Mommy Play-Time Hell.
It was a cute anecdote, I had to admit it. But something about it had bothered me, and nausea cramped my stomach. I had been out walking our sweet mutt, Fannie Mae, when my neighbor Cindy crossed the street to dish about what was new on the block. She’d regaled me with the latest development on her front: she and her four year old daughter had engaged in a dueling marathon of Candy Land the night before.
After hearing that the game had continued until Sarah had failed to win for the third time in a row, all I’d had to offer was a moronic Oh, my God, you must have the patience of a saint! Watching a puzzled expression cross Cindy’s face made me realize I’d just committed a faux pas. Or maybe she just had never heard the phrase before. However you looked at it, I couldn’t stop myself from busily calculating the time it must have taken to complete a triple round of this board game that was so popular with kids throughout the many years since its first manufacture. It had to be nearly an hour, I concluded with horror.
Nevertheless, I saw immediately that the vignette surely had deserved at least a smile. Yet, I had stumbled in my response, as I often did when faced with listening to stories like these. I’d had nothing to offer except that lame expression I’d heard so often while growing up, an expression that was, in fact, one of my mother’s; Florence Crylen was a woman totally and chronically overwhelmed by parenting, and had little tolerance and zero interest in entertaining any of her eight kids. No Candy Land with Mom for us.
Ancient memories marched through my mind and the sense of unease in my gut intensified. I used Fannie Mae as an excuse to start walking again and said goodbye to Cindy. As we moved on down the street, all I could think about was how I’d felt as a new mother when called upon to participate in a host of kiddie-centered activities—the kind I’d always thought of as being the backbone of Mommy-Playtime-Hell.
As I took one of my poop baggies out of my pocket, I wondered, with something akin to shame, whether I would ever be able to simply grin, or maybe even offer an enthusiastic rejoinder to this sort of share from a friend, albeit one in a different stage of her life? After all, it wasn’t as if I hadn’t enjoyed most of my interactions with my own daughter when she was small. So why did I always react to other mothers describing these play-time activities with their kids as if I were experiencing post-traumatic stress disorder?
I was unable to imagine that I would have ever been able to hang out in the Peppermint Forest or at the Lollipop Palace with my own girl as long as Cindy had with hers, and so I was amazed by her sheer tenacity. I knew exactly what kind of Mom my neighbor must be—not the kind of parent I had been. When so anxious about this sort of playtime that I imagined myself raising my voice in refusal, I’d had to consciously take a deep breath, then sit down and calmly do whatever was asked. Cindy, in contrast, would never, ever, have been tempted––as I had been––to scream NO! in response to a Will you play with me?
As a clinical psychologist, I have long understood that one-size-fits-all parenting is an unrealistic proposition. The “goodness of fit” between ourselves and our children can vary greatly––which is to say is that everyone involved must have an appreciation for the way personality and temperament interact when families try to bond. Such understanding makes it easier to tease apart how best to connect with and respond to a kid—thereby minimizing tension and maximizing pleasure.
I had tried to be reassured by these truths as a young mother and to incorporate them into my own parenting. But the reality was that back then I hadn’t been terribly successful in accepting or practicing what, as a psychologist, I knew to be true. I’d experienced activities like building with blocks, cutting out paper dolls, fingerpainting, and engaging in most types of pretend play as not merely boring, but as torture. I’d viewed playing certain board games, like Candy Land or Chutes and Ladders, and later, Sorry or Monopoly, as akin to being asked to quit breathing. But instead of just pawning off these no-brainer exercises to others––as a more confident mother might have done––I ultimately treated these playtimes as crucibles. They became critical tests of my patience and fortitude. The test was to see how good a mother I was—and how different a mother I was from my own.
How crazy was THAT? I found myself thinking when I revisited the issue a few days after my encounter with Cindy. As I sat down in an old wicker rocker on my front porch, I reflected on how hard I’d been on myself as a new Mom. Before long, a different question began circling my thoughts: But isn’t there even more to the story?
A forgotten memory reemerged then, set against the backdrop of my early childhood. How confusing those years had been for me, as I was tasked with the job of entertaining my youngest brother, an anxious and volatile toddler who would not easily be soothed. My mother couldn’t handle him, so she steered him to me. I was only six years older than my sibling, but Mom nevertheless expected that I would be the one to keep him busy.
I wore this responsibility like a heavy weight. How desperately, I remembered now, I’d wanted to be free of this child: liberated, able to run off with friends, or simply allowed to play on my own. But reprieves had come neither often nor easily. Worse, as a nine-year-old girl, I didn’t possess anything like the “patience of a saint.” And who would have imagined that I should have? Only my mother, it seemed.
Was it any wonder, I thought now, that I’d later come to classify all these kinds of play as torture? I rocked my chair back and forth, and then sadness mixed with hope: a new sense of clarity settled over me. An important part of the equation for understanding my negative responses to cute-kid stories snapped more firmly into place.
In any case, right now I’m working to reframe how I might better answer the cute Mommy-Child play stories without feeling such a strong swell of anxiety, or as if a trap door had opened beneath my feet. I don’t expect to ever enjoy a Candy Land binge, mind you, but how pleasant it would be to offer up a happy-sounding How dear is that!