Reason #384: Prolonged Pretending

I remember pretending as a child. Do you? For me, that is huge because without these memories of what I was imagining, I'd hardly remember childhood at all. I remember things like the contents of my own dress-up box. There were chiffon curtains, dresses my mom had made for herself in high school, a bassinet skirt. I loved being a pioneer and a princess best. Interestingly, I was always a troubled princess. I was orphaned, or I was running away from beastly parents and my bike was my horse. Or I was being made to clean like Cinderella. In fact, I probably WAS being made to clean. But when I pretended I was being MADE to clean, the task didn't seem so bad.

In fact, I had games like that for boring tests at school. I lived in some future world where everything life-like was artificial and, though I was a child, it was my job to sit at a desk and do dull paperwork, just as I imagined adults do. Come to think of it, that isn't too far off reality either.

I remember lamenting to my mother that my friends weren't fun anymore because they had grown out of pretending. (I guess they weren't up for fastening a bassinet skirt around their waists, loading up a plastic toboggan with other dress-ups, snacks, and maybe a little brother, and trekking "west" across the soccer field to the promised land anymore.) Then my mother did something that makes the top 5 list of kind things she did for me (that I noticed and can remember) as a child: she surprised me by inviting a good friend over that had moved across town who hadn't yet forgotten how to pretend.

Somehow I've grown up into an adult whose pretender is mostly broken. Yes, I wear a princess dress to the Renaissance Faire, yes, I volunteered at a historical re-enactment site just to get the pioneer dress and house to hang out in, but it's not the same as it was when I was a child. I think I know, am too aware, that everyone else's pretender is broken too.

My girls have not yet grown into that awareness. (Maybe it's dawning on my oldest boy.... Sad.) Anyway, my older daughter, around Christmas time, was listening to The Nutcraker and swirling and whirling and so very gracefully performing for me. And I was an enchanted audience, I must say. Then she suddenly paused the performance to ask, "Mom, are you imagining what I'm imagining?" (I wasn't, but was happy to hear what it was she was imagining - that she was surrounded by a swirling corps de ballet - and add her vision to my enjoyment.)

Her question, however, reveals that her imaginings are almost so real that anyone could see them. Such power! Perhaps because I remember those days, perhaps because I lament, and even remember lamenting their loss, this power of imagination is something we reverence (as much as we can, but perhaps not as much as we should) around here. I can't help but feel, when I see my girls deep into worlds and scenarios of their own creation, that some very important work is going on. Work not to be interrupted.

Emerson, in his essay titled "The American Scholar," wrote, "Genius looks forward; the eyes of man are set in his forehead, not his hind head; man hopes; genius creates."

And, "Whatever talent may be, if the man create not, the pure efflux of the Deity is not his; cinders and smoke there may be, but not yet flame."

Finally, "The soul active sees absolute truth; and utters truth, or creates. In it's essence it is progression."

Though I don't fully understand the work of imagination, I get that it is real creation. Do I worry from time to time that in this subject or that, my kids may be "behind" their peers? Yes. But I'm in no hurry to fill their minds too soon with "facts" that I separate them from the genius that they already posses. That would be merely trading in a higher progression for a baser one. And though I can't say that I am giving my kids the most rigorous academic education going, I will say that I am giving them their childhood. And that feels like important work too.