I Thought My Childhood Imagination Would Come Back When I Had Kids

I’m so, so bad at playing pretend.

My kids aren’t yet in grade school, but already their interests are beginning to take shape and sharply diverge from one another. My older son, who is five, is obsessed with dinosaurs, even more than the average child-who-likes-dinosaurs (no, seriously, he is DEVOTED to dinosaurs at the expense of all else). My younger son, aged two, vacillates a bit between trucks in general and fire trucks in particular, and these days he’s just getting into the groove of setting up the Thomas the Tank Engine trains and track. Whether it’s a Spinosaurus attacking a Jeep full of scientists or Gordon Pulling the Express across precarious coffee table infrastructure, my kids want the same thing from me every time: new, improvised, dramatic role-playing. It is not enough to simply identify the dinosaurs and pretend to buy them in a store, or to set up the track and then make peeping and chuffing noises as we drag the engines and their magnetic cars through tunnels and over bridges. No. I must MAKE. THEM. TALK.

I cannot stress this point enough: I am terrible at this.

Once upon a time I was full of whimsy, of course. In the Paul-Simon-esque days of miracles and wonder, my younger sister Carolyn and I had a long-running pretend game in which we escaped to an imaginary kingdom.

We called it Jewelbank. Well, actually we called it Mayfield first. Then Turquoise. But Jewelbank was the name that lasted the longest; the one that stuck. It was mostly in our backyard, a sprawling half acre of clover-studded grass bordered by a fence that kept us in and kept the cows out. Our parents rented the farmhouse; someone else rented the pasture out back to raise hamburger. The yard was our domain, and it was magic. And I do mean magic: we scorned dress-up costumes and the plastic food from our toy kitchen for air and improvisation. When we jumped off the low retaining wall by the vegetable garden, we stepped through an imaginary portal into a world where there were no limits. Everything is realer when you imagine it. A sequined Cinderella dress from the Disney store, bound by time and space and cheap synthetic fabric, can’t compare to a metaphysically impossible ball gown you dreamed up out of nothing.

I outgrew the game before Carolyn did. The slide into adolescence was inevitable and led to countless fights and angry tears. But no matter how much I wanted to hang on to our web of self-spun stories, my ability to believe in Jewelbank began to fade with the arrival of grown-up molars and training bras. Carolyn could still see the castle we’d constructed, but I was landing on the other side of the retaining wall into plain old grass.