Dispatch #43: Child's Play

Scattered thoughts about fantasy and pretend

Two weeks ago, my thirteen-year-old son tried to fashion a knife out of a spoon he discovered in the back yard. He painstakingly sharpened it against an orphaned water spigot he found on the ground at school.

Clink clink clink.

“I’m going to be fur trader some day,” he called out. “I’ll need a knife to skin the pelts.”

Clink clink clink.

“Okay,” I yelled back. “Don’t bring it to school, though.”

“I won’t!”

Clink clink clink.

*

Like most PE classes, his seems like utter bullshit. Their gym is always being rehabbed in some way, or the locker room is condemned, and so the kids are left to do nothing for ninety minutes. Last week, Bean spent PE with a crowd of kids at the edge of some trash-strewn field. The coaches were nowhere to be found, and so, while most students zoned out on TikTok, he and friends found an abandoned shed (?!) and set up a trading post. More kids arrived to participate. A trade economy of pirated goods formed: abandoned nails for more interesting scrap metal, and more interesting scrap metal for a stick of gum, and so on.

Someone found a giant net and began capturing people. These people were put to work digging for more metals.

“It took two days for slavery to be invented,” Bean said balefully.

*

The same day he was fashioning this knife, an unidentified number called me twice before I picked up. When I did, I heard many people speaking, shrieking, laughing.

Then I heard Bean’s voice. Mom!

“I walked out!” he cried into the receiver. “I’m part of the protest!” He was gleeful.

He said there were tons of kids walking out to protest the Trump administration and the inhumane policies of ICE. Some of the students were going to City Hall. He would head to our local public library with friends to make posters.

He said, “I’m fighting fascism!” before hanging up.

Later, I made him show me the posters, partly because I was curious, and partly because I wanted proof that he had skipped school to exercise his constitutional rights and not to just, you know, goof off.

I was happy to see the fliers they’d printed out (bless our librarians!) and taped to the trees and telephone poles. They were real!

Fuck ICE/ no human is illegal

I asked why he hadn’t, instead, stayed in school and joined the letter writing campaign they were holding during lunch.

“Letter writing?” His voice dripped with derision. “That does nothing!”

When I pointed out that it did about as much as putting up signs, he said, “But putting up signs made me feel better.”

*

For the past year, Ginger, who’s in the third grade, has begun so many art projects and opened so many businesses that it’s difficult to keep track of them all. Each endeavor is deadly serious.

Recently, she and two friends wanted to do a bake sale fundraiser for fire victims. Because she had missed the playdate to test out the cookie recipe, she went ahead and did her part by making a poster. Never mind that we didn’t have any poster board. She refused to wait. Armed with scissors, a Land’s End catalogue, markers, a glue stick, washi tape, and printer paper, she went to work. She taped together the smaller papers to make one large canvas.

In place of useful information, the poster offered catalogue models longing for cookies. A month later, if anyone implies that this might not be the final poster, she loses her mind.

A deranged yet perfect poster

*

While talk of the bake sale has faded away, there are other plans afoot. For instance, Ginger is directing (and producing and starring in) a staging of Wicked at her school; somehow she convinced the assistant principal to let them into the auditorium during lunch so that they might rehearse. In the evenings and on weekends, she handwrites scripts for her friends; these are key scenes as she recalls them from the movie. She will play Glinda (nee Galinda). She wonders aloud if my mother can make the costumes.

The play opens in May.

When she isn’t working on this, Ginger is drawing the characters of her sitcom, The Davis Family. She’s been watching Full House religiously for the past month and is obsessed. She now wants to be a TV writer—no, a show runner, which is a word I taught her.

She wants to make this show, The Davis Family, as soon as possible. My nephew, who is almost seven, has already agreed to play the middle-aged father.

“He’s gonna need to fix his speech impediment if it’s going to be believable,” she says without a hint of irony.

*

Meanwhile, Mickey, my kindergartener, is still hoping to get a jetpack. A working jetpack, as he had me put on his Christmas list.

While he’s playing, he often comes up to me to ask if things are real.

Are blasters real?

Are portals real?

Are black holes real?

In other words: Does his imagination touch reality?

He seems to be asking me how capacious his ambitions can be.

*

I’ve been thinking a lot about my children’s dreams and delusions, and how I’m meant to relate to them, as their caregiver.

Bean’s minor act of protest required transgression and allowed for camaraderie with friends. It acted as a balm and it animated his hope.

It also supported the story he’s telling himself about the kind of person he is and wants to be. He reads history and is interested in political action; if I let him, he’ll berate me with information about general strikes and such. Sometimes I tell him to stop being such a cliché.

“A cliché?!” he repeats. “I am not a cliché! Of what?”

I tell him he’s every pontificating white guy in college passing out fliers to join the cause.

That makes him laugh in disbelief. The idea that there are others like him! At thirteen, it’s impossible to believe.

