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One of the great surprises I had upon becoming a father was that because I had a child, I could play like a child again. Nobody told me that would happen.
I have seen it happen to others, and not only to humans. It has happened to our adult cats.
"Play with her, Leo," my wife Honey said. "She's asking you to play with her."
The "her" is Cammie, one of the five kittens we recently fostered, and the only one we kept from that litter. Leo is one of the three adult cats in our household we kept from a previous foster litter. (Sense a pattern here?) Though just turning one year of age, those three ex-kittens have become stodgy grown-ups whose lives revolve around getting petted, going outside to raid the chipmunk villages, and demanding regular feedings.
The two males in our very recent foster litter of five went back to the animal shelter when they achieved the magical weight of two pounds, but the residency in our home of the three females was extended by a whopping six weeks due to a ringworm infection, from which they hopefully have been cured.
When it came time to send these three now half-grown kittens back to the pound for adoption, my wife searched desperately for some nice old cat lady for Cammie, the sweet cuddler to which she had become overly attached. No luck. She had to be the nice old cat lady she had looked for.
"It's okay. You can keep Cammie. What's one more cat?" I told my wife.
That is the backstory to the cat portion of the child play renewal theme I'm working on here.
I've always been good at playing with children. When Honey and I were in an extended motel stay while negotiating the purchase of our first house, the motel owner's young son came to the door and asked, "Can Fred come out and play?"
I had no experience playing with babies and toddlers, however, but soon found out how much fun they could be. I invented two games which I think have a good chance of being passed down in the family. One is "I've got a little baby." I sing, "I've got a little baby, his name is ..., he's such a little baby he doesn't know what his belly button (or whatever) is." When the child points to it, I say, "Oh, he does know what his belly button is!" And on to any other body part or object or person. We played this game until the kids and grandkids were to too old to be sitting on my lap, and the object of the game became a joke, crying "Wrong!" to every answer.
The other game is "bad foot, good foot," in which I spank the bottom of whichever foot is not behaving itself and pet the good foot, alternately lecturing or praising. Children catch on quickly and chortle gleefully as they make good feet turn bad.
As a recent graduation event broke up I noticed a man in son Seed's extended family playing outside with his son. He is around 30, the boy 7 or 8, but they were chasing and jumping like boys of the same age. A man who does that not only earns praise as a good father, but has as much fun as the child does.
At the risk of gender stereotyping, I would say fathers are most likely to become playmates, leaving mothers to be the adult in the room. Perhaps the roles can reverse if the child is a girl. Nah.
Our three big cats were at first wary of and sometimes hostile to the five tiny foster kittens running like wild rats through our home. Curiosity eventually led to acceptance, and then the funny thing happened. They began to play together. The kittens, who at first showed no fear of the big cats, were now the wary parties. Was that giant paw swipe or chase around the room done as play or aggression? However, not only did the adults learn to play gently with the kittens, they began to play with each other like when they were kittens.
It was last Wednesday that Cammie's two sisters went back to the pound. She keeps looking for them. She acts sad, and begs for attention. Honey keeps encouraging the big cats to play more with her.
I should play more with her, but I've become a bit of a stodgy oldster, too. I need to remind myself there is joy in child's play for both of us.