Playing House
# 9
Date 9-4-58
All this "playing house" takes me back. Back to the dim distant days of my own childhood when all I wanted was to be grown-up. I then could do whatever I wanted, when I wanted. Or so I thought.
This business of being grown-up didn't turn out exactly as per my childhood version. Now I watch my own little cherubs and their friends playing in the same cheerful ignorance of things as they really are.
“Playing house" starts when Mary's little friends arrive. Laura and Maeve. Their first concern is who is going to be the Mother. The Mother in the games gets to give all orders and everybody must do as she says. The real mother (in this case, me) wishes things went like that.
Laura sadly is the Mother. She ranks, as a third grader. Maeve and Mary, both only first-graders, do not quarrel with such indisputable superiority.
About this time the boys rush in ---Tim, John and a neighbor, Johnny Guy—with their dukes up. Today, this time, the girls are going to let them play too. The girls, with a finesse that belies their age but betrays their sex, let the boys win without an argument. And the boys lose all the way.
For the game of "house" begins right after breakfast when, naturally, fathers must go to work. Against "Fathers do not work at home," the boys are helpless. They go off to work.
The boys and the girls. When he dumps out their water, the boys send him away. He joins the girls who decide to use him as their baby. Till-he tosses all the dolls out of their bed and crawls in himself. He is then banished to play with the boys, where he provides another excuse for another basin of water.
On my next inspection tour of the area of action, I find seven dripping wet rags tucked behind the bolsters on the couch in the family room. (I really prefer the more old - fashioned term "rec room!' in our case, spelled w-r-e-c-k.) In my kindest, gentlest tones I tell those boys that THIS IS THE END THERE WILL BE NO MORE WATER TODAY OR EVER AGAIN.
They rejoin girls , fathers do come home for lunch sometimes, you know. The girls have just accepted a shipment of Furniture and Paid for it with a penny someone found on the floor. A real case of non-realism if there ever was one.
Among other things, too, their baby doll has been sick. They took the doll to the hospital, came right home again.
"She just needs an aspirin." In MY book of things as they really are, the baby would at least get an upset stomach from the ride in the car.
It just happens that the boys get home for lunch Just as the girls are setting the table. The boys tackle the table and push everything off.
I tell myself the girls shouldn't be punished for what the boys did.
In the middle of the milk production Johnny Guy gets up and announces, "I guess I'll go buy a Cad." Mary tells him, "Buy me one, too."
"Okay," says he. "I'll buy you a Ford. Got some money?"
"Use the money on the little table." (The change left over from the furniture purchase, no doubt.)
Johnny Guy goes off. "I'll buy you a Merc, Laura, just to run around in."
And I sigh. And wish I were so very young again.
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