At Play

Last night I attended a conference on "play" at my daughter's nursery school. Although I was really looking forward to hearing the featured author's talk, and the subsequent group discussion, I was not expecting to be surprised by much that I heard. Since I was in preschool myself, I have been indoctrinated in the ideas I knew were going to be discussed; the importance--centrality--of play in the lives of children was the foundation of both my childhood home and my mother's schools. 

And, in fact, the author's talk contained no new information for me. Rather, it reinforced what I have been taught and know. The discussion, however, led by the preschool director and supplemented by some of her excellent teachers, sent me home with a little something unexpected to chew on. 

When I think of play, I will admit that I do think of children, of childhood and childhood things. I play with my children all the time but almost always in their world, on their level, on their terms. When I am lying on the floor making puzzle pieces "say" animal sounds, or deep in the throes of a passionate game of Candy Land (cue sarcasm), I am playing their games, playing their play. 

Not that there's anything wrong with that. I think that's probably how most of us think of play: as the provence of children. But then the preschool director, almost as an aside, said something near the end of the talk that I must have absorbed and set aside for later, as it wasn't until hours later, as I sat in my desk chair way too late, that I really thought about what she had meant.

I can't remember the wording, but she told us that over her many years of working with children she had come to think of play as more of an attitude, or an approach, than as something children do with toys or their imaginations. Play, she said, was just as relevant--and necessary--a term and a way of being--for adults. 

It is very clear to me that in these past few years I have rarely let myself play in the way I used to, certainly as a child, but not for a very long time since. Adulthood can be so serious, so full of itself. There is no reason that I can't take off on the sidewalk as Lily and I walk to the subway in the mornings announcing a race to the curb, just as I would have done 30 years ago had I been walking to school with my sister. More, there is no reason I can't approach my relationships with adults, my sacred loved ones, my friends, with a lighter, looser, improvisational take, as opposed to what has become my grown-up self's less playful, frankly less appealing version. Play, I suspect the preschool director might agree, has much to do with freedom, much to do with joy.

One of my favorite memories of my parents is from when I was nine or ten. It was a moment on an ordinary afternoon. I suspect they won't remember it at all. They were in what used to be the kitchen in their house, and my father had a glass of water, and for some reason he was trying to pour the water on my mother's head, and she was ducking away from him, and he was chasing her, and they were both laughing, and I remember so clearly as a child thinking to myself, in a way that made me deeply happy, that they were, well, acting like children, outside of their regular selves. 

I would like my children to have lots of memories of me like this: at play, in the spirit of play, not just with or for them but because it is who I am, the person I would like to be.