It was a good question, badly timed.
I’d swept the white wood kitchen floor at least 10 times, picked up umpteen Nerf pellets from around the room, and had been watching a friend’s four kids all night. The laundry machine rattled back and forth and around and the dryer hummed. The sink was full of dirty dishes, again.
“Why are adults so boring? Why can’t they be fun, like kids?”
It came out of nowhere from my sweet-faced 9-year-old boy, who stood there next to me all wide-eyed innocence, like he had no clue his question was destined to ignite my simmering rage.
I think my answer came out in one long, loud run-on sentence: How am I supposed to have any fun when all I do is clean up after you over and over, make sure you have the perfect breakfasts and lunches and dinners, make sure your jockstraps are washed and ready for baseball, and you can’t even stop wrestling each other to the ground over and over or shooting those Nerf guns around the kitchen and knocking things over!
Very calmly, when I finished, I looked him in the eye and said what I’d been feeling all day, all month, all year, maybe for a decade or more.
“Believe me, honey, I want to have fun. I think all this stuff is boring too. But someone has to do it.”
He looked at me with apologetic eyes then, like maybe he could finally understand. He may even have said a sweet whispered “sorry” as he came over to where I sat on the couch and hugged me, gave me kisses all over my face. And then he left to play computer.
It is a conundrum, really, how to have kid-like fun in middle age, strung between the worry and work of being a parent and concern over being a child of aging parents, working to build careers and keep one’s house in working order.
The New York Times recently reported that suicides are up at alarming rates for folks in the middle, and unlike many of their incendiary headlines, this one rang depressingly true.
Oscar, my boy, is onto something as usual. And what I didn’t say then but have since is “I’m trying to have fun!”
Let me count the ways. First off, I returned to piano playing a few years back and penned some poems I thought might be good to set to tunes. And I joined a band. Yes. A mom band, with three phenomenal likewise fun-seeking moms, Abena, Judy, and Evelyn. We’re calling ourselves “Finally Lost It” or F.L.I. Girls. We drum circle first, then rock out for an hour or more at Brooklyn Music Factory with our trusty teacher, Rob. We laugh and joke like we’re 14-year-old girls, even though the lyrics to the songs I write can be kind of sad. It occurred to me the other night that rock stars get away with wrinkles. It adds character.
We go out after, to a bar, to Sidecar, where Will the bartender kisses us on arrival and immediately starts pouring my bourbon on the rocks. I took up bourbon at a friend’s lovely house upstate over the snowy winter break. One, maybe two. Southerners are smart. It goes right to the veins, like an epidural, and really takes the edge off.
Lately, we’ve been heading into the city afterward, to Nublu in the East Village, a little Brazilian club, to listen to the phenomenal percussive stylings of Davi Vieira, whose drum beats somehow bring me straight up to happy, forcing my limbs to move in rhythm. Dancing free and un-self conscious is fun!
I have also started running writing workshops in my house, bringing some great smart minds in the neighborhood like young adult author Melissa Walker and Reiki Linda Gnat-Mullin to chat with us, mostly Brooklyn Moms, about how to tell our stories, how to expunge all that animosity and fear we have about being a boring adult. We laugh when we hear other people have the same messed-up fantasies of finding a way out of the doldrums as we do.
As parents, as people, we do have to have fun. Sometimes, focused solely on how much laundry there is to fold, I forget, or feel guilty.
I can still have fun. I just need to try a little harder.
Read Fearless Parenting every other Thursday on BrooklynPaper.com.
