Laughing, and with smiles as big as they could make them, the two little girls delighted in their new invisible game.
"Okay, I'm X's and..."
"And I'll be O's!"
"Yeah! Okay, I get to go first."
From where I stood, I couldn't quite see how (or if) they were marking their moves on the floor or any of the other rules of their makeshift tic-tac-toe game. But without fail, after the older one, a six-year-old with dirty blonde hair, called out her "X here!," her fourish sister, wearing nearly all pink, hopped a bit and called out, "O!" throwing her hands into the air and smiling like she'd won a prize.
That's what I love about little girls.
Sure enough, though, the game inevitably needed the validation of an authority figure. Turning to her mother, who was cradling yet another child in her arms only a few feet away, the six-year-old asked, "Will you play our game, Mommy?"
And after hearing the mother's answer, I now know why the world is headed for ruin.
She looked up from the infant, pursed her lips, and stared at the floor where the girls stood.
With a stern, matter-of-fact tone, she replied, "There's no game there. It's just a floor."
The four-year-old looked down and wrung her hands a bit, waiting for her sister to convince their mother to join. The six-year-old studied the floor for a moment, as if trying to decide whether or not she had actually been playing a game. Looking up, she stammered, "...But... but, we're playing tic-tac-toe..."
"No, you're not. You have to have some way to write X's and O's for that.... Now stop it. You're making a fool of yourself."
With that, the girls stood silently for a moment, and looking at the tiles on the floor one last time, shuffled their feet back to the chairs from which they had originally sprung.
For a while, I pondered that sentence: "You're making a fool of yourself." How could a child make a fool of herself? And, quite frankly, who was she supposed to be worried about being a fool in front of? Me? I was the only other person there. Perhaps this mother was stressed. Naturally, with three children all under the age of ten, I could see how she would be. But could that have been the only reason for her fun-killing comment?
The question simmered in my mind for a few more minutes, and then, as I watched the mother stare worriedly at the ticking clock as her little girls swung their dangling feet in their chairs, I realized something. As long as you let it, history will repeat itself. This woman was clearly trapped in some kind of time vortex where she subconsciously relived her own tense, joyless childhood again and again. She might even have actually believed that by enacting this kind of self-absorbed, prudish parenting, she was doing the best she could for her girls. She probably didn't know better.
What scares me is that there has to be exact replicas of that scene playing out every night, in every town... And twenty years from now, the world will be populated by nine-to-fiving joyless children of joyless parents who believe that nothing exists if they can't see it, that they need to "straighten up and act right," and that whatever they do, they should never, ever, make fools of themselves for the sake of actually living.
"Okay, I'm X's and..."
"And I'll be O's!"
"Yeah! Okay, I get to go first."
From where I stood, I couldn't quite see how (or if) they were marking their moves on the floor or any of the other rules of their makeshift tic-tac-toe game. But without fail, after the older one, a six-year-old with dirty blonde hair, called out her "X here!," her fourish sister, wearing nearly all pink, hopped a bit and called out, "O!" throwing her hands into the air and smiling like she'd won a prize.
That's what I love about little girls.
Sure enough, though, the game inevitably needed the validation of an authority figure. Turning to her mother, who was cradling yet another child in her arms only a few feet away, the six-year-old asked, "Will you play our game, Mommy?"
And after hearing the mother's answer, I now know why the world is headed for ruin.
She looked up from the infant, pursed her lips, and stared at the floor where the girls stood.
With a stern, matter-of-fact tone, she replied, "There's no game there. It's just a floor."
The four-year-old looked down and wrung her hands a bit, waiting for her sister to convince their mother to join. The six-year-old studied the floor for a moment, as if trying to decide whether or not she had actually been playing a game. Looking up, she stammered, "...But... but, we're playing tic-tac-toe..."
"No, you're not. You have to have some way to write X's and O's for that.... Now stop it. You're making a fool of yourself."
With that, the girls stood silently for a moment, and looking at the tiles on the floor one last time, shuffled their feet back to the chairs from which they had originally sprung.
For a while, I pondered that sentence: "You're making a fool of yourself." How could a child make a fool of herself? And, quite frankly, who was she supposed to be worried about being a fool in front of? Me? I was the only other person there. Perhaps this mother was stressed. Naturally, with three children all under the age of ten, I could see how she would be. But could that have been the only reason for her fun-killing comment?
The question simmered in my mind for a few more minutes, and then, as I watched the mother stare worriedly at the ticking clock as her little girls swung their dangling feet in their chairs, I realized something. As long as you let it, history will repeat itself. This woman was clearly trapped in some kind of time vortex where she subconsciously relived her own tense, joyless childhood again and again. She might even have actually believed that by enacting this kind of self-absorbed, prudish parenting, she was doing the best she could for her girls. She probably didn't know better.
What scares me is that there has to be exact replicas of that scene playing out every night, in every town... And twenty years from now, the world will be populated by nine-to-fiving joyless children of joyless parents who believe that nothing exists if they can't see it, that they need to "straighten up and act right," and that whatever they do, they should never, ever, make fools of themselves for the sake of actually living.
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