“Who do you want to be, mom?” I get that question a lot around here from the big boy, “Will Turner or Jack Sparrow?”…”Hermione or Hagrid?”…”Do you want to be the parrot?” I particularly like being Jack Sparrow because of the kookiness of his character and the pirate accent.

At the same time, my baby girl often lines up all of her stuffed animals for tea parties, school, naps, or storytime. She sometimes pretends to be a puppy. She barks and begs for spoonfuls of peanut butter, which I place on the floor for her to eat. (I make her sit and shake with her paw, first.)

So, I have been pondering the idea of children’s attraction to role playing and all the related imagination games and I have realized that we grown-ups don’t really do that. We don’t decide to be one person today and another tomorrow. We don’t explore characters unless we are actors or it’s Halloween. I don’t pretend to be a CEO today and a barista tomorrow—although I think that sounds awesome! (I suppose if you count the fantasy that comes from buying lottery tickets and rehearsing how you will dole out the money to all the people you love, then I do role play often.) Interesting, though, that young children do it so naturally. It occurs to me that they don’t have fixed personalities yet. They aren’t caught up in issues of identity or have too much concern about who they will become—they are too busy BE-ing. They aren’t locked into the relatively static definition of self that we are. It is all pretty interesting. Some good info about the importance of role play here, here, and here.

I must confess, it is tricky to navigate imaginative pirate play—what with all the drinking and womanizing and looting. The thing is…Jack Sparrow is kooky because he’s totally drunk. Lately, we have been playing with our Pirates of the Caribbean LEGOs and the kits come with (quite a few) little bottles. So, the other day we were acting out our little minifigues and I suggested we have a picnic on our deserted LEGO island while we wait to be rescued by a ship. My son informed me that pirates don’t eat food—”they just drink beverages.” Perhaps because of my husband’s recovery, our son doesn’t actually know what goes in those bottles because he doesn’t see them at home. So I asked him, “what sort of beverages do pirates drink?”  “Grum,” he said. Of course…grum.

I gotta go now because I really want to go pretend I am a princess…and I am going to a hidden princess spa in the West Indes for a glitter pedicure and a hot stone massage and a…glass of grum. 🙂