Coming Attractions

Met a charming three-year-old girl at a local playground today. (I won't specify as to which one; suffice it to say that it was a nice one.) I was playing hide-and-seek with my son, baby-style; I disappeared from view inside a small plastic structure and said "Where's Mommy?"; he lifted a flap and saw me and giggled. That's a great form of hide-and-seek for the average tired mom, of course; no motion involved for me, oodles of fun for the boy. The three-year-old, a slight girl with a wide-open expression and big, impish grin, started opening a different flap and looking in; I leaned over and said "Hi" to her, in a funny voice, and that was enough to make her beam with pleasure and keep doing it again and again. The next time my roving kid and I were in the structure, she actually popped inside with me and stood in the corner; I poked her gently in the stomach and said "I see you" or something similar, and she responded with a chortle of delight.

"What's your name?" I asked. She said something that was incomprehensible to me; maybe she'd been trained by her parents not to respond with her real name, or maybe that was just her three-year-old pronunciation. A few minutes later I asked how old she was, and I think she said, "Three."

The thing that knocked my socks off wasn't so much her winning smile and easy, friendly manner, although those things were wonderful; it was that moment when my son and I walked past her and she was pretending to take a phone call from someone. She wasn't holding a toy phone or anything of the sort; she was just leaning against a play structure, talking in a very businesslike way into an imaginary telephone.

It reminded me of how much I love that age in children. Their imaginations take flight at any moment; they are in love with the world in a way that only three and four-year-olds can love it.

However, the downside is the degree of loneliness and fear they can experience at any moment...precisely because their hearts and imaginations are so huge, especially when compared to their ability to process information, they are vulnerable. This little girl suddenly told me in a whisper, and not in response to any question I'd asked, "I want to go home." I looked over at the silent person sitting on a bench, presumably her caregiver, who never said a word to her or even smiled the entire hour or so that we were there. "My mommy's waiting for me at home," the little girl continued, her voice sad, or at least, wistful. I can't know exactly what she meant--was she expressing a wishful thought, i.e. she wanted her mom to come home from work early; or was it true and for some inexplicable reason she was forced to remain with this unsympathetic person for the time being?

I'll never know. But that little girl reminded me, not just how much I love that age; she reminded me how incredibly precious our little girls and boys are--not just my son, or my friends' sons and daughters, but all these miraculous beings that we pass on all the playgrounds.