Paper Flowers: When "Big Kids" Play

"Say say oh playmate

Come out and play with me

And bring your dollies three

Climb up my apple tree ..."

"Go play." Parents say it to their kids all the time. I've said it to my niece:
Baby, go over there and play for a minute while Auntie folds the clothes." 

Just recently I've started wondering if any adult really knows what it means to play, or if we all lose the gist of it as we get older. I have, on my camera, a video clip of Lina helping my sister fold the clothes -- bunching them up and then handing them over for Mommy to "Oooo," over while she covertly actually folds them. But Lina is so proud of herself while she's "folding". She can hardly stand still. She bounces from foot to foot and comes to show me a shirt she did. "Oh, good job!" I tell her. "That's so awesome, helping Mommy fold the clothes! You're such a good helper."

And every time I watch this video, it strikes me just a little more that for my niece -- who will turn three on the 21st of this month -- folding clothes *is* playing. Play is all about learning by doing. I tend to think that as adults, many of us think that we don't need to play anymore -- "learning by doing" is accomplished your second hour on a new job, when your supervisor leaves you to drown in a stack of policy manuals and a line of patrons screaming for your attention. But play takes learning by doing to a whole new level: play makes it fun. 

I'm reminded of how I made it through chores as a child. I'd pretend that I was a kid in a Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle story, trapped in my room by a giant mess that I had to clean so that I wouldn't have to drink from the garden hose put through the window and eat peanut butter sandwiches off the tines of a rake. (That's an actual story, by the way.) Or I'd pretend someone really, really important was coming to visit, like the President or the Queen of England, and everything had to be impressively spotless. This made chores suck less. I wasn't out in the yard with a Super Soaker or in the playhouse with a doll, but I was playing just the same -- and in recent weeks, I've noticed that I'm still playing. 

Now whether this is a product of retarded social development due to a traumatic childhood or just something I've picked up on that most people aren't aware of, I think it's a good thing. And I think, too, that its origins might not be "or" but "and." I play to pick up on social development, and I've probably been doing it all along without noticing. What brought it to my attention was my new-found obsession with crafting.

I'll admit it: at this point, I still suck at crafting. I don't have a lot of patience or practical know how, and my fine motor skills are blotto thanks to CP. Tying intricate knots or folding papers *just so* is difficult and time consuming -- and yet I find I'm still enjoying it. 

I love to color and draw, too. I didn't realize how much until I sat down and let myself do it, until I stopped criticizing it and just scribbled. CP has left me with a sizable deficit in my ability to recognize proportion and spacial perception, so I can't make a symmetrical anything, and 3-D artwork is still largely beyond my grasp. I was teased for this mercilessly when I was in school. Art class was my worst enemy. The yearly ritual of having classes hand-draw a design with the teacher's name on it to put over the door was pure torture when it came to the voting-for-the-best-one part: every year I was the worst artist, hands down, and even though the "entries" had no student names on them, my classmates knew which entry was mine and would boo and snigger at it. So I stopped thinking I could make pretty things. I was ashamed of everything I drew or colored, feeling that it stuck out like a hideous growth from all the other pretty things everyone else had made. I stuffed my inner artist into a little closet in the back of my head and resolved never to let that bitch back out.

But oh, I love to create!

I mostly do this through writing. Writing is my lifeline, my happiness; writing is cathartic and fun and I would be lost without it. I make my pictures out of words. And now, sometimes, I make my pictures out of crayons and pencils and markers and paper too. I'm letting the artist in me out to play!

Most of my stuff is crude. Flat. Clearly drawn laboriously and erased again and again. A Kindergartner could out-draw me, with my (lack of) spacial perception: I can see the picture so clearly in my head, and then I look at a piece of paper and the dimensions unravel until all that's left of my mental picture is a bunch of loose threads all tangled together. But I'm enamored with color! Texture! Design! ColorColorColorColor!! Color makes me happy!

I've started drawing these huge, garish abstract flowers

for no other reason than that it's fun. I like it. I have no idea what I'm going to do with them, but I like to make them. I'm playing, and I like it, and I'm learning -- slowly, I find that my drawing is getting better, that I'm becoming less hindered by what I always thought of as the "right way" to draw or create art. I'm reminded of the easel and paints in the playroom at the hospital when I was 7 years old and recovering from major surgery, and the simple joy I found in taking a brush and spreading broad sweeps of aimless, happy color over the page. I had nothing in mind then about what was "good" art: I had color and paper and I was happy. It's been an exercise in true learning, getting back to that point ...

One gigantic explosion of a paper flower at a time!