Caution: Woman at Play

I had this urge to dance! To skip! To jump!

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about this idea of play and the inner child. I never really paid much attention to it and more so understood the concept in a broad scope — The idea that we have to connect to who we were when we were little or that we have to make our younger selves proud.

I was on a walk the other day, and I hit a sort of “in the zone” moment where I walked for an hour, which is not the length I typically walk. Normally it’s about 20 to 30 minutes to help me to clear my head, stay active, and reset. But that day, as I got to 30 minutes and then 45, I started feeling this urge, like my body wanted more. Like it was craving more movement. Not just a jog, but something more along the lines of play.

I had this urge to dance! To skip! To jump!

But I was immediately stopped by the feeling that if someone saw me doing that, I would probably look pretty ridiculous. A grown woman, skipping? Alert the authorities!

And then I thought, there will never be a time in my life where it is not going to appear strange to play alone out in the open. Unless I’m completely alone in the woods somewhere and even then that’s not likely because LA hiking trails are always packed.

And then came this overwhelming feeling of mourning for a childhood that was over. And has been for a long time.

When we were little, we used to go outside and play for what felt like, or what very well could’ve been, hours. We didn’t have any timeline, any limits, anything to do, especially if it was summer and we didn’t have school. The days were endless. We would just go out there and do whatever came to mind — digging in dirt, playing with sidewalk chalk, hide and seek, playing pretend, tag, or any thousands of versions of made up games that would change daily. We would be out of breath, panting, cheeks rosy in the humid Texas weather. We would get dirt under our fingernails, grass stains on our jeans, or scraped and scabbed up knees, all of which were evidence of an unforgettable afternoon outside.

I was recently looking at an Apple Watch feature (that sentence alone is soul-crushing) that tells you how much time you allegedly spend outdoors daily. Recently I’ve been wearing my watch a lot less because it started to feel a little too dystopian, but there was a period where I wore it almost every day. During that period, my average time outside was only 20 minutes, and I really didn’t believe that. (Sure, there are outliers like days where I wasn’t wearing my watch so Apple thought I didn’t go outside.) But I still didn’t understand how that was even possible. But then I thought about it a little further. There are many mornings where I spend hours inside drinking my coffee, reading, writing, cleaning, etc., then I step outside to maybe go to the gym. The walk to my car is probably 30 seconds. The walk into the gym, about a minute. Then I come home. That’s another minute and a half of being outside and there goes half the day and we’re only at three minutes total of outside time. Or the days I have work where I’m inside an office for most of the day, only stepping out for a brief lunch walk and once again the walk to my car after work. All of those short little minutes of walking to my car may just add to about 20 minutes a day.

It hit me that I am not living like my inner child at all. It’s not natural for me anymore to sit outside in the sun for one hour, two hours, three hours. It’s not natural for me to play and have fun doing nothing, and I don’t think it’s very natural for anybody in this day and age.

So no wonder I had that urge for movement. It’s almost like my body was remembering what it was like to let go and have fun.

But I’m not sure how to embody the idea of play. What does that really look like? Is the only way to achieve this to become a mother? That way, I have a child to play with as an excuse to play? A way to negate the weirdness of dancing alone or skipping or singing?

This got me thinking about the roles women play in society. The image of mothers comes to mind. I feel like we constantly see mothers depicted as the responsible ones. (This view goes way back, cemented into my brain because of being in elementary school, where it was sort of assumed that boys would act up more than girls in class.) I see this joke time and time again on TV and in movies where the dad is the one who sneaks the child a sweet and tells them not to tell their mother, or the dad that does a fun toss at the public pool, leaving the anxiety-ridden mother in shambles having to school both her child and her husband. In this very narrow scope of women’s roles as mothers, where is the window for them to play and be carefree?

Perhaps this is all just an emotional spiral. Maybe this is just a fear of losing my autonomy making itself known. And if so, maybe it’s just a caution sign for my current and future self, alerting me that time needs to be made for slow moments, to be a person without needing to be productive. To play.

For me, that looks like my hour-long walks (or as long as I can), allowing myself to explore a new path, allowing room for joy to creep in. It looks like reading time. It looks like going to the movie theater alone. It looks like finding time to do nothing. I’m still working on this, so I’m not quite there yet, but I think it might unlock this sort of happy freedom, ensuring that no matter what’s going on in your life — work, kids, family, etc. etc., you still exist and your inner child does too.

What makes your inner child happy?