On Sunday I climbed the curved ladder to the top of the play structure for the very first time.
Jake beat me to this milestone by several months and four decades. But that didn’t cheapen the fun of climbing, rung by rung, up and then, a little at a time, over until I crouched horizontally over the ground gazing at the mulch beneath me in giddy, defying gravity (sorry, stuck in my head from last week’s episode of Glee) motion.
It was yet another 75-degree November Sunday, surely the last of the year, and I had cheerily left Lily at home napping with Dad while Jake and I headed to the park for what I felt certain would be another morning of Mommy socializing.
Surprisingly, it seemed that all of our friends had something better to do with this glorious day than hang out with us for some impromptu playground partying.
For a while, I followed Jake around, dutifully pushing him in the swing as I scanned the faces of the other adults in attendance for some spark of familiarity. We headed for the play structure, and I settled myself on a nearby bench while Jake headed down the slide by himself.
This was, I thought smugly, far preferable to the days when I was obligated to accompany Jake on the play structure, him being too young to, oh, slide by himself without possibly flipping over the side or failing to stop at the bottom, instead landing in a heap of mulch and tears and possibly a few stitches. How lucky I was, I thought, that my child was old enough to entertain himself. I performed a few quick mental calculations to determine whether Lily would magically be old enough come spring for me to escape the awkward Mommy-on-the-play-structure phase entirely.
Except that my continued hopeful gaze at the faces of strangers — like a puppy at the pound hoping some nice person would take me home and love me — reminded me that I was, frankly, bored. I mean, it was nice and warm and sunny and all. But I was mostly checking my cell phone every few minutes to see if it was late enough to call friends on the west coast to distract me from what I was treating as a chore.
A chore. Hanging out with my beautiful son on a beautiful sunny day. This was, I began to fathom, not desirable behavior.
That’s when I headed for the curved ladder, casting aside habitual vestiges of self-consciousness, fear of falling, and adult-acquired reservation.
It was time to play with my not-quite-three-year-old.
Learning to Play
I’m pretty sure my inspiration for a little child’s play — some energetic sand castle building, complete with orders from my three-year-old, followed by a solo flight down the curved slide — came from my day at the dentist with Jake.
This was another big first for him, and not one I expected to go well. Despite the excitement with which he told me one of this classmates had “holes in his teeth,” I did not sense that Jake was particularly inspired to go to the dentist himself. For my part, I can’t say I was looking forward to being scolded for sending him to bed with a Dora cup filled with milk every night to rot his pearly white baby teeth.
I was pleased to find that Jake headed off with me happily enough. I had informed his teachers at drop off that I would be picking him up at 11:00 for a dentist appointment, so perhaps they had talked it up in that way you can do with young children.
“Jake’s going to the dentist! Isn’t that exciting?”
All it takes is one kid clueless enough to agree and before you know it the whole class is patting Jake on the back and congratulating him on his good fortune. The DENTIST! WOW!
I also asked the teachers if I should avoid bringing him back during the 1:00 to 3:00 designated napping time — a social consideration I soon came to regret.
“Well,” one of the teachers said in that way of trying to sound more flexible than she was feeling, “I suppose if you got him back by 1:30 he would have time to nap. But by 2:30 there’d be no point, really, would there?”
“He couldn’t, um, go play somewhere else?” I asked meekly, watching any hope of work time drain away like a stream of sand slipping through my fingers.
“I’m afraid not,” she said, leaving me with a vision of Jake tripping over sleeping classmates, crying disruptively as I left him for a second time that day, and generally ruining nap time for all involved.
So I said a quick prayer for a short appointment — a prayer I supposed I hadn’t a chance of having answered — and headed for the dentist.
And, somehow, just an hour after our 11:30 appointment time, we were headed out of the dentist’s office loaded down with: one purple and blue Dora toothbrush, one tube of Dinosaur toothpaste, three colorful flossers, one orange dinosaur-head toothbrush cover (is there some dinosaur-teeth connection of which I am unaware?), a lovely red pencil case in which to hold these “toys from the dentist,” as Jake called them, one fluorescent green rope bracelet, one tee-shirt, one picture of Jake posing shyly with his dentist, and one orange balloon.
