Friday, August 31, 2012

Team Chickpea Piccata: Some Thoughts on Deliberately Falling Short


“The true object of all human life is play.  Earth is a task garden; heaven is a playground.” –G. K. Chesterton

“If you want to be creative, stay in part a child, with the creativity and invention that characterizes children before they are deformed by adult society.”  --Jean Piaget

“Imagination rules the world.”  --Napoleon Bonaparte

Comparisons are the death of joy.  I know this.  I know quite well that I ought to go about living my own life the best I can and not worry myself with what anyone else has or does.  Competition, however, is contagious, and it’s a difficult disease to shake.  You would think that abandoning my career and for the better part of a decade earning $0, and that having my running career taken down by a chronically broken foot, and generally doing and having nothing lauded or glamorized or even compensated by our current culture would go a long ways towards breaking me of measuring myself against others, but such a thought underestimates the depravity of human nature.  There are endless ways to keep falling short, even if you protest that you are not really running the race.

The issue I am currently wrestling with is how much is enough.   Likely, the level of enough is different for every family and within each family, every kid.  Still, I think every kid probably has a level that is too much.   Every year it feels like more and more kids are doing everything available, and in an affluent suburb, that’s a lot.  Kids are in soccer—and not just regular soccer, travel soccer with foot skills classes and special audition-only tournaments—and baseball and swim team and Spanish class and piano lessons and scouts.  I feel like Adam is in plenty.  He’s in “recreational” soccer and cub scouts and takes piano lessons.  But all of his friends are in those things and baseball and some sort of tutoring as well.  Maybe football too.  Most are now on “travel” soccer teams.  Today I overheard one mom moaning/bragging that her eight-year-old is on two travel teams and a baseball team.  If you talk to the parents of these over-scheduled children, they will claim that they are doing it for one or both of two main reasons: (1) the child’s friends are all on those teams, and (2) if the child does not play every sport every season, and if he/she is not on the best teams now, he/she will not make the high school team(s). 

Now for my confession: sometimes, I believe these parents.  Sometimes I worry that my son is getting behind by not playing fall ball when the rest of his baseball-playing classmates are.  Sometimes the competitive part of me wonders if I am, when he is only eight years old, causing my son not to “make” the high school soccer team by keeping him in “recreational” soccer while all of the other kids who ought be his teammates and competition are now in travel soccer.  (Side rant: the travel soccer thing annoys me for other reasons too.  If we all just stayed here, the competition would be of the same level.  Instead, people are giving up their weekends to play teams whose members live in our town but on a field 90 minutes away.  And they’re paying a thousand dollars to do so.  Why? Because all of the good teammates and competition have gone to travel teams.  If we all just stayed here, we all could just stay here.  Seriously, folks, get over yourselves.)

Of course, there are all sorts of other ways I fall short of perfect.  Recently, I was at a meeting in a house that was probably close to twice the size of mine and decorated like a model home.  No, much more nicely than a model home.  I was in constant awe.  There were pictures in the bathroom, and they were hung in painted rectangles (perfect perfect rectangles) that matched the matting of the pictures.  The soap and hand towels matched the paint and the matting as well.  And that was just the bathroom.  Moreover, the house was immaculate.  Not a stray anything.  Every surface—and there were a lot of surfaces—was polished and shiny.  No dust on the framed mirrors.  No sock fuzz on the carpets. No toys.  Not even any toy boxes.  No papers.  Of course I didn’t go exploring around the house, so it’s possible the upstairs was grimy and chaotic, but I really doubt that was case.  Gretchen, who did go upstairs to play, told me that she hopes she can go back there someday because the house was even more like a castle inside than it was outside.  I wonder: how is such a life possible? 

How do other people live these lives?  And, because it’s really all about me after all, why do my children and I seem unable to pull it off?  Why are there piles of papers that I don’t have any idea what to do with but am afraid to throw away?  When should I be scrubbing the kitchen floor and tile walls (not that   I have these) and polishing the bathroom counters?  Do my kids have more toys than other kids, since the toys in my house seem not to all have a place to go other than the floor?  Frankly, I suspect that even if my son was on three travel teams, he still wouldn’t be the best soccer player in the third grade.  He’s small and neither particularly fast nor aggressive.  Nothing I do is likely to change that.

I know there is no point in making these comparisons.  In the end, when I’m, say, eighty, I don’t think it’s going to matter to me that my floor was dirty or my mantel was dusty or that my mirrors were splattered with soap and toothpaste.  And, let’s be honest, some of our kids are not going to be on the high school soccer and baseball teams, and that’s OK.  Really.  Some of them (gasp) might not want to be on the high school soccer, basketball, and baseball teams.  Furthermore, when I pull out my rational self for a few minutes and think through this thing, I suspect that it’s too early to either predict or prepare for those years-away try-outs.  If I’m being completely logical, do I think that playing fall ball in third grade is going make that much difference in Adam’s baseball playing two years from now, much less six or seven years from now?  No.  I don’t think it will.  What I actually believe is that there is far more to be lost than there is to be gained.

