For the last year, our oldest child has been begging for a toy kitchen. Our former neighbors had the ubiquitous IKEA kitchen. Before they moved, our son would plead to go play at their house, even though their kids are younger, so he could access his favorite toy. Now that vaccines have made playdates possible again, I frequently hear about the magical lives of other kids in other families who have toy kitchens. We’re on a mailing list for a school supplies catalog; as bedtime reading, he devotedly pores over the images of the toy kitchens being marketed to pre-K classrooms.
Our son is a talented negotiator. At five, he’s already artfully persistent at throwing words at a problem, like someone else I know. He uses every trick in the book to make the case for why it would be a good idea for our family. And I consistently answer, “No.” We don’t have space. You have enough toys. You won’t even use it once you get it. It’s expensive. And most of all, from the depths of my heart, why get a particle board version of the gorgeous, expansive real thing already available to you? Come cook with me any time!
His response to this is surprisingly coherent: But the real kitchen is dangerous. We need adult supervision. With a toy kitchen, we can play by ourselves and not get hurt. He knows how to hit me where I’m vulnerable! I fantasize about our kids using their imagination to play unsupervised, without screens–as I recall doing, quite happily, throughout my childhood. We didn’t watch a lot of TV, and while I know we had plenty of toys and crafts and projects, and later, homework and activities, my best memories are of playing make believe: a box of curricula inherited from a relative became hours of school. The playset in the backyard was a ship rescuing us from the orphanage. The hill behind our house was a chalk mine where we worked. The dress-up box, fodder for cheer-leading routines and princess parades (with apologies to my brother, a few years younger and used as a dress-up doll like my middle child uses our baby). It was blissful. One of my great parenting fears is that our children will get suctioned into rabbit holes of mindless screens and never learn to create their own worlds. So when he argues that the kitchen is the gateway to imaginative play, I’m hooked. Free time for me, well-developed creative muscles and a lifetime of wonderful memories for you.
Each fall, I enforce a comprehensive toy cleaning and sorting project, sold to my kids as preparing the way for Christmas presents. My son isn’t the only one who can negotiate. And despite his reluctance to participate in day to day clean up, for this project, he’s a helpful participant, even a partner, pitching his own salient categories of objects in ways I wouldn’t have considered. Let’s have a pretend school under the bed, let’s have a box of things for me to play with when my hands are getting into trouble. We move a small play table and two tiny chairs out of our upstairs living room, “the den,” and into the kids bedroom. It’s an awkward fit and I’m doubtful this configuration will work, but a month later, it is still going strong. And as soon as the table is set up, he sets out to play school with the stuffies. Apparently school’s much better when you’re the teacher. I’m giddy; imaginative play is happening!
When the cleaning project ends, we have reordered their toys to live largely in their bedroom and have significantly more space available in the den. It’s become apparent they don’t have that many toys. It’s also become apparent that big ticket items are more practical–easier to clean up, sort and organize than piles of pieces that get scattered across a floor, lost under couches, eaten by babies. As the Christmas season draws to a close, we parents still haven’t pulled the trigger on buying presents other than the things-you-needed-anyway-in-shiny-wrapping-paper. So we don’t cave on the kitchen so much as take a principled stance: one large toy kitchen is better, and cheaper, than a handful of smaller forgettable, breakable, mess-making gifts.
A week after Epiphany, the box lands on our porch, so heavy it takes two of us to slowly hoist it up the stairs. We put the kids to bed on a Friday night with promises of “snow pancakes, pajamas and presents” in the morning, the last day of our Christmas celebration. Kids asleep, the adults put on The Philadelphia Story, fill glasses of wine, and get to work. The various screws and bolts are pleasingly packed in tiny plastic apartments within a cardboard sheet, like a miniature construction Advent calendar. As Katherine Hepburn sorts out her engagement, we place the numbered boards in order around the room. I scan the hieroglyphic images in the manual, translating the numbers and letters into a set of pieces to hand Nate, who starts assembly while I move on to interpreting the next set of images.
