Childhood Play

“Go play outside!” was an oft-heard rejoinder in my childhood home. My mother – along with having questionable ideas about nutrition – had Definite Ideas about What Children Should Do, and one of those ideas, boiled down to its simplest form, was: Go outside.

I was a bookworm as a kid (still am), but despite my ability to sit and entertain myself with words for endless hours (or perhaps because of it), I also possessed endless physical energy (and boundless imagination). My mother’s solution to expending both of those vitalities was to send me outside to play.

So outside I went.

To the sandbox, the swingset, the garden, the blackberry bushes to climb and create and pretend; to the front sidewalk to draw with chalk or ride my trike; over expanses of lawn, barefooted, to neighbors’ houses to gather together with other kids who were doing the same things, having been given the same directive: Go play outside.

As a result – at least until the time of my mother’s divorce – I spent a good deal of time outdoors. In the summers, with the exceptions of rainy days, every day was an outdoor adventure. My pale skin burned/peeled/tanned repeatedly, until by the time autumn rolled around I was a combination of freckles and dimples and deep Scandinavian brown. In the autumn, I climbed trees and raked leaves and carved pumpkins (still do!) and did all the things I did during the summer (I was exceptionally good at playing Wonder Woman and excelled at Hold The Fort against my little brother) except I wore more layers to do them. Winters were spent ice skating and building snow forts. Spring time brought Lessons In Yard-ing™, which included focused units on things like Planting The Garden, Pulling Weeds, and Trimming The Raspberry Bushes.

Add in long walks, visits to parks and beaches, bike rides, picnics, sporting events (think: small-town bar league softball, NOT pro arena tickets), and treks through my great-grandmother’s farm fields…

And yes, I think you can say I grew up with a healthy appreciation for the outdoors.

Teenage Years

I mentioned my mother’s divorce above… It was absolutely necessary that we leave, and I 100% supported her (and supported is definitely the correct word; I was Acting Adult No. 2 – emotionally, financially… all of it – in my family as soon as we walked out the door), but it also created a whole new set of rules to live by and one of them – for safety reasons – was Do Not Go Outside Unsupervised.

Gone were the days of outdoor play. No more bike rides (unless she knew *exactly* what route and where we were going), no more ball parks (because, people will talk), no more trips to the park or the river or the beach.

And y’know…

Perhaps it’s a testament to how unhealthy it was for me to be cooped up indoors all the time, and perhaps it’s just a matter of how my body was processing the excessive stress of the situation (which was further exacerbated by my mom getting re-married; OY), or maybe some combination of the two — but I have never been sicklier (and I was definitely sickly — I was NOT ‘sick’) than I was during the first 2 years afterward. I missed so much school due to feeling unwell during my 7th grade year that the district threatened to hold me back. I was pale and lethargic from lack of sun and the Vitamin D it provides; I couldn’t sleep because my body never felt tired due to lack of outside exertion. In eighth grade, I experienced a period of two weeks where all I could do was sleep. It was like my body just… Shut down.

Whether my mom recognized it as lack of outside air or not, I’ll never know. Perhaps she just chalked it up to stress. But I do know that the next year, things changed.

Go outside became a parental mantra again.

So outside, I went.

But at that point, my outside activities were different. I was organizing the garden and instructing my younger siblings (while working along side — I may be bossy but I’m a damn hard worker) on which shoots were weeds and which were flowers when we set up beds. I was mowing the lawn and washing the siding and climbing up to apply sealnt to the roof. I was biking, but not for leisure. Instead, riding my bike was how I got to my babysitting jobs.

Then, once high school began, I got into sports.

(Which… Honestly, at the time, I used sports as a way to get away from the excessive responsibilities of my home life. Sports were an “approved” and “healthy” activity, so my mom allowed me to participate. I had also decided by that time – the beginning of 9th grade – that I was going to get the hell out of my home town and as far away from my nutso family as I could get. It was a promise I made to myself, one I succeeded in, and one I have kept for 26 years. But that is a post for another day.)

And then, of course, ‘outside’ played a role in my early sexual ‘sporting’ as well.

There was one time my boyfriend and I ended up in a corn field…

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