For example, the other night while I was making dinner—and I’ll return to that activity in a moment—my children got to (read: had to) play by themselves.  Adam had already had a piano lesson; Gretchen had already taken a nap.  We had already had some time together for snacks and a trip to meet Adam’s new teacher and discuss his allergies.  And so my children had something they would not have if they were on multiple sports teams: down time. 

Segway to a snapshot of our home: our dining room is neither elegant nor neat.  We have a big indestructible table covered in colored paper and cardboard, markers and crayons, scissors and tape and popsicle sticks and googly eyes.  We have a play kitchen and a lego table, and the floor is often strewn with plastic food and lego blocks and pretend money and a few stray dominoes and other detritus of childhood.  The chaos of that room often makes me cringe and sometimes makes me angry.  Interestingly enough, however, the response the room more often than not garners from visitors (at least visitors of a certain type) is, “This room is awesome!” 

The chaos of the room more accurately reflects the mind of my youngest than any of the rest of us, although all of us are prone to leaving things where we last used them when we get distracted by (or startled into) the next activity.  Gretchen, though, lives in a world of constant imagination, a world with multiple simultaneous plotlines and lots of made-up songs.  During this one late afternoon, she wandered past the lego table and decided to set up a petting zoo.  She built a number of enclosures that were neck-high to the various animals she was going to display.  She built a slide entrance for the visitors, so they could get in but the cows could not get out.  She mounted pretend lights on tall pillars so that the zoo could stay open past sunset.  She surrounded the penguin enclosure with cooling blocks.   The longer she played, the more details she thought out. 

Adam had returned to the play he had started on a previous afternoon.  He took our big tub of plastic animal figurines and sorted them into teams: the snakes, the frogs, the birds, the sea creatures, the wild dogs and cats, etc.  Then the teams competed in a baseball tournament.  He would periodically call out to me the current score.  On the evening in question, the frogs were winning, although the birds, being able to fly, are usually very good at fielding.  Yes, he could have been at real baseball practice then, had I signed him up for fall ball, but I couldn’t help but think that he has many years ahead of him for organized sports and likely far fewer years to make up a new world, to “believe” that the frogs could play the birds and win, to govern the rules not just of the game but of nature and physics as well.  You can’t sign your child up for imaginary play, but you can sign him up out of it.   

Meanwhile, I was making chickpea piccata over mashed cauliflower on a bed of arugula.  We had roasted squash and zucchini on the side and fresh blueberries and wheat-free, dairy-free chocolate chip zucchini cake for dessert.  It took some time, yes, but the end result was the sort of dinner I wish I could get in a nice restaurant but usually cannot.  I couldn’t help wonder if the people whose children are on two or three travel sport teams at a time ever eat that way, much less every night.  Doug commented to me recently that as he stands in line at grocery stores, he compares what most people buy to the food in our cart. (I confess I do the same, in a shamefully self-righteous way.)   Other people, he said, buy a lot of processed food: chicken strips, pizza rolls, crackers, fish sticks.  It’s quick and easy, no doubt, and it doesn’t mess your beautiful kitchen.  Likely, people eat that way because they don’t have time to chop and sauté, to study recipe books, to plan menus in advance, and then to wash several loads of dishes when dinner is over.  Likely, they do not read labels because their children are not allergic to wheat, milk, eggs, tree nuts, fish, and shell fish.   Perhaps they never think about the impact they are having on the environment by supporting factory farming, the over-production of genetically modified corn, and chemically processed and over-packaged food-like products.  Unfortunately, somehow we’ve come to believe that by making such decisions, we are prioritizing our children’s futures—namely, their chances of making the high school soccer and baseball teams—while failing to recognize that such decisions, in fact, only look towards a few years of sports competitions and not the long-term health and survival of the people we claim to love.

That night, I surveyed my messy house: the kitchen covered in dirty or air-drying dishes, the dining room covered in half-completed craft projects and a lego zoo, the family room set up as a baseball diamond with the birds in the field and the frogs lined up in their batting order, the shelves and bags and tables over-flowing with books and magazines and homework .  My kids did not get “ahead” at anything that evening.  Had someone come to our house, they would not have been impressed by either my domestic prowess nor my interior design skills.  For that moment, though, I thought that  maybe by making dinner and making my kids amuse themselves, we all came out ahead anyway.