It took me a moment. Or a few. It always does. We had walked down to the churchyard to knock the soccer ball around. That was the promise from my daughter. The plan.
“Want to kick the soccer ball?” I distinctly remember her asking. She knows I’m a sucker for it. Like an overly excited dog who learns he’s going to the beach. “YEAH! YEAH! YEAH! Oh no, I just wet myself.”
She got a World Cup replica ball for Christmas — a swerving wave of color that screams, “kick the stitches out of me, will ya?”
I planned to.
But I forgot children don’t make plans. They break them. They lure you in with one thing, then pull the carpet out from under you in a classic bait-and-switch.
How quickly our simple game of kick evolved into something that involved no kicking whatsoever.
It started subtly.
“OK, so here’s the thing,” she said. “My goal is from there to there…” She pointed from Lawrence, Kan., to outer Ft. Myers “… And your goal is this tiny twig that I’m going to snap in half and bury 11 feet underground.”
Huh?
“Ready? GO!” she yelled, and the game was on.
It lasted for exactly 13 seconds before she stopped, thought about it and then tried to convince me to play chase instead. “Chase?” I said. “I don’t want to play chase. I thought we came here to play soccer!” and I tried to steer us back to simple kicking.
Sensing defeat, she shrugged her shoulders and then concocted a game that scored points by the number of times you touched the ball while the other person — uh — “chased” after you.
“Ready? GO!”
“Wait a minute?!?” I thought to myself as I charged after her across the field. “Did I just get bamboozled by a kid?”
Child knows how to con.
Then it was football — a version from a 9-year-old whose only real knowledge of the sport is that her father supports teams with arrows and pirate flags on their helmets. Then something that involved her sitting on the ball like an egg and me trying to swing her around until the ball (egg) flew free.
“What the heck are we doing out here?” I said as games morphed from this to that.
“Playing,” I was told.
“Playing?!?” I said. “But this is mayhem.”
Of course it is, silly man. We’re being a kid.
It took me a moment. It always does. But I remembered it’s not about what you’re playing, or even HOW you’re playing. It could, I guess. Sometimes it should. You’ve got to have rules. You’ve got to have plans. You’ve got to have focus and time limits and goals with boundaries. Sure. Sometimes.
But sometimes all that really matters is that you’re playing. That you don’t get hung up on what you’re doing — or even how you’re doing it — but that you just embrace the complete schizophrenic nature of it all and go wherever the “play” takes you.
EVEN if it means chasing your kid all the way across the field while the rules change five times in the span of 50 yards, and the World Cup replica ball sits alone by itself wishing someone would come kick the stitches out of it.