My niece celebrated her 3rd birthday this weekend, and for some reason, my parents had pulled out my graduation party photo boards for the occasion. Along with pictures of me in my prom dress, there were several from my childhood, back when my standard photoshoot-wear was a tutu and a pair of underwear on my head. My niece walked up to the boards and looked up at them quietly.

“That’s me. I used to be little too,” I explained.

She looked from the pictures and back to me, digesting this information.

She pointed to one in particular, which I’m not sure why my parents stuck on the board in the first place. It was me and my sisters back in the ‘80s, when I was about 2, sitting on The Easter Bunny’s lap. They were smiling and playing it cool, but when you looked at me, some major shit was going down. I was clearly in the middle of an agonizing tantrum slide, the kind where you go helplessly limp while attempting to fall on the ground in a heap of objection. My belly was bared over my diaper and my face was contorted and red. Behind me, the Easter Bunny himself looked like a hungover perv, sporting dark plastic sunglasses and a cocky grin.

“Oh, that’s when I went to see the Easter Bunny. I was really freaked out,” I explained to her.

“Oh, we tried to get her to go,” my sister shouted from the next room. “But she wasn’t having it.”

I could tell that by looking at the picture, my niece was having a serious revelation that her choice to protest this Easter Bunny trip was absolutely the right one, and that the Easter Bunny was indeed some kind of baby torturer.

“I feel scared,” she whispered.

“Most of the things that scare her involve humans dressed up as giant anythings,” my brother-in-law later explained. “The Easter Bunny. The Pizza Man. The giant mouse at Circus Pizza.”

The Pizza Man, while not an archetype in pop culture, has been a fundamental part of my niece’s understanding of the universe. Basically, she was in the car with my mom one day when they drove past a guy dressed up as a giant slice of pizza, handing out coupons on the sidewalk.

“What’s that?” my niece asked.

“That’s the Pizza Man. He’s half man, half pizza,” my mom explained. “Are you going to grow up to be a pizza man?”

Apparently, this exchange burned the notion into my niece’s mind that she could indeed, against her will, grow up to become half man, half pizza.

“Don’t talk about the Pizza Man,” my sister told me, last time we met at California Pizza Kitchen. “She just keeps talking about him – ‘The Pizza Man! Those hands! Those hands!’”

Although I was never haunted by the white gloved hands of a man dressed up as pizza, I remember having similar complexes as a kid. I had no convincing proof that my crooked-toothed, Beatles-coiffed self was my permanent vessel through existence, and that freaked me out. I remember laying in bed and wondering if I would wake up with a tail, or suddenly start morphing into a boy.

My niece seems to think similarly. “When is my brother going to turn into my sister?” she frequently asks.

I would suppress these thoughts in myself, sure that I had the dark power to turn my own fears into reality if only I kept thinking about them.

The fact that you can’t understand what is concrete and what is variable is one of the scariest things about childhood. You believe that the powers that be will suddenly render you freakish and inhuman, with nothing to do with yourself but hand out coupons to strangers on the road. That idea beats dark basements any day.

-Becky Lang