"Do you want to play with us?"

“Do you want to play with us?”  It’s a question I get asked about a dozen times a day when the grandgirls are here.  Abby just turned 3 and Raya turned 4 just a couple months ago.  They are here three days each week and as you know if you read my blog they now have a room dedicated to fun and naps. I continue to have my office in my home, just a short distance from their room.  It would certainly be different (and emotionally easier) if I had an office somewhere else.  But I don’t.  And so the question comes with regularity.

It’s Abby who most often asks the question.  How do I nuance the answer for a three-year-old?  “Yes, I WANT to play with you, but no I CAN'T because I have something else to do right now.”  I do want to play with them.  So my answer is a definite yes.  But even on sabbatical I have a few things I need to do so it doesn’t turn into an extended vacation.  (I include this in case my boss, Steve Highfill reads my blog.)

It would be easier to answer if Abby asked, “CAN you play with us now, Papa?”  But she doesn’t ask that.  She asks if I WANT to play with her.  No equivocation on the answer to that question.  Yes, Abby, I do.

Life is full of situations where we want to do something.  Something good.  Something life-giving.  But life is also full of responsibilities which we may or may not want to do, but it must be done whether we want to or not.  There will be a time when Abby understands that.  But in this season of her life her responsibility is to play and learn and be extremely cute and sometimes ornery.

The challenge for those of us who lean heavily toward fulfilling our responsibility is making sure we balance that with the need for nurturing relationships.

Even my above-average granddaughters will not remember many specifics of these early years but they will have a general sense, an ethos, of what it was like to be at Papa and Lola’s house.  I don’t want that impression to be one of always being second to fulfilling a responsibility.  Always being second to fulfilling an obligation.  So, throughout the day, I take short breaks to read with them, play on the floor with them and turn the record over for them (yes, they listen to vinyl at my house).  I still get my responsibilities fulfilled. But I also have the distinct privilege of getting to do what I want to do.  I get to help in the raising of my grandchildren in such a way that they learn life is full of both/and.  Responsibility and Fun.  Obligation and Freedom.

I’ll close for now.  I want to go play.  And I can.