not engineer to hold a human being’s full weight. And then, and I cannot stress this enough, a man got into a cannon and was shot out of it, on purpose, for our entertainment, while we ate popcorn like this was a reasonable Tuesday.

That was a circus. That was appointment television performed by people whose life insurance agents had clearly never met them.

So when we decided to take Harper for her birthday, I was thrilled. This was going to be one of those foundational childhood memories, the kind she brings up in therapy decades from now, except in the good way. Kris had never been to a circus at all, which somehow made it even better, because I got to introduce three people I love to the glorious chaos of lions and motorcycles and cannons and clowns and a general disregard for OSHA.

In my head, I had made exactly one update to my circus expectations: I assumed the tigers were gone. Somewhere I’d absorbed that tigers had been retired from show business, and I decided that was the full extent of the changes. Everything else, I assumed, remained precisely as feral as I remembered.

I did not research this. That was mistake number one. Mistake number two was trusting Bobo.

The show was originally booked for Harper’s actual birthday, which was perfect, circus plus birthday equals core memory, math I could not screw up. Then they canceled that performance and casually shattered my dreams over a group text. Harper recovered from this tragedy considerably faster than I did. We rebooked for a few days later and went anyway, front row, and when I say front row I mean we were close enough to be considered unpaid cast members.

There was eye contact. There was hand holding. At one point a clown walked directly over to my husband and rubbed his head like he was checking a cantaloupe for ripeness at the grocery store, no explanation given, no explanation wanted.

And then there was the drummer.

This man looked directly at me. Not a friendly performer glance, not a “hello, front row” acknowledgment. He looked into my actual soul and then, this is the part that still haunts me, he stayed there. Sir. I am a married mother of ten. There are things back there you do not want to see, filing cabinets you do not want to open, but he held that eye contact like he already knew my secrets and fully approved of them. I did not know whether to look away, confess something, or add him to the Christmas card list. This is apparently what front row circus life demands of you now. Personal space is not a right, it is a suggestion, and at any moment a stranger may touch your husband’s scalp or stare directly into whatever is left of your soul after ten children.

And I respect the commitment. I really do.

The show started. Lights, music, dancing, gymnastics, people doing impressive things with bodies while mine was busy filing a formal complaint about how I slept the night before. There were bicycles. So many bicycles. It appeared that Tony Hawk had quietly opened a discount bicycle division and staffed it entirely with circus performers, and the kids thought it was incredible while I sat there thinking, okay, but when does the elephant come out.

More dancing. More gymnastics. More bicycles. Surely the lions were next. No lions. Surely someone was about to swallow a sword. No sword. A fire breather, maybe. No. A motorcycle. No. The giant steel ball of death. No. And where, I began to ask myself with real urgency, was my cannon.

At this point I would have accepted literally anything with a whiff of danger. A guy holding a lit sparkler too close to his own face. A stunt with a folding chair. Give me poor judgment. Give me risk. Give me one single performer whose mother does not know what he does for a living.

Instead they wheeled out a robot dog.

A robot dog, ladies and gentlemen. This was the entire animal kingdom’s representation at the modern circus. No elephants, no lions, no actual living creature with a pulse, just a metallic dog on wheels doing a little dance routine to a pop song while lights flashed off its plastic little face. It spun in a circle. It did a bow. The crowd cheered like we had just witnessed the Cirque du Soleil debut of a Boston Dynamics prototype, and I sat there in the front row absolutely losing it, not because it was impressive, but because somewhere a group of adults sat in a boardroom and decided that the solution to fewer live animals was a Roomba with delusions of grandeur.

I have seen elephants do headstands. I have watched a lion yawn eight inches from a trapeze artist’s face. And now I was watching a robot dog moonwalk to a dance remix while a room full of parents applauded like we hadn’t just witnessed the circus quietly outsource its entire wildlife budget to a battery pack.

The kids, of course, loved it. Harper thought the robot dog was the single greatest thing she had ever seen in her life, possibly greater than her own birthday, and she is not wrong to feel that way, because she has never had to sit through a real cannon act and then compare it unfavorably to a Wi-Fi enabled Labrador. She has no baseline. She has no scars. She was simply delighted, and I sat there next to her like a disgruntled elderly woman muttering about how back in my day we had elephants, not extension cords.

I kept waiting for the show to become the show I remembered. Surely something unhinged was still coming. A sword swallower. A bearded lady descending dramatically from the rafters. Anything with actual stakes. Instead I got a robot dog, some very talented humans on bicycles, and a drummer who I am fairly certain still thinks about me sometimes.

Apparently the circus has gone through the same safety renovation as everything else in modern life. Less danger, fewer animals, way more LED lights, dramatically fewer opportunities for someone to accidentally become a cautionary tale. Which, fine. Good. Ethical. Progress. I support all of it in theory while mourning it in practice, the way you support a friend’s decision to quit drinking while still quietly missing the version of them that made bad choices at parties.

But there was something genuinely chaotic and alive about the circus we took the older kids to all those years ago. You walked into that tent knowing there was a nonzero chance something could go sideways, and that tiny sprinkle of potential disaster was, somehow, the whole point. The circus of my childhood was not asking if you were entertained. It was asking if you were emotionally prepared to witness a catastrophe live and in person, and we, God help us, always said yes. We bought the cotton candy anyway.

Somewhere between my first batch of kids and my second, the circus changed, and maybe that is genuinely fine. Because while I sat there mourning elephants and cannons, Harper was not missing a single thing. She did not know a lion was supposed to be there. She was not waiting on a cannon. She had never once wondered where they were hiding the monkeys. She did not need my circus. She needed her circus, robot dog and all, and she got it, and she loved every second of it.

She laughed. She stared. She watched people fly through the air and felt actual heat from actual flames from the front row. She watched a clown rub her father’s head for reasons none of us will ever fully understand. Some of her brothers and sisters were there to celebrate with her, after her birthday circus had already been cruelly ripped away once and rescheduled. She finally got her circus day, and to her, it was perfect.

Years from now she will not remember that there were no elephants. She will remember the front row. The lights. The music. The heat of the flames. Her siblings laughing beside her. A very confident robot dog doing what may have been the greatest dance of its short mechanical life. And hopefully, buried somewhere in that memory, she will remember her mother sitting next to her, smiling and clapping, and not visibly doing math on the structural integrity of a giant metal sphere.

Because apparently, in this new era of circus, I am the problem.

So yes. It was fun. The performers were genuinely talented. The kids were thrilled beyond measure. Harper had the best day of her small life so far. Memories were made, cotton candy was destroyed, and a robot dog achieved something close to celebrity status in our household by bedtime.

But somewhere out there, the real Bobo, the Bobo of 2015, is sitting next to an actual elephant, polishing an actual cannon, watching all of this unfold from a distance, and quietly wondering what in God’s name happened to his industry.

I miss you, Bobo. You absolute lunatic. You would never have made me watch a robot dog get a bigger ovation than a lion tamer. If you see this come find me I have ideas to rebuild your circus!