Toys
Dr. Rio is performing surgery. She has a pencil, a rubber band, a kitchen apron and the laser-like focus of a professional deep in her work.
“Hold still, Mama!” she says. “This is very important.”
Of course, her medical career is just one aspect of her life. My young doctor is also an artist, a hairdresser, an explorer and a tired little kid who does NOT want to put her pencil and rubber band away at the end of playtime.
I’ve always been a lover of simple toys for children. The beeping, blinking, bopping plastic stuff that crowds the aisles in Big Box stores is personally annoying to me. It’s also far outside my ethics: a lot of disposable plastic crap produced by cheap labor through environmentally vile practices. I’m no more likely to buy it than I am to buy disposable diapers.
Like many parents, I was drawn to the high end, hand-crafted, sustainably produced toys promoted by my stepson’s Waldorf school. My house is full of wooden trains, chunky wood puzzles, felted dolls and animals, spools of yarn and baskets of beads. A lot of these toys sit, disused, alongside the My Little Ponys and Disney dolls they’ve received as gifts. (While I was typing this, Rio ran into the room to empty out her art kit and use the case as a blanket for her Ariel doll’s bed).
The kids don’t care if their toys were handmade by elves in German forests or pressed out of a factory by child slaves in Cambodia. They don’t, after a day or two of excitement, care if the toys look like a tiny pastel gnome or their favorite cartoon character. They’ll use whatever is at hand. First, to explore their world. Later, to fuel the worlds they imagine.
The expensive, carefully wrought toys I bought these kids as babies share this in common with their annoying plastic counterparts: they reflect my desires at least as much as they do my child’s. (Just now Serena has interrupted me, presenting me with a tiny wooden bowl full of socks and asking for a spoon).
And this is the real stuff of play: a sock, a spoon, a brightly colored bit of fabric. As Karen Maezen Miller says in the absolutely delicious Momma Zen: Walking the Crooked Path of Motherhood
(and in the next room, the game seems to have reached a climax with Rio’s doll agreeing to marry her rescuer with this little speech, “OK, I’ll marry you, but I’m still going camping by myself,” and then flying away to the piano.)
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