Why?

Lately, my daughters (now 6 and 8), don't need me to entertain them anymore. They are quite content to play together (with all the requisite squabbling) for hours on end. It's easy for me to find myself for long stretches at the computer or in the kitchen or folding the seemingly endless piles of laundry spit forth by our dryer, emerging from a haze only to discover that it's already dusk, bedtime for the girls, and realize that I have barely seen them all day. And I just know that one day soon I'm going to look up only to see two teenagers staring back at me. Scowling.

When they were littler, I was a hands-on mom. I was always with them drawing with sidewalk chalk on the pavement, capturing fireflies, assembling various costumes for various productions in our basement playroom. But now that they are in school full-time with busy little lives, we really don't play anymore. I miss it. And I miss them.


(By the way, this is them and over there, on the sidebar, is me.)

I am a novelist. Playing make believe is my racket. My livelihood. How could it happen that I stopped playing with my own children?

When I was a little girl, I used to spend my summers playing in the tree house that my grandfather built in the woods next to our camp in Vermont. Over the years it's gone through a lot of renovations: a new deck, a new front wall, and a gate added to the entrance to the forest. At some point my grandfather, an avid Lewis Carroll fan, started to call this area the Tulgey Wood. (The trees there are not the birches and maples they appear to be, but rather Tum-Tum trees.) He joined my sister and me in the tree house, we played Scrabble and chess, we played croquet.

My grandfather passed away seven years ago, but my own daughters now get to spend their summers in this magical place. When I am there with them, it is like a return to my own childhood. But that only happens for a month in the summer. What about the rest of the year? Recently, I started to wonder what would happen if I made an effort to play. To go into the Tulgey Wood every single day?


The gate to Tulgey Wood.

This is where the blog comes in. I intend for the next year (from March 28, 2010 thru March 28, 2011 -- March 28th being my grandfather's birthday) to spend one hour a day playing with my kids. I mean really playing. Not watching, not supervising, but playing. And I also plan to write about it here. With pictures. A year long play-date with Mom.

Anybody else wanna play?