3/7/2011 - the power of pretend. . .

In a theoretical way, I always thought that I would make a great dad some day.  In theory, I'd like to think of myself as parental and a good caregiver, the fun dad that my kids would call "Pop."  In reality, I have less than no idea how to relate to them. 

By the time kids have made their way through baby- and toddlerhood, they likely have developed little personalities and want to play games, pretend and imagine.  I'm no good at any of that stuff.  In that way, I have always been old.  Even when I was young, I was old.  I think I first got the acute sense of it when I was nine or 10, and I discovered that I lacked imagination.  For Christmas one year, I got an elaborate Lego set of a medieval castle, complete with four walls, an articulating drawbridge, and a glow-in-the-dark ghost to haunt the tower.  Exactly what I wanted.

It took me a few weeks to put it all together according to the included specs, and it was great fun to see it through to completion.  Once I placed the final Lego flag on the final Lego tower, I remember feeling a vague sense of disappointment, like a "What do I do with this now?" kind of feeling.  I didn't know, so I just looked at it, raising and lowering the drawbridge from time to time.

Mostly, it just sat there on my desk, like a monument to my failure.  I wanted to play with it, wage battles and quests with my horse-mounted Lego men, but I lacked the power of pretend and did not know how to play.  I could not move those Lego characters without seeing my hand doing the moving, could not act out scenes from King Arthur without seeing the carpet underneath the castle floors.  I couldn't even tear it apart and build something else with the pieces, anything other than what the instructions dictated.

In college, I dated a man with a five-year-old son named James.  James liked me well enough at first, constantly asking me to play Matchbox cars with him.  And I would, but tried as I did, I just could never make those Matchbox cars be anything more than palm-sized replicas of actual race cars (which itself didn't exactly thrill me in the first place).  The worst part was that I think he knew.  Eventually, he stopped asking me to play with him; could there be anything worse than failing at playing with a five-year-old?

But now I have Grr, practically a child himself in his needs and behaviors (both the good and the bad), and I think he sees me as the most fun dad that I could ever be.  When I come down the stairs, he often gallops over with his ears plastered to the side of his head, wagging his entire body along with his tail like it had been ages since he'd seen me last.  If I sit on the floor with him, he inevitably plops down on my lap with whatever chew toy he conveniently grabbed on his way.  In the mornings when he comes upstairs and I'm still in bed, he gives me little kisses all over my face and falls down right on my chest, as if to say, "I can't wait for you to wake up, give me all of your attention, and play!"

Who actually knows what he means since we can't exactly sit down and chat about it (that would pretty much solve my problems with kids, too, if I could do that).  But for now, I'll just pretend that that's what he means, and maybe with enough time, I'll come to learn that I do know how to play after all.