Wormholes in Time

In the evenings, when I go to pick up my 8 yo daughter from play, she and her friends will insist that I chase them to the lift. Since they have converted the transition from play and fun to the home into a game, it’s easier for me to get her back without the endless negotiations of “5 more minutes, pleeee…ease” or “It’s not yet dark”.

As I read Jennifer Senior’s awesome book, All Joy and No Fun, on what parenting does to parents, I realized why I enjoy the chasing part. It’s the thrill of the chase, of course!

“(Young children) also create wormholes in time, transporting their fathers and mothers back to feelings and sensations they haven’t had since they were young themselves.”

During the chase, anytime I am closing in on one of them, they’ll scream for a timeout (“Game pause” in their lingo) shamelessly. That’s another thing with kids: rules can be bent and broken. Unlike how adults how view the world:

“I’m talking about the selves who live too much in their heads rather than their bodies; who are burdened with too much knowledge about how the world works rather than excited by how it could work or should.”

Of course, I ignore their timeout calls and tell they’re out (“it”) anyway. On that front, I realized my actions fit in with something else Senior wrote in her book:

“Sometimes the transcendent joys of toddler-dom aren’t about transcendence at all, but how far we can descend. These joys give us a reprieve from etiquette, let us shelve our inhibitions, make it possible for our self-conscious, rule-observing selves to be tucked away.”

And it’s times like this one can understand what Adam Philips said:

“Children are mad in the best sense of the word.”

Of course, kids don’t just change their parents via the games we play with them. They also break the rut we all fall into all too easily as adults:

“Young children can go a long way towards yanking grown-ups out of their silly preoccupations and cramped little mazes of self-interest – not just relieving their parents of their egos, but helping them aspire to something better.”

And even with (because of?) all the effort and time that goes into everything we do for them, on our better days, we get that very pleasant feeling, as Gopnik once wrote:

 “Caring for children is an awfully fast and efficient way to experience at least a little sainthood.”