Volume 4, Issue 9: Permission to Play
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Hi friends! Being that this weekend was the first Mother’s Day after losing my mom, I planned a whole day of distraction for Nicole and I. We got up quite early and drove about 45 minutes east to go mulberry picking. We picked six pounds of mulberries and it was 87 degrees by the time we were done. Then we stopped for In-N-Out Burger and headed back home so that I could have my first go at making shelf-stable jam with the mulberries. I’ve made refrigerator jam before, but I hadn’t canned anything yet. My friend let me borrow her equipment and I successfully made jam with half the mulberries on Sunday. I planned on making the other half into jam the following day after work. We went to bed on Sunday tired but pleased with ourselves.
On Monday when I went to make the rest of the jam we found that the berries had already gone moldy. They were definitely not moldy the day before. This minor inconvenience threw me into total meltdown and all the grief that I had been trying to avoid on Mother’s Day came crashing into me. Still, we had a lovely day on Sunday and I have come to the conclusion that some of it is because there is nothing that we did that day that was work or that I was trying to monetize or solely mine for content. Yes, I wrote about it just now but I didn’t post dozens of photos on Instagram and I’m also not selling any of this jam nor do I have the desire to.
Our activities that day fell in line with something I’m trying to get back to, which is giving myself permission to play. There has just been so much going on the past few months and so many obligations that everything I was doing while awake was productive. Work, writing, unpacking, dealing with mom stuff, going to therapy, or even as I mentioned a couple weeks ago, community care. I want to make clear that the community care happened as a form of caring for myself but was not meant to replace actually caring for myself. But things like unpacking are, in a way, caring for myself because it’s really anxiety-inducing to still be living among so many boxes. I even baked a donut cake on Saturday but it was because I was going to a BBQ and wanted to bring a dessert for everyone there. It was delicious and yes, it’s a cake that tastes like a donut; the recipe is from Snacking Cakes.
All that being said, I haven’t really been having a lot of fun so I’ve been trying to do more of that and we kicked it off on our wedding anniversary earlier this month. We took the day off and went to Scandia Golfland. Scandia has mini golf and bumper boats and batting cages and go-karts and an arcade. I used to beg my father to go when I got to spend time with him when I was a kid. He would go to the bank and get an absurd amount of quarters and we would go for hours and hours. He and I beat the 4-player X-Men game as well as the 4-player Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle game (on different days) after a ridiculous number of hours and I have no idea how much money because I was like, ten. Anyway, I brought Nicole on our wedding anniversary and we got there midday on a Friday. We did something that ten-year-old me would have absolutely lost her mind over and we paid for the four-hour unlimited fun cards where we could pretty much do/play whatever we wanted as much as we wanted for four hours. We played mini golf and laughed until we wheezed. I am just as obsessed with air hockey in my forties as I was when I was a child. My arm was sore for days after playing so much Galaga. I’m still good-ish at skee-ball and I’ve fallen madly in love with the large, two-player co-op Mario Kart. We also drove the actual go-karts but Nicole ended up with a slow-kart and I totally lapped her and even the guy doing grounds maintenance gave her a look like, “Why are you going so slow?” On our anniversary, we gave ourselves permission to play and it was amazing.
Another way that I’ve recently given myself permission to play is one that didn’t involve going anywhere or spending lots of money. Earlier this month I was recently reading The Shadow Cabinet which is the upcoming sequel to one of my book obsessions, Her Majesty’s Royal Coven. I was so absolutely enthralled by it but it was past my bedtime. I only had about 40 pages left so I stayed up late to finish it. It has been a long time since I have done that with a book I love and while I was a mess the next morning, it was still worth it because holy shit what a book!
I am often painfully hyper-responsible and yes, it’s a direct effect of being raised by a parent who always chose fun over responsibility. I had gotten to a place where I was able to both be responsible and have fun but that got thrown in the dumpster these past 7 months so giving myself permission to play is my attempt at regaining that sort of harmony.
What ways do you give yourself permission to play? Or what ways would you like to?
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