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At the Playground

 One of many areas in which I fall short is playground behavior.


A Maplewood Mom recently expressed horror that her friend used *only one* playground on a regular basis. And I thought, what the fuck? It's not enough to drag yourself to the swingset. You also have to diversify the portfolio: There must be a new, and newly stimulating, playground with each new sunrise. Fuck that. I think I should receive a prize just for exiting my house. I'm with the late essayist David Rakoff, who observed that he moved to New York City just so that he would never, never need to interact with nature. "There are entire segments of the city that you can travel through without ever leaving an underground tunnel...."

My hatred for the playground has to do with the swingset. I know that this should feel like a Zen exercise; I should focus on my breathing or some similar nonsense. But all I can think is this: Right now, we *could* be watching a Disney film.

The main compensation is the troubled child who lives down the road. I don't know what to make of her. She is my daughter's age, and there is something slightly maniacal in her conduct. A classmate introduced herself--I'm Jessie--and the troubled child said, "You are not Jessie. Your name is GARBAGE." Jessie responded in a shrewd way, with a polite faux-laugh. (I think Jessie has been reading about the "Let Them" Theory, devised by Mel Robbins.)

The troubled child turned on my daughter--and gestured to her new haircut. "Are you a girl....or a BOY?" And my daughter answered in an ingenuous way: "Girl!" The troubled child then cackled--I swear she cackled--like the Evil Queen in "Snow White."

Perhaps I was too passive through all this. But what could I do? I didn't want to attribute motives to anyone--at least, I didn't want to do this without concrete, irrefutable evidence. The troubled child did not have a parent but did have a nanny, and the nanny seemed to be lost in her iPhone.

OK, I'm not completely against playgrounds. I'm learning to modify my behavior; I'm growing with the passage of time.
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