“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.
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