I’ve had the experience and heard many mothers share it of trying to be “fun.” When you go out of your way to set up a great experience for your kids, it usually falls flat. When you make or purchase some exotic food or throw out ordinary procedures for something zany, why is the result often so underwhelming?
On many occasions, it’s not just underwhelming but downright infuriating (blame that on miscalibration of expectations). For extra effort you sometimes don’t get the joyful lasting memories you went in for. You just get the same-old, same-old, or, worse yet, emotionally dysregulated children.
Why?
An element of fun is a forgetfulness of self, an easygoing lack of self-consciousness. When we are monitoring ourselves for the experience of levity, it’s unlikely to happen. By trying to set up a fun time we may unintentionally make it very hard to enjoy.
The stage is set with bubbles, music, popsicles; now, have fun! We have fuzzy socks and hot chocolate—so very out of the ordinary—have fun already!
As an aside, one error in our attempts at merrymaking is the unrelenting cultural message that sugary things are fun. There is nothing wrong with sugar. Concoctions derived from almost exclusively food dye and high fructose corn syrup? You could say there’s nothing wrong with it, but your body will likely tell a different story, one of pain and unhappiness. Watching children on these syrupy, brightly colored “treats,” whether frozen, hardened, jelled, sucked, licked, or drizzled, the results are remarkably consistent. It seems important to state that fun does not mean a low-quality corn syrup food product is required.
But what about the rest of it? So much of our unfun “fun” mom stories entail a palpable expectation that “this will be fun.” Perhaps, as mothers, we should acknowledge that King Fun does not come at our command. We do not dictate when everyone is allowed to have a wonderful time. And, if we consider the experiences that we had a tantalizing taste of eternity known as fun, those were likely experiences in which no one had lofty expectations.
Instead of pouring ourselves into futile efforts to manufacture fun, we can release control of joy. That is not to say that we must then embark on a miserable path of drudgery. No, but it seems wise to acknowledge that we don’t get to decide when fun happens.
Instead, there are patterns of activity that lend themselves to joyful experiences. Being outside with children might be the surest one. Reading books, telling jokes, eating meals (admittedly, not likely to be fun depending on the ratio of kids to adults), painting, card games, funny old movies. All these activities can be woven into daily life with the likely result that there will be fun.
In closing, it’s amusing to consider how this conundrum might strike our ancestors. We can get a sense that we have created a problem where there previously wasn’t one. A hundred years ago, it’s unlikely that many parents were agonizing over why their super fun plans were not have the longed for results. It was unlikely that “fun” was a top priority for this make-believe activity called “parenting.” It could be that back then adults, who were simply being adults, not “adulting” or “parenting” or taking mushrooms to cope with ordinary life…it could be that those adults realized children are oftentimes much better at having fun than adults are. Children do not need us to intervene and direct traffic for fun to take off.