If this sounds like bribery, it is. And it worked. Jake couldn’t wait to tell his friends about what a great time he had at the dentist.
Even with trying to position the balloon in the car in a manner that would not dangerously impede my vision and picking up all the items immediately dumped from the red pencil case, Jake and I were in the car with plenty of time to make the 1:00 start of nap.
Except for one problem. Jake had not yet eaten lunch.
I could have chosen to ignore this issue entirely. He’s not much of an eater, and I’ve never known him to actually say he’s hungry. Any crankiness brought on by plummeting blood sugar could easily have been dealt with by encouraging a little shut eye. And I knew that nap time ended with a good snack, so it’s not like I would have been depriving my child of proper nutrition.
But I have not yet reached quite this level of selfishness in my attempts to combine mothering and a life. Besides, I figured I could grab the rice and beans Jake was requesting and still make it to school by the 1:30 deadline set by his teacher.
This might, possibly, maybe, have been an option had I chosen the mediocre burrito place closer to school. But we were passing through downtown anyhow, and Mike had suggested Mamacita’s — a popular downtown restaurant — at a weak moment when I was trying to maneuver the car in traffic, talk on the cell phone, and pick up flossers from the floor behind my seat where Jake had once again dumped them out of the red pencil case. I was barely capable of functioning at this point, much less making clear-headed decisions. Hence, I headed for Mamacita’s.
I am well aware that downtown Asheville is not exactly your traffic-snarled big city. Still, it is not the easiest thing in the world to back out of the parking lot next to Mamacita’s with the signs informing me that parking was strictly for the business on the other side of the lot (towing enforced) in the rain in lunchtime traffic.
“I’m not sure we can find parking,” I said to Jake as I eyed the fully occupied meters on both sides of the street.
“I want rice and beans,” Jake said sadly. “Please.”
We ended up in a public lot a couple of blocks and a big flight of cement stairs from Mamacita’s. On a sunny day, Jake and I could probably have covered those two blocks in an equal number of minutes. But with me clutching an umbrella in my Reynaud’s-impaired (read: freezing) hand, Jake regularly and I’ll bet deliberately stepping out of his fireman rain boots every few steps, and plenty of pedestrians in various states of annoyance with the weather providing us with a formidable obstacle course to run, it took a good, frustrating, long time to make it to our destination.
Which was packed.
Not “It’ll be ten minutes, have a seat,” packed. Snaking line, doubling back on itself in the small space with the red bar stools on which Jake likes to endanger himself while I try not to get bumped by the opening door or to bump others with my wet umbrella packed.
I desperately counted the number of people ahead of us in line and then watched in numb surrender as the prep line assembled order after order far too slowly to assuage my rushing-to-get-to-naptime anxiety. I pulled out my cell phone and checked the time.
Maybe, I thought, if I can have him at school by 2:00, his teacher will take pity on me. After all, she’d not been clear about the period between the 1:30 approved time and the 2:30 don’t-bother hour.
And so I ground my teeth and raced the clock by standing around pretty much doing nothing except thanking the strangers who helped Jake put his boots back on and apologizing to the ones he rammed into in his boredom.
By the time we made it to a booth, his rice and beans in hand, I knew he would not be returning to school until 3:00. Rather than liberating me, this fact depressed and annoyed me.
“Sit on your bottom and eat,” I ordered, shoveling my own lunch into my mouth with a complete absence of enjoyment. Why oh why hadn’t I just headed for Urban Burrito? I asked myself, convincing myself that I actually preferred their food and Jake certainly doesn’t know the difference. If only I had thought more clearly, made more informed choices, we would be done with lunch and Jake would be safely on his cot in his classroom while I proved far more productive than I ever am on a school afternoon.
And then Jake said something charming and nonsensical and Jake-like to me. And grinned that ridiculous, goofy, little-boy grin.
Oh yeah, I thought. I like spending time with Jake. When I’m not busy stressing out about how much I need to spend time not being with Jake.