My teasing is gentle, though. Most of the time, I tell him he’s the coolest teenager around, and that I am proud of him for being so engaged. I mean, how many eighth graders are reading this?

*

Nowadays I wonder more about the mothers of revolutionaries more than I wonder about the revolutionaries themselves. What did Bobby Sands’ mother think, when his hunger strike began? Was there a childhood antecedent?

And when it ended—

*

Bean knows he doesn’t really, actually, run a trading post, just as much as he knows he won’t really, actually, become a fur trader. (What year is it again?) These are games—and I am grateful he can still enter the daydream.

I don’t think he actually wants to lead a revolution, either. At this point, it’s an academic interest with shades of playing pretend; he is reveling in a fantasy borne by the horrors in the news. Like all play, it’s productive: it shapes understanding, pushes boundaries, becomes a mode of self-exploration.

When Ginger imagines herself a creator of a big-budget television series, she is being creative, and she’s problem solving, and she is catapulting herself into a reality where she has power and know-how, and where her entire life is dedicated to the Art of the Sitcom, an enclosed universe that is never scary.

Who am I to shut that down?

As for Mickey, he just learned black holes are real, and he is excited.

*

My children’s acts of play make me wonder about my own. What do I pretend at?

At work, I play pretend all the time, writing stories about people and scenarios that do not exist.

And let’s face it: writing a novel at all is one long act of delusion. I’m going to get paid for this! This is going to blow people’s minds! It might even change the world!

I nurse other delusions too:

This [article of clothing I haven’t tried on yet] is going to make me look so elegant.

Our trip to Denmark may just change me.

Once I read x I’ll understand y.

Didn’t I play at being an adult until one day I woke up middle-aged?

And when Patrick and I decided to have kids, wasn’t that a step into an unknown world we could only guess at?

In Gideon Lewis-Kraus’s article “The End of Children,” about declining birth rates around the world, he writes:

There’s a philosophical view, best associated with the scholar L. A. Paul, that the decision to have children is fundamentally irrational. A rigorous cost-benefit analysis might produce an estimate of a child’s expected value, but the experience is transformative in a way that renders the calculation irrelevant. You will have made a decision by the lights of a person you will no longer be.

*

One of the problems with having multiple kids is that the older siblings shit on the dreams of the younger siblings. While I always express support of Ginger’s production of Wicked, there’s Bean asking questions she can’t answer:

Who is going to do the set design? Are you doing the entire musical? It’s like 3 hours long!

“No one is going to see this!” he yells and then she cries.

He also refused to be cast in The Davis Family and told her the whole thing was absurd. That’s a rich response, coming from a kid fashioning knives out of spoons with which to skin muskrats.

At the same time, I appreciate the cynical realism a sibling offers. It brings the dreamer down to Earth and it also gives them something to push against. We all need a little “I’ll show you!” fist shaking to clarify our intentions.

It also keeps me, the parent, in the role of gentle encourager. I don’t want to be the sober realist.

*

When one of our kids makes fun of someone else’s plans, I quote The Mountain Goats’ song “The Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton.” In it, two friends have dreams of starting a death metal band:

Jeff and Cyrus believed in their hearts
they were headed for stage lights and lear jets
and fortune and fame

And then Jeff is sent to the school where they “tell him he’ll never be famous,” and Cyrus writes to him “with a plan to get even.”

And then there is the most poignant line, the one I quote to my kids:

When you punish a person for dreaming his dream
Don't expect him to thank or forgive you

*

Some people seem to believe that loving a person means bracing them for the cruel world before their beloved meets it. Or, worse: by offering them their first taste of cruelty.

As if we can inoculate against pain with pain.

*

But, also, I want to keep my children’s dreams and delusions in the realm of pretend—for now.

It seems like a lot of parents are swift to professionalize a child’s play. Let’s get Ginger in a screenwriting class! Get her an agent! Let me put Bean into a welding workshop! Mickey, would you like to take a class in astronomy?

Every fleeting or enduring interest becomes fodder for a structured activity rather than remaining a private occupation that isn’t meant to go anywhere, be anything, amount to something.

It’s a fine line, of course. It’s not totally clear when support and encouragement turn into gross optimization for success on the ever shrinking glacier of late capitalist achievement.

We’re just trying to help our kids find what lights them up.

*

Patrick thinks part of why our kids are so good at pretending, why they lead these intense fantasy lives, is because so much of their time is unscheduled. They have nothing to do but day dream.

Can you put day dreaming on your college application?

*

The spoon that Bean was making into a knife is now in his bedroom. It’s missing the spoon part—it’s just a metal handle now, and not sharp at all. It’s not a weapon, but it’s also no longer a spoon.

I don’t dare throw it away.

Sometimes motherhood can be boiled down to this: finding the deranged poster, finding the mutilated spoon, and letting them be. I notice them and my noticing is a sincere form of love.

*

I spent my childhood telling my parents my dreams, my ambitions. They never told me they wouldn’t happen. They listened, they paid attention.

That was all I needed to keep conjuring.

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