We were out playing every day it seemed. Tag, making a bog/ swamp habitat in a red wagon, then populating it with salamanders! Wiffle ball, building a fort in the woods!
We also loved to play board games and cards. My family was dysfunctional, so I stayed away as long as possible. It was easy in my neighborhood. Everyone seemed to know, so they did not mind me showing up all the time, thank goodness.
My room was over the garage. You had to go down an L shaped hallway to get there. It was my fortress. I couldn’t hear the fighting going on downstairs from up there. I LOVED to read thank goodness.
The Boy Scouts was the best thing that ever happened to me. I can not recommend it enough. But that was my only “soccer mom” activity. I thought that was plenty. I was a big daydreamer, and I would do that out of doors. I loved the woods, I loved my alone time too.
I wanted to be a forest Ranger for the longest time. I should have stayed with that. When I became an adult, I liked to entertain. Dinner parties, doing the restaurant circuit. Easy to do in Atlanta.
In the late 1970’s the Baptists and the Catholics really started emphasizing the old saying "idle minds are the devil’s playground. Gyms started popping up at churches everywhere. [for some reason, the Episcopalians, my Church, were having none of it.
] Then came the infamous soccer! Leagues started forming all over the place. It just snowballed from there.
In 2009 my world turned upside down. I got laid off my dream job, and was sick in bed for a month with chronic pancreatitis. I lost real estate, all my money and all my plastic friends. I had a lot of time in bed to think about my life. [between pain pills] It was during this time that I decided to become Catholic. Best thing I have EVER done!
My busy busy life came to a crashing halt. I lost 40lbs. It was awful at first, but it lead to finding a peace that I left long behind exploring those woods in the past. In the scheme of things, I was very fortunate to have been given a “reset.” Too often, that is what it takes to get us to a better perspective, certainly a spiritual one.
Kids at the high school I teach at are all now walking around with those expensive blue tooth headphones. Non stop techno stimuli. Gone now are the neighborhood sandlot baseball games. Tag is now just a washing instruction label on the back of an undergear T-shirt.
To find out what kids are doing now, you have only to look on the back window or bumper to find out what team your neighbors kids are on. Nothing wrong with that, but finding out the next window on your kid’s schedule per google calendar is 45 minutes two weeks from now, is toxic in my mind. Giving your kids “the gift of boredom” sounds like a fine idea to me!
Thankfully no Sundays, but with two kids enrolled, the other six days were up for grabs. I’m not making that mistake again!
Kids need opportunities to visit with their families. It can be helpful for parents to demo the fine art of putting electronics away for several hours each night and parking them at the kitchen charger at bedtime.