That’s when I gave my head a good, clearing shake, looked at my son, and decided right there to start having fun with him.
Why Having Fun Isn’t as Easy as It Should Be
I risk painting myself as more than a little bit out of the ordinary and pretty well divorced from how normal people act, but I need to explain here that I am not someone who procrastinates. For example, I work at home and only once a day or so wander to the refrigerator to stare at its contents while creatively dreaming up without success good things to eat made of banana peppers left over from Jake’s June party, raspberry preserves from the farmer’s market, roasted sweet potatoes really meant for Lily, and, if I’m lucky, day-old rice from last night’s dinner.
In this relatively procrastination-free world, I designate when it is time to deal with the things life deals us and when it is time to have fun. Which is, roughly, when I don’t have something more pressing to do. Which, in turn, has, for the three years since I became a mother, been close to never.
My point is that — even for those normal people who do procrastinate — we tend to have a sense that there is time set aside somewhere in our lives to have fun. And that even when we bump into potentially enjoyable situations — planned or unplanned — we generally spend a lot of our energy thinking about all the un-fun things we need to do once we are done “having fun.”
Is it just me? That would be a very sad thing.
I don’t think it is. I think it’s a function of how our minds love to chatter. No matter what we’re doing, there’s always something else to think about. And I don’t see any reason this rule doesn’t apply even when we’re supposed to be enjoying what we’re doing right now.
Surely I’m not the first parent to look right past the joy that is my child playing in front of me to figure out when I will make it to the bank to drop off the quietly accumulating pile of checks sitting on the sideboard in the dining room. Isn’t it our job to do all the boring stuff so our children can remain carefree and happy in a way we can only dream about?
Of course it is. I’m not discounting the heavy and endless responsibilities of being an adult in this world, much less an adult responsible for the welfare of small children.
But I am suggesting that it might be possible to meet all these demands without thinking about them all the time. That there might be more wiggle room that we realize — especially when we give up the hours spent doing pretty much nothing productive but fretting. That maybe we should stop waiting until we have time for fun and just have fun.
It was a clear, clean click of clarity, that moment in Mamacita’s. I saw myself wishing for time I didn’t have to do things I didn’t absolutely have to do that afternoon because they would immediately be replaced by other things that could also wait a day or two. And I decided to stop.
It was a thrilling turning point, like the first time I pushed aside all the fear and did a handstand. I simply embraced what was there all the time: the chance to have lunch alone with my son, the time with him I often complain I don’t have and then waste when I do.
What I felt wasn’t precisely the be-in-the-moment philosophy of yoga. Or the surrendering of what I couldn’t control, though there were certainly pieces of both, since yoga isn’t compartmentalized into one-or-the-other sparks of revelation.
But the big element here — the one that is too often missing from my (and, I am guessing, most other people’s) asana practice, daily living practice, attempts to make my way to mindfulness — is fun. Just letting go and having fun. The way kids do. Not setting it up. Not even taking the time to give myself permission. Just . . . having it.
As simple as that.
So Jake and I enjoyed our rice and beans. We played together at home until it was time to take him back to school. And, a few days later, for a little while in the park I became his peer, a friend who climbs up the play structure without care, who buries toys in the bottom of a pail of sand, and who is just a tiny bit jealous when a friend his age arrives and takes off with him to play in the mud of the baseball infield.
Play. Or Try Hanumanasana (Forward Splits)
A past yoga teacher who knew me very well once told me to embrace Hanuman, the monkey god. I needed to be more playful in my practice, he said, though I’m not entirely sure I heard him.
The traditional “play” pose is the one named for Hanuman — hanumanasana. The thing is, it isn’t strictly a whole lot of fun for most people, requiring our bodies to bend in ways that they just don’t seem designed to bend. But I’m offering it here because its very awkwardness can inspire a throw-up-your-hands-and-laugh sense of play.
So try it. With props and a feeling of flying and a following-your-heart lightness in your body.
Or, if you want to, forget about hanumanasana and just play.