Fun-atic

Last week Emily took her twins to a trampoline park in a mall to celebrate their 8th birthday. If you have never been to a trampoline park, it is basically an enormous room - or half of a floor of a mall in this case - covered in trampolines of varying shapes and sizes. It was mostly full of kids with their guardians standing respectfully off to the side, monitoring for safety. 

But also present was a special subset of grown men on their own, dressed in white tank tops and stretch pants and practicing back handsprings with a level of seriousness reserved for future Olympians. There is something very special about a grown person who goes to a mall alone at 4 in the afternoon to spend hours perfecting a skill they will never use in everyday life. 

Then again, it is probably just as rational as running aimlessly around one’s neighborhood in stretch pants like Emily and Alexina do on a regular basis as a way of - get this - maintaining their sanity. The point is, Emily could not have respected these lone adult trampoliners more. Upon entry to the trampoline park, Emily put on her special grippy socks that she purchased at the front desk (Alexina was shocked she didn’t already own a pair), spent the requisite amount of time pretending to usher her kids into the play area so they could have fun, then cut the crap, shoved a few talentless kids to the side, and got to work showing off her mad skills. Who cares if most of her sweet moves from her gymnastics days of 30 years ago were now more arthritic than artistic? It was worth it.

We so rarely let ourselves cut loose like we used to when we were kids. It would serve us to do this more, but it is also understandable that we don’t. After all, there is a fine line between acting carefree and seeming deranged. But lately, the idea of pursuing fun as an adult has been picking up some buzz. There is even a book out about having fun that most of you will have heard about by now. Neither of us has read it because we’ve been too busy laughing at the oxymoronic idea of an instruction manual on having fun, but apparently we are missing out because word is, it’s full of good stuff. And we aren’t talking about some inane idea of being a silly, fun family that, let’s face it, is a recipe for having no friends. We mean actual fun - the kind that does not involve suspending all dignity to act like a lunatic who thinks doing laundry is actually just an opportunity for make-believe! 

Parents in the United States spend more time with their kids than our parents and grandparents did, and we aren’t even talking about how much quality time we spent with our kids in 2020. While this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, it does mean that parents are frequently sacrificing other things that bring them joy such as friendships, hobbies, and going to the bathroom without someone barging in and screaming that their sibling tried to feed a LEGO to the family dog. 

An article published last year in The Atlantic summed it up nicely, “happiness is a resource best drawn from multiple wells.” So while your children may fill your cup, remember to find some fun out there in your community to fill your well.