Child's Play

In weeks of war and death - why we need one another more than ever

I picked my youngest son up at school last week and took him out to lunch, wherever he wanted, his choice, to celebrate his recent birthday.

He told me that he wanted to go to the same place his big brother did, but he wanted “one with a play area.”

He had just turned that age where he knew that he was getting to be too old for the play area, but he wasn’t ready to give it up quite yet. He still wanted to be little.

I didn’t blame him. I didn’t tell him sometimes I shut my eyes and told time to stop, when I bent down and hugged him tightly, and he let me.

When we got there and sat down in a booth, near the play area, I saw his eyes squint. He read the sign on the door, which said that the play area was for kids his age and younger.

“That’s me!” he said.

Even though it was lunchtime in a bustling suburb, and the restaurant was crowded, the play area was empty. Eerily silent. So he wanted me to go with him to the play area, where he read another sign that said:

“Toddler area: 3 years of age and younger.”

He looked at me sheepishly: “I’m just going to check it out, mom. I’m good at those games.”

He wandered over and dutifully pressed the buttons and giggled with a restrained glee when the game tipped over and the objects inside made a crashing noise. Then, he quickly ran up to the green plastic slide and slid down as fast as he could, which wasn’t that fast anymore, because he was too tall for the slide. He bumped from side to side, slowly.

It was so quiet in there, and I felt us both grasping to hold on to his childhood, or something.

“It’s kinda creepy in here, mom,” he said.

Soon, we saw a restaurant staff member walk over to our table with our food, and he said he was done and we started eating waffle fries and chicken nuggets. I saw him looking over at the play area wistfully, and then his eyes widened when a boy sitting nearby, a few years younger than my son, got up and went inside, and then stared at my son, beseechingly.

Come on. Come play.

He took a long drink of his birthday shake and looked at me, precociously serious and yet still clinging on to the remembrance of days gone by.

“Mom, I’m gonna go play again. I’ll be back.”

He and the other boy looked at each other with pure delight, and wordlessly they started chasing each other, running up and down the plastic play place - sneaking up behind each other, and then jumping up and down, eyes wide with joy.

I scared you!

You’re it!

I got you!

Their play soon took on a fluid quality, almost as if they were participating in a choreographed dance, one adults had never taught them, nor one they’d learned in preschool or Kindergarten. Playing, as it were, couldn’t be taught. As I watched them, I felt as though I were watching something more ancient, and I thought of our shared human ancestors, hundreds and even thousands of years ago, jumping and hiding and playing innately, taking delight in one another.

As I watched them play, their shrieks and screams and leaps and playful pushes made me think not only of children of the past but children of today, of how kids can - even in the worst of circumstances - turn a trash heap or bomb wreckage or refugee camp or migrant detention center into a play place, and how games of tag require no equipment nor coach nor fancy uniforms.

I thought, of course, of the children of the Holy Land: the little kids of Israel and Gaza, some of whom woke up last week grievously injured, or as the only surviving members of their families. They woke up only to realize their playmates had been murdered. They had witnessed unspeakable horrors. We had stolen something from them that they would never get back, that if they lived on would spend their entire lives trying to claim again: their childhood.

I thought of how natural it was for kids, upon seeing other little kids, to almost immediately sense a connection. Every kid they saw was a potential friend. There was no pretense, no sizing up, though that would come later.

I thought of how we taught them instead to hate: to see instead of just another kid to see a threat, a risk, an enemy, or worse, someone to pity. Kids are not born seeing Zionists or Arabs or liberals or conservatives or rich people or poor people. Kids see different skin colors, different clothing, different social backgrounds, but they see them as a curiosity. It is us who teach them to hate and to judge and to socially stratify: to compete and to kill or be killed.

I am not naive enough to think that our kids don’t need this knowledge, this sense of competitive drive in order to survive in a capitalist world where individual lives are too often a means to an end, faceless statistics in a war game of great powers and great wealth.

It has gone on so long now, and there is so much money and power tied up into the value of hatred and dehumanization, that unwinding it seems both futile and impossible. We weep for the children, but how can we protect them? We cannot even protect our own biological children, can’t even guarantee that their classrooms won’t become killing fields.

This ancient game between my son, nearly too old for the play place, and his newfound younger friend did not last very long. I don’t even know if they ever spoke to each other, beyond shouted phrases or triumphant chants. I don’t think they really said goodbye, but when it was over their ballet of run and hide and find seemed unfinished, as childhood so often does, disappearing without a final conclusion, an opportunity to applaud and wave goodbye and take a bow. Childhood fades out, without us noticing, and it seems a game of survival that we’re relieved to leave behind, rather than what it truly is, life and love and joy and hope and the purity of shared existence.

My son came back to the table. As we drove back to school, he told me he wanted to go back to that restaurant soon, so he could collect the other pieces of the game from the kid’s meal. But then when we got to school, he told me I could throw it all away, and he jumped out of the car to make it into the recess football game before it was time to go back to class.

A world away from tragedy, war, and death in the Holy Land - and still in our neighborhood, at my son’s school, in houses and apartments and tents - children grow up in a world that both loves them and has no idea how to protect them and keep them safe: not from war anymore than from a rapidly overheating planet filled with ever-present natural disasters and extreme weather and deadly pollution.

It was a beautiful October day when I came back home that afternoon. I stared at the wise old maple trees, who’d somehow endured our folly and our noise, who miraculously again had burst into flames of orange and red and yellow and hot pink. Their branches waved softly in the afternoon sun, set against a brilliant blue sky, promising a beauty that I thought this world too had finally outgrown.

Live in me and love me, they whispered for the world.

And in the breeze I heard the sweet peals of laughter of the children, protesting their suffering and impending death.

P.S. …

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