I Need a Fix

By Michael

Every so often, I want to rent a baby. Or a toddler. Or a kindergartner. Just for a day, maybe four hours, but enough time to revisit the pure joy of an unexamined life. I suspect there’s not a real business like this, baby rentals, although I guess I could hire myself out as a babysitter on those nights when Jill is out with friends and there’s nothing on TiVo.

I’m in that in-between stage, with the girls all grown up and no grandchildren yet. It’s not that I’m not quite ready for grandchildren and, last I checked, it’s not going to be my decision anyway. It’s just that I need a little kid fix every so often.

Our fellow blogger, Kelly, gave birth to her fourth and final child a week ago and it reminded me how much I miss playing with little kids. I know the moms on this blog are all screaming right now, “Take mine. I need the rest,” and I get it. When the girls were younger, we had lots of work mixed in with the fun and the fun sometimes took second place.

But there were those moments…..when we’d come up with new rules for a game or a new game entirely, when we’d be reading a book and decide to change the names of the characters, when we’d come up with a new song (Driving on a private road, carrying a heavy load…) that demanded all the rhyming skills a writer-dad could muster.

Spending an hour in a child’s world is a wonderful escape and a new perspective on the world. They don’t see things the way we do, with our responsibilities and our bills and our being all grownup and smart and practical and boring. Their world is the one with the imagination and the giggling and without….what was it…rules.

Before we decided to have our own children, we’d visit friends with kids. I’d play with Alan and Patti’s son, Samuel, who is now about 87, and we’d make up stuff as we went along. Jill and I knew it was time to have our own children when I didn’t want to give Samuel back to his parents at the end of our visit.

Playing with children gives us a license to be little kids ourselves. We can tell the world we’re only crawling under the table and swinging our arm like it’s an elephant’s trunk because Timmy wants us to pretend with him, but the reality is that we like it. Playing with kids makes us younger and more creative and more fun.

I miss that. So will you.

Michael Rosenbaum is 5 Minutes for Parenting’s first dadblogger. He is a business consultant, playwright and author of Your Name Here: Guide to Life.

Michael blogs on life issues at Your Name Here Guide to Life and manages the Adult Conversation discussion group on Linked-In.