Dominic, ten, made a game yesterday from an old pizza box. You toss in five small candies, and you add or subtract the numbers on which they land. The first player to 100 wins, unless you land on enough “pick a puzzle piece” spaces to spell out “You Win The Game.”While Dominic was creating this masterpiece, Daney, nine, fashioned herself an office. Pushing her nightstand into the corner of her room, she blew through four library books.
Rees, seven, ran around in a full-body Star Wars Clone Trooper outfit, with a red bike helmet and snowboard goggles, spying on the oblivious cat.
After some time, Dominic brought the game into Daney’s office, and they played until Rees came in and ate the candy. Because there were no game pieces, the kids filled a cooler with books, drug it outside behind a rose trellis, and threw a sheet over the top.
Aside from a few meals and bathroom breaks, this was one whole, happy day.
Their imagination is inspiring.
Like my kids, I wish I could clear my calendar and focus on creativity. I wish I had hours, days, weeks just to write, with nothing in the way.
I wish I could pick up and strum a guitar, like Dominic, or lounge in bed with a good book all afternoon like Daney, or chase butterflies in the sunshine like Rees.
Their bliss makes me sad, in a way, that I am too busy now to play, that my Lego homes are becoming obsolete, that my tea parties are few and far between.
It has nothing to do with time. If there were more hours in a day, I would still fill them with laundry, peeling vegetables, and doing dishes.
It has to do with guilt and responsibility and the fear of getting really behind.
I wonder, though, what my writing would be like if I could give it complete, uninhibited surrender. Would it be more fluid than these ten-minute snippets of plot all crammed together?
“If you slowed down your life,” says Dominic. “What would you write?”
“Yeah,” agrees Daney. “You’d have a lot of time, but nothing to write about.”
Reesie has no hesitation. “Stop writing,” he says. “You can read me this story about the police dog.”
2 comments:
I love hearing what your kids do in their downtime! Maybe you should start Daney on a manuscript of her own...no doubt she can kick out something better than Judy Moody!
CR
But you're still writing alot in those ten minute stretches and you have something to show for it. You're also writing a script inside your children's heads that features imagination and creativity as the major themes. That is an accomplishment too.
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