In Praise of Play

My daughter Cecilia and I moved from Spain to the United States two years ago, originally just for a year, but now it looks like that year is being extended indefinitely. Until I can gather the funds for a “real” home, we’re living in a little rental duplex: not exactly where I want to be at this age, but I do know it’s temporary. Back in Spain, I was used to being surrounded by Ceci’s friends; she would always invite them over to play (no, not “play dates”, perish the expression!!!), have lunch, or spend the night. I love those friends and the easy banter we had – after all, we’d known each other their whole lives. They were my surrogate children, and I still love them dearly.

They would take over one entire floor of our house with their elaborate set-ups and scenarios: a combination of all the different toys Cecilia has ever had in her life , most of them animals and homes for the animals, but also shoe boxes converted into stables, farms, zoos, and homes, toilet paper rolls with green construction paper on top for miniature trees, fences made of popsicle sticks, and other childish yet clever accoutrements she and her friends spent hours carefully crafting. When they tired of that game, out would come the costumes, a mixture of hand-me-down tutus, old Carnaval and Halloween costumes (running the gamut from her giraffe costume from when she was three years old to her more recent “Gothic witch girl” costume), scarves, boas and anything else that could be tied, draped or tucked into a fantastical getup. Or perhaps they would haul out the paint, brushes, paper, pencils and other art gear and proudly produce their handiwork an hour later. They would spend hours and hours playing upstairs, and even last summer, when we were in Barcelona for a visit, although they were now 11 years old, they still played, fought, made up (fer les paus), invented, created, and giggled for hours on end.

A few months ago I asked Cecilia why she never invited her friends over to our home in the U.S. I imagined it was because she had just met them at her new school and wasn’t familiar enough with them yet, or maybe because she was a little embarrassed by our tiny quarters. Her answer flabbergasted me: “I don’t want them to see my horses.” Now, Cecilia is a collector, no, make that hoarder, of any plastic horse or conceivable horse-related accessory on Earth. She has dozens and dozens of them, plus at least ten stables –  from the lovely wooden one her father gave her last year to an old box that she carefully cut out and glued with dividers to make stalls, shelves, and tack hangers. Of course they’re all fitted out with her store-bought and handmade bales of hay, apples, carrots, tack, saddle pads, hoof ointment, bridles, halters, and anything else a barn has. I realized that Cecilia had just revealed the change I’d noticed in her since she’d started in her new school, a change I had attributed more to her age than the school, although it no doubt has to do with both. At her school, girls her age are into makeup, mall clothes (the same five brands, all overpriced and identical except for the name screaming across the chest  or rear), boys, sports, cell phones, iPods, roller skating, and other ‘tweeny stuff. Cecilia has suddenly tried on this personality for size, too, and I have to say that I missed her sweeter self, the more “Cecilia” Cecilia, the kid. Nostalgia for a lost little child, one that was all mine. And now although she is unwilling to give up her toys and crafts – she can still spend hours at it and often does, she has to do it alone instead of with her school friends to avoid ostracism if she revealed her littler self. I thought it was a reasonable, though sad, compromise: don’t give it up, but don’t make herself vulnerable to mockery by sharing it.

The exception is her friend Kathryn, the daughter of a dear friend of mine, a girl she’s known all her life, whom she has sisterly spats with and walks away in a huff… but only so many days can go by before Cecilia tells me she misses Kathryn – she needs a Kat fix. They go to different schools, so both seem to feel comfortable revealing that inner layer of child they each still hold so dear. Sometimes Kathryn’s mother and I listen to them play, and we look at each other and wistfully sigh, keenly aware that these days are numbered yet tickled that our children still hold onto the joyful abandon of childhood and have someone to share it with.

Last year, our first year back in the U.S., Cecilia went to a private, alternative school where not only can kids be kids until eighth grade (and they emphatically are!), but the five-year-olds easily play with the twelve-year-olds. A magical place. On the last day of class, two mothers and their daughters from Cecilia’s class invited us to join them in their yearly “school’s out” ritual of lunch and then the bookstore to pick up summer reading material. At the bookstore, as we mothers chatted on foot-high stools in the kids’ book section, we heard the girls’ laughter and chattering, and I turned around. There they were, three 11-to-12-year-olds, playing with the toy train set there to entertain little kids. I realized what a blessing that school had been, that with her school friends they could still play, still be little and innocent, still laugh with childish glee, not oh-so-knowing cattiness, and let their minds wander and imaginations soar.

If only I could have afforded to keep Cecilia in that school, but it was a home of our own or school, and home won out. How I miss the child that she could be there! Yet this past spring break, back in Spain again, no sooner did we enter our home than Cecilia disappeared upstairs. I was busy unpacking, but after about an hour I snuck up there to see what she was up to. There was my mature, clever, knowing 12-year-old surrounded by a sea of old costumes, a vast farm scenario already set up – big as our living room in the U.S. – her doll house tidied and redecorated. She had literally marked her territory, or reclaimed it, in truth. Cecilia was wallowing in, relishing, frolicking in her childhood again, and soon her best friends Maria, Anabel and Ramon joined her. And I realized just why it is so hard for us to imagine giving up that home in Spain: that is her childhood home, a magical place where she can create her own world, dress crazy, fight over who gets what horse, make up dances, draw and paint on her easel, make tiny little make-believe voices, take boxes, pieces of paper and other odds and ends and turn them into whatever her heart desires and imagination conjures up. There Cecilia can return to her original, truest self, and I can reclaim my baby, my little girl, my crazy, madcap, silly, beautiful little Tweety whom I miss so much.