When I was teaching preschool the NAEYC slogan for either that year or the year before was “Play is Children’s Work.”

One of my very first memories is from when we lived in Boston. I guess I was about three, maybe a little younger. Because this was the good old days (at least for a 3-year old living in that suburban Boston neighborhood), I was free to roam around our cul-de-sac. My mom would put me in a handmade bubble suit and tie my hair up in pony tails and set me loose to wander. My best friend, Pamela, lived next door and I would play on her swing set and run into the woods next door (actually a small grove of young birch trees). Her father’s name was Neal and I was sure this was because he would kneel down to play with us.

Across the way lived bratty Elizabeth. She had a metal swingset — the kind where the leg would thump up if you swung too high. One day I climbed up the slide ladder after her and she turned around to try to shove me off. I looked over at the moms chatting on the cement patio and thought about how they had just missed my brush with death.

Up the street was Kimberly — red hair and freckles. She was annoying and bossy but when Pamela was down for her nap or had to go to bed (she had an earlier bed time than the rest of us), Kimberly would do for a playmate.

Anyway, what I most remember about Kimberly is this overcast day when she and I sat down in a mud puddle to play. It was this fabulous, slippery-smooth mud, which held the shapes we made and molded with a satisfying squish. It was the best goddamned mud I have ever known in my 35-years (and for some time after that day, I went looking for mud as good and couldn’t find it). We planted our little bottoms right in the puddle and dove in aided with dixie cups (the little wax-covered paper drinking cups that people sometimes have in bathroom dispensers) and our own eager hands. I was absolutely in bliss. My play (work) was satisfying and interesting. It was challenging (we had to learn how to work with the consistency, we had to understand the limits of the increasingly soggy dixie cups) and on that day Kimberly’s bossy mouth was quiet as she focused on the task at hand.*

Then these two big girls came over. One was Kimberly’s sister. She said, “Oh are you going to get in trouble!” Kimberly looked down at her mud-covered clothes — from head to toe, we were both covered and splattered in mud — and began to cry. I wasn’t a bit worried because I knew that my mother understood the importance of dixie cup mud pies but I was annoyed that Kimberly’s sister came and disrupted our play.

My mom really did understand. The pictures of me that summer show a filthy and smiling 3-year old. My mother always understood the value of whatever I was doing — mud pie making, truck track building, dollhouse creation, stories I wrote, stories I pretended, anything. She took me seriously and she took my interests seriously. When I decided to be a teacher, she helped me write out notes inviting all of the toddlers in the neighborhood to come to my school. When I wanted to be a writer, she let me use her electric typewriter.

Growing up, I believed that what I wanted to do was important even if other people didn’t understand. My mom always understood. I expected work to be interesting and challenging and worth the drudgery to get to the fun. The feeling I had playing in the mud was exactly the same feeling I have now when I’m working on an article or project that interests me. Playing taught me about work.

I think about my mother whenever I talk to Noah about his play. When he grows up, I want him to seek out work that is as interesting, as exciting and as worthwhile as his play is to him now. I never tell him that when he grows up he’ll have to buckle down and get a job because I know if you get the right job, it doesn’t feel like buckling down. Even the petty annoyances of the right job pale next to the times when you’re streaming along deeply caught up in your task. (I think about the drudgery of paperwork and phone calls at shelter and the sheer joy of pulling together a case plan. I think about the boredom of inventory at the deli and the meditative contentment of reordering the cheese case. And now the sheer hell of queries and mundane resource gathering more than makes up for the way it feels when an article is coming together seemingly without effort.)

My mom taught me about work by leaving me free to play without worrying about the mud in my hair or the bath at the end of it. I hope I can do that for my kids.

*One of the best depictions of this kind of satisfying play that I have ever read is Beverly Cleary’s description of Howie and Ramona’s game, brick factory, in Ramona the Brave.

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