Looking in the mirror, I saw someone looking back at me who was both terribly familiar and foreign. For one, she had green skin in comparison to my normal pale visage. I noticed a spot that was a bit light and dabbed on a bit more green makeup. There – finished. Save the red hair and the cartoon skinniness, I was the image of Poison Ivy from the Harley Quinn animated show.

On the lawful to chaotic and good to bad morality scale, I am solidly in the lawful good zone. I was obsessive about rules as a kid to the point I would correct other kids regularly. (That made me very popular.) While I’ve shed much of that slavish devotion, I hate breaking rules for no good reason and hold myself to high moral standards.

So why was I cosplaying a chaotic supervillain at a comic book convention?

The easy answer is that the version of Pamela Ivey – Poison Ivy – in the Harley Quinn cartoon is pretty close to me if I was a supervillain. Hardcore into nature, often preferring it to people. Fed up and angry at people’s abuse of ecosystems and the fellow organisms that live in them. Really hates corporations. Loves science. Hyper focuses and obsesses over her passions. Often misunderstood. Can easily be read as autistic. So yeah, it’s fun to cosplay someone you identify with who is also super powerful.

The harder answer is that it helps me understand both my kids and myself better.

If I was uber-lawful as a kid, my kids are uber-chaotic. They both have a very healthy level of skepticism, especially of people in authority. Both of them have a ton of energy that often comes out by play-wresting, bouncing off of each other, and annoying the crud out of each other. Rules are often hard for them to follow and their complicance is inconsistent at best. Even working their hardest, their executive function challenges make it hard to get stuff done. That entire aspect of their ways of being is so different from mine that it’s hard for me to understand and causes a lot of friction between us.

By playing a chaotic character, I can better put myself in their headspace. For that reason, my last two characters in Dungeon and Dragons games have been chaotic. One was a bit of a mad scientist character who was trying to be good but not sure what that looks like. My current one is definitively good, but reject-all-rules Robin Hood character. (For those who have seen the animated Robin Hood movie, she’s basically a grown up version of the little girl rabbit.) Both of the characters have provided me with new perspectives on how people move through the world in a way that’s radically different from how I do. I’ve gotten just a little bit closer to my kids as a result.

As for myself, I’m often closer to a villian than I wish I was. If I had a power fantasy, it would be for everyone to just do the stuff I want them to do in the way I want them to do it. (This is a constant frustration with kids who have trouble following directions.) I stated that desire once on a friend’s Facebook, who responded by saying, “Shannon, that’s a supervillian fantasy.” Oh – so it is. Well then.

Recognizing those tendencies in myself allows me to keep them in check and see when they’re overriding my good sense. It also lets me see that when I’m getting triggered by my kids not following directions that it’s often me freaking out in a way that’s not appropriate to the situation. Remembering that being good is about what we do, not some inherant goodness, also helps keeps us from being toxic. As I explained to my older kid the other day, if you believe you are good, you will find some way to justify bad behaviors because “I am a good person and good people don’t do bad things.” But if you stay humble, then you can realize when you’ve done something bad and make amends.

Once in a while, it’s good to explore our inner supervillain. It’s a lot better to get those tendencies out in fantasy than letting them loose in real life. So I roamed the floor of the Washington Convention Center in my plant-patterned leggings, black blazer, and green face paint, complete with a stuffed giant Venus Fly-Trap. I didn’t actually have the power to control plants and take down corporations, but for a little while, it felt like maybe I could.