Let's Go Play...

Ever have a day where all you wanted to do was go play outside? 

I’m sitting here at work, looking at everyone around me and feeling like a little boy among the grown-ups.  I’m thinking “Don’t yell at me.  Don’t ask me when this next piece of boring shit will be done.  Don’t ask me things I don’t know.  Stop being so bloody self-important.  Let’s just go outside and run around climbing trees.  It’s a beautiful day and I just want to go and play…”

Sigh…

There is a song on one of Madeline’s CD’s that is called “Let’s go play”.  It is one of my favourites.  It is bright, exuberant , joyful and carefree.

I don’t remember my childhood ever being truly carefree.  I sorta missed that bit.

It is not like I had a bad childhood.  I climbed trees, had friends, played chasey, rode a bmx everywhere, only came in at sunset…

…but none of it, for me, was ever really care free.  There was always an edge.  A darkness inside.  Like there was an invisible ledge I must not go over.  A vague, indefinable fear hampered my play and meant everything was constrained and felt… incomplete.  It is very hard to describe but remains with me even today, despite my best efforts to indulge in reckless abandon.  It seems to affect everything.

I have always wondered why, and have been thinking about it again recently…

I was playing when I was burned.

I was a year and a half old.  Mum was in the kitchen and I was busily rolling a log of wood up to the bench so I could climb on it and peer over the bench to see what she was doing.  She didn’t know I was there.  I stood on the log, it rolled away and I knocked a saucepan containing freshly boiled water down on me.

Mum heard a scream and turned to see me with my skin stripped from my face and hanging in shreds from my chin and jaw.

Her world changed that day. 

I guess mine did too.  I almost died.  For many weeks my head, shoulders, chest and back were one big scab – eyes and ears sealed over and only my mouth reliably open.  My parents had to pour liquid food into it.  Every morning Mum or Dad had to lift me from my bed, tearing the healing skin from my back and making me scream in agony (45 years ago the burns technology we have now didn’t exist).  After that Dad refused to put me down again for the whole day.  Once a day hurt them enough.

I had to learn to talk again afterward.  Apparently that did not take too long J, but the nightmares went on  and on for years.

Even today, at times when life feels a bit overwhelming, I catch myself holding my scarred arm across my chest the way I did for a long time after recovering from the accident.

I suppose physical scars aren’t the only ones that will last a lifetime in some form or another.

Madeline is about the age I was when I mangled myself.  I simply cannot imagine the horror of hearing her scream and running to find her in the same state Mum and Dad found me.

I watch her barrelling around the house, yelling with abandon, laughing and playing, dancing and exploring.

Being truly care free. 

It always makes me smile and I feel a fierce desire to protect her and nurture that recklessness - so that there may always be an element of it in her for as long as she lives. 

 She runs through my life like the most gorgeous little ball of sunshine, warming everything she touches…

…and I think “It’s a beautiful day and I just want to go and play.”

Show me how, little Princess.  Show me how…