I’m surprised at how fun the process turns out to be. All very logical and certain, it gives me the same comforting feeling of a clear answer I remember getting from high school geometry proofs, much different from the ambiguous, subjective act of scribbling an essay. You know with certainty when it is right. It also feels good to do something together, something solid and tangible, not just sorting through the logistics of which parent will handle the daycare pickups and which is making dinner. Divvying up logistics can occupy an uncomfortably large percentage of our interactions, especially if we don’t work to carve out space for deeper connection. Unproductive enjoyment, what comes so easily in the early stages of a relationship, doesn’t happen by accident when there are so many life tasks to get through. While this isn’t exactly unproductive–we are building a kitchen, after all–it is oddly enjoyable, the satisfying work of creation, as a team. “Team confused,” we often joke; we don’t know what we’re doing but we’re doing it together!
But no confusion tonight. Hieroglyphic at a time, the boards become cupboards, the oven gets knobs, the plastic sink is inserted. Just before midnight, long after Katherine has figured out which man to marry, the fully-constructed kitchen is hoisted up and against the wall, looking tidy and proud. I savor its clean lines and bare space, the last time it will ever look this neat.
At this stage in the pandemic, I don’t feel like I have five minutes to return a text or cut my toenails, but we squander three precious child-free hours on a Friday night constructing the kitchen of our kids’ dream piece by tiny piece. Was it worth it? That night I’m on high on the satisfaction of a job well done, and anticipation of rocking my kids’ world. I can’t wait for the moment they burst into the den and squeal in delight at the dream come true.
In the morning, our kids know there’s a surprise awaiting. We usher them expectantly to the den, open the door in a flourish. They walk in. He stares. “Whaaaaaat?” he drawls, like a teenager. There’s a definite absence of enthusiastic squeals. Aren’t you thrilled that we just made your kitchen dream come true? If he is, he’s not showing it. LIke so many humans before him whose dreams have theoretically come true, his first reaction is about what’s missing: there’s no toy food. Are you kidding me? What did we do all this work for? I wonder, in this moment, how much of the gifts we bestow upon our kids are about supplying their needs, and how much are about ours: the satisfaction of being the hero who has delivered, of succeeding in making them happy, however momentarily.
The truth is, I can’t make my children happy. I can’t make them feel anything. I want to resist using the delighted squeal factor as the measure of my acts of love for my kids; if that was the goal, screen time and candy all day every day! But letting go of the drive to manipulate others’ responses, particularly my children, literally made from my body, is painful and slow. My primary progress to date is probably acknowledging the limits of my ability to control another person’s reactions, something that sounds so obvious on paper but feels so revolutionary in practice. I can provide a thoughtful gesture that fulfills a known need or expressed desire, and choose whether I’m doing so open-handedly or with strings attached. I want to choose to enjoy the process, not focus on the response. I may not have the delight payoff I was hoping for, but is there still value in the giving? I suppose we’ll always have Philadelphia.
Even as I’m disappointed at the lack of hysterical joy and weeping gratitude directed at their valiant parents, I notice the kids start to make up for the lack of toy food by mentally converting other toys into pasta, cake, tea. They cover a big IKEA box that’s been kicking around the house with a playmat and call it their table, they show mom and dad to the couch repurposed as “guest bedroom” and start “moving in” to the “new house,” stacking brightly colored toys in the kitchen so they can cook a pretend meal, no adult supervision required. They’re not even asking for Saturday morning cartoons.
A couple weeks later we baby-sit a school friend, a few years older, and she leads them in writing out a menu for their restaurant, “Global Foobal.” They serve couPcacs and cofee; she makes me a delicious mochaccino. Without hysterics, without any prodding from me, imaginative play is happening.
Later I see the note taped to the door of the den, in a confident childish scrawl: “Opin.” And it is.
