The Power of Play
How play helped me process some big emotions about our present political predicament.
Kim and I both distinctly remember feeling grief around the age of 11 as our peers became too cool to play anymore. I wasn’t ready to give up making witches’ brews, building forts in the haymow, or walking shirtless and unsupervised down the railroad tracks to catch tadpoles in the creek beneath the bridge. Kim still climbs trees when the occasion presents itself. While our friends were eager to grow up, we just weren’t ready so we both resisted. We’re still resisting.
We have incorporated play into our relationship, and more than anything else, it has brought us closer together. We make puppets out of anything, create silly dances, and laugh pretty hard together every day. Recently on one of our date nights, we invented a new game. We’ve been together only seven years so we journeyed back in time to meet our younger selves.
First we pretended we were in college. Kim told me about her favorite fishing hole in Maine, and I told her about my favorite spot along the Mississippi to sit and contemplate and smoke clove cigarettes. I asked her about her favorite book.
“Okay, you have to imagine my head is shaved while we’re talking about this,” she said.
“Easiest thing you’ve ever asked me to do,” I replied.
“The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood.”
“Why’s that your favorite?”
College-age Kim clenched her fists and growled, “FEMINISM!”
We jumped ahead to age 35. For me, it was a few years after I moved to Muncie so we could have conceivably met in the very bar where we were sitting. I told her that I worked on the intensive care unit of the hospital as a heart monitor technician. Just a few years earlier, I had completed a one-year chaplaincy residency at a hospital in Wisconsin. I thought it was good for the ICU nurses to have a chaplain always parked at the nurses’ station for them. It was deeply meaningful work for me, but the pay was poor and I still had a lot of student loan debt from seminary. Plus, night shift was killing my body.
Kim asked if I might go back to chaplaincy, and I said, “No. You have to be in good standing with your church body to be a chaplain, and I’m not sure I want that anymore.”
She asked me what it was I didn’t like about my current church, and I replied, “All the racism.”
Kim, who knows the real reason I finally left my church was because I was queer and came out, broke character. “How did you come up with that so effortlessly?” And I said, “Because the best lies are true. They just aren’t all of the truth.” The racism really did bother me. Just not as much as it should have, and not as much as the misogyny and homophobia that affected me directly.
35-year-old Rachel was a closeted liar who was just beginning to break free. Kim deserves an academy award for “acting” her disgust at my conservative religiosity throughout the evening. But the next day, I told her how disturbed I was that it was so easy for me to slip into character, and I still haven’t gotten over it.
For those of you who don’t know, I went through a conservative phase in my younger years. At the age of 24, I sat 11 seats from President George W. Bush at an Army/Navy football game. I yelled, “Thank you,” and blew him a kiss. I loved it when he winked back. My first job out of college was as a Latin teacher at a classical Christian school. They idolized Pastor Doug Wilson who was just recently interviewed by CNN about his Christian nationalist views. I met him once at a conference where he was the keynote speaker, and I shook his hand. I luckily got meningitis halfway through my first year at the school and had to quit my job. They were too conservative for me, but not by much. One of my closest friends from that time period is now a regular commentator on Fox News and is such a Trump loyalist that she was invited to sit in the special Trump press chair at a White House briefing.
By age 35, I was moving out of this period of life but was still stuck in it. I have a lot of regrets, not the least of which is hating myself so much that I willingly participated in a system that was designed to hold down and hurt me and others like me. I have a deep empathy for the people who are still stuck, and that kind of embarrasses me. I can’t help but hope that they too will get just the right push, like I did, to move them away from the self-loathing monster eating away at their guts, even if they vehemently deny the monster exists.
This is why play is so powerful. Kim and I laughed all evening, but more importantly imagination helped me come face to face with some big emotions about my past that I have been compartmentalizing. Regret. Guilt. Grief. Embarrassment. Empathy for my younger self. Just like a child using play to face their fears, I came face to face with one of my current ones. I’m afraid I will be forced to go back to that life someday, and instead of resisting, I will slip right into it effortlessly.
On the drive home from our date, 35-year-old Rachel pulled up in front of her house and asked Kim if she wanted to come inside. My roommate was out of town. Kim said, “I would love to, but I think you just need a little more time. Maybe I’ll come back in five years.” I started the car, and Kim asked, “What do you think you want for your life, Rachel?”
And 35-year-old me replied, “I want a modest house with a big yard where I can have a giant garden and millions of wildflowers. I want to feel peaceful and safe there.”
“Who will live with you?”
“I’ll have two dogs, both rescues of course. Maybe three if the right one comes along, although no one should ever have three dogs. You know it’s funny…I’ve never been able to imagine a husband there. Even so, I know I won’t have this feeling of loneliness sitting on my heart anymore.”
61-year-old Kim reached across the car and held my 48-year-old hand. We rode the rest of the way home like that, holding hands on a quiet night in Muncie, Indiana.
“Something like this,” I said as I pulled into our driveway.
*The title of this blog is taken from an article of the same name in Psychology Today, February 2024 https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/relationship-based-parenting/202402/the-power-of-play
