The anxiety of the break has been clawing at every SF parent as early as January. AcroSports, for example, knows this and so sign-ups open with caregivers spending a morning hovering over the “register,” button.
I had been, in my usual fashion, avoiding this anxiety even as I heard the whispers:
NOTHING MIGHT HAPPEN (the lizard brain hisses)
NO SUMMER PLANS ARE UNACCEPTABLE (says the mean mom)
BUT I’M ALREADY SO LONELY (says the sweet inner child)
Somewhere around May 15th I confronted my avoidance by making a a list of unsolved problems, among which SUMMER was 6th.
The last on the list was “bike tire,” referring to one that was flat, and since this seemed an easier problem to solve than two and a half months of unstructured time, off I went to the bike store and then wanted immediately to make good use of the good deed. When I picked up O we went straight to Stowe Lake where she wanted to watch a couple of ducks waddling around looking for food. She just wanted to follow them and watch them nibble on the little sprigs of grass, at the side of the trail.
“Let me show you something,” she said from a crouched spot next to a man-made pond and she peeled the outer layers of a long piece of grass away from its center to reveal the very fluffy parts of green that the two ducks were after.
“That’s what they’re eating,” she exclaimed and spent another few minutes collecting a bunch of them and storing them in the dip in a rock that made the shape of a cup.
Down the path a bit there was a fifty-foot waterfall and some of the ducks were eating bread treats that visitors had left for them on the rocks. O threw the ducks some of the green fluff, which they promptly ignored, and then she went off back to where she had found the food to gather some more. She seemed to be in her own world with the ducks; ignoring me, finding her way back and forth, noticing the cracks between the stones where the water flowed through.
I hadn’t planned for this kind of adventure. I had been doing my usual running around arranging and organizing: fixing a flat on the little blue bike and mapping out a place to ride it and driving twenty minutes out of our way. It had been the path that turned bumpy with pebbles that had forced us to slow down, to walk the bike, to notice the ducks, to sit by the water, green and stinky as it was.
I was left wondering if this shit is so easy and enjoyable and sometimes free why do I run around booking camps and reading instagrams and organizing rooms and buying stuffed animals when the day goes especially well? I think it is because it is painful as it is beautiful to slow down like this. There’s something about this kind of simplicity that feels like sand running through the fingers; like you must acknowledge time as completely ungraspable.
I had one of these moment at the beginning of the pandemic, when we went out to Griffith Park in place of pre-school one morning in June.
“Pretend you’re the wind and I am a flower and you’re trying to blow me down,” O had said, in the middle of a field, with no understanding of our new circumstances. I had felt how unavailable I had been for this level of intimacy, this level of play — and I can’t say that I found a way to engage it alongside the years of quarantine. (years, there were years). But I did notice it — the simplicity of her needs versus the complexity of my planning. The difficulty of being present with what would so quickly pass.
This past weekend we needed to get out of the house and so we drove over to Sausalito’s Bay Area Discovery Museum, which I had been actively avoiding despite it being mostly outdoors and spacious and heavy on big communal projects with very few rules. We went on Sunday in the late morning and spent a long while rolling around in the red wobble chairs - the ones that make you feel like you’re about to fall over, just before you come round the bend of the circle and the chair lifts you back upright.
I realized that in having such low expectations of what people see as children’s needs I had been missing out of the handful to gazillion numbers of people who feel just like me; who cherish whatever childhood that they had and feel that all kids deserve at least that if not a whole lot more.
Take people who make board games now for example, which up until this week Olive refused to play. [I think it’s because I’m so good at Candy Land. Really. Just ask my friend whose kid I beat with one hand behind my back. I had even warned him before we started by saying: “I just want to let you know I’m good at this game.”] Because people have encouraged me to both listen to Olive and not listen to Olive I decided we’d head over to Game Parlor and oh! things have changed in the gaming world since I last had a sleepover. I had a strange nostalgia for a game of guessing the identity of a face based on a series of questions about their appearance.
“I don’t understand this game,” Olive had said, a sentiment I was glad to have been able to meet.
Instead we played Cauldron Quest; a collaborative game in which all the players work together to move pieces of potion into the center of the board past a wizard piece that often blocks their path. All kinds of lessons were learned. Odd numbers, even numbers, the chances that three dice when rolled would add up to twelve, versus the chances that the remaining two dice when rolled would end up making a roll of all evens. (to be fair my answer was just, I don’t know which is more likely). The value of collaborative games is probably another topic. Are we (over)protecting kids from the feeling of losing? Probably (see my Candy Land note above for my level of callousness about this). But are we also helping them see that beating everyone else is not the game we’re playing?
“Take them,” I had to urge Olive when in another game she knew two pink eggs lay under a penguin's body on my side of the iceberg – “you have to.” But she had refused.