The Twists of Time

I was lucky. When my two girls were young, I always had some work/life balance owing to always working around various part-time work schedules. Both my daughters accompanied me to my office job until six months old; the youngest started at nine days old. I was never home full-time. But I was home plenty enough to need sources of entertainment outside of home. Fifteen years ago in my hometown, that was easily achieved between the public library, the parks, and the living rooms of other young parents. We saw amazing puppet shows, musical guests, plays and artists at both the libraries within walking or transit distance from home. We conducted leaf science underfoot on numerous occasions walking to and in city parks. We made paint messes throughout our house and others. All in all we were quite busy and in my mind as cultured as we could be compared to my disappeared independence of college-educated adult gal. In those days my number one criteria for sources of entertainment: no fee.
Eventually our social entertainment playground included annual gift membership destinations such as the zoo, the science museum or the children's museum on a revolving basis. And the grandparents also provided symphony dates, but in truth my own out-of-pocket entertainment expenses for years were nil.
Nowadays, from the periphery of tween and teen social strata, it appears there is no end of cultural, engaged hobnobbing available to the young and their keepers. There are still fabulous free shows and guests to be seen at the library (although capacity is limited and one tends to have to arrive early to get a ticket), the parks are older and more majestic throughout the seasons and have updated playgrounds, and no doubt households are teeming with young guests and socially-deprived parents in need of camaraderie and conversation. Additionally, there are crops of cafes and indoor play palaces catering to these folk - places were congregation is popular and often comes with admission or at least the price of coffee. I can't help reflecting how impossible it would have been for me to participate in this expanded culture. My earliest recollection of feeling panicked by the prospect of paying to play was when a family asked us to join them at the Burlingame McDonald's indoor play structure when it was a hot spot, pre-PlayDate PDX and JJ Jump and all the others. I was conflicted and horrified that I had to patronize an establishment I wouldn't otherwise visit to accept the invitation, and I was challenged that it would cost money. It was the slow dawn signalling that though the library would forever anchor our reading habits and weekly habits, we would outgrow the free entertainment resources it offered.

Of course, and luckily, resources do evolve over the years. Eventually children demand a debut on the consumer scene and just as importantly need to learn to value the costs and balance of social life. Without a television at home, we may have craved movie-going by the tween years more than the average person. That came after hosting art camp with my daughter among 7-year olds and realizing she was the only one at the lunch table who could not participate in the popular conversation because she hadn't seen the programs or the movies de rigueur. I will always proudly own that my version of screen-time with a toddler was sitting on the floor in my daughter's bedroom with my head buried in the first Harry Potter book while she emptied every dresser drawer and played laundry contentedly. Movies were one of the first - and ongoing - expenses of parent-child entertainment I adopted. Now it's just plain a guilty pleasure to share a movie date with either of my daughters. The big-screen is still a novelty for us and happens pretty rarely. I love that so many movies these days are unoriginal scripts, as in borrowing stories from the literary masters and moving them to the screens. I love that we aim to read any book before we see it, or get excited upon discovering a book version exists so we can go back to the source.

But funding entertainment doesn't mean I forgo the freebies. In fact the stakes seem so much higher now, finding satisfying things to do together when they'd so often rather be with their friends, or in the case of one daughter, at home in her own element. Things that won't break the bank. Fast forward to yesterday, when I bucked our tradition of walking to a neighborhood lot for a Christmas tree we would typically launch to home on the old wagon just days before Christmas so as not to eclipse the pre-holiday birthday of my oldest daughter. In an effort to extend the adventure, we drove out to a farm to choose and cut our tree. It could be that I was the only one expecting to enjoy this. It could be that I was the only one prepared to enjoy it. While it seemed plausible to wander the cultivated woods and emerge with a tree that made at least two if not three of us happy, it was a chore. There was cold, there was anger, there was species disharmony (Grand Fir vs. Noble Fir vs. Douglas), there was too much brown in the middle of every favorite tree. There was dispute over how tall a tree could or had to be. There was insolence and yelling and chaos. There were furrowed brows and impatience. It's really quite a workout to saw through a standing tree with a mediocre borrowed handsaw. I about died when one of the potential trees had a trunk bigger than my upper arm. I actually worked up my sweat over two trees, as my dad was with us and had no trouble at all choosing the tree he wanted. 

I'm not sure that my kids will ever remember this effort fondly. I know my dad won't especially remember it at all - with Alzheimer's robbing his brain of the ability to make new memories and hold them. But I had a great time. And in this twist of time, my number one criteria for sources of entertainment don't always have to be free. They have to produce feelings. I scored all around this time.