When responsibility is your love language

Fun has always been a risk for kids like us.

My husband and I have a problem with fun. Namely, we don’t know how to have it.

It might not be our fault. We are both oldest children who grew up during the latchkey era. Watching ourselves and others is second nature. We worked our way through college, graduated into a recession, and got married working at McJobs. We became parents during the HMO years and raised our kids through the Great Recession and a global pandemic.

Responsibility is our love language.

We want to have fun. We’re just waiting for time, money, and everything to be ok with everyone else first.

I didn’t realize that was weird until my husband’s job took us away from our adult children, our family, our friends, and our community. Overnight, we became strangers with the calendar of strangers – all wide-open weekends and unstructured evenings. Yet we behave as if nothing has changed.

Last Valentine’s Day, we exchanged the usual slapdash homemade cards, one of which included a reminder to pay the water bill.

It had a smiley face on it. We even laughed about it.

Then, we took a walk, split a meal, and...paid the water bill.

I know it’s pathetic. And we’ve been trying to change. We talk about places we want to go, things we want to do, but as soon as those conversations require action, we freeze up, take a walk, split a meal, and pay a bill.

Recently, while walking in a local park before splitting a meal at a local restaurant, we were talking about buying tickets for a baseball game out of state...or not...or booking a B&B for an upcoming play festival...or not.

And that’s when I started using my outdoor voice.

Clearly, planning fun wasn’t going to be fun. We needed to power through the pain of potential irresponsibility, book SOMETHING, and hope when we got there, we remembered how to enjoy ourselves. Having fun shouldn’t be a risk, but apparently that is what we have created for ourselves.

My husband agreed with my rant, but that was it. We lapsed into silence and kept walking.

The park had an extensive wooden play structure, one of those massive cathedrals where bridges and rope ladders connected forts, swings, and slides, all encircled by protective fencing and packed with cushy mulch. Kids shrieked with glee while parents gossiped under trees.

We skirted the whole show and then stopped.

Outside that Shangri-la of fun was a grouchy metal merry-go-round, the cornerstone of all 1970s playgrounds. It was the height of irresponsibility, tetanus-on-a-tilt, a paint-chipped purveyor of nausea and mayhem.

Both of us grinned.

I sat first, avoiding the screws poxing the top. My skin remembered the bite of those metal bits as centrifugal force dragged my younger self over and off the disc. Without getting up, I set the scary-go-round in motion with my foot. The world blurred into “whee”. My husband pushed the rust-covered bars, making it spin faster, before jumping on himself.

Together we spun in circles, recalling split lips and scraped knees and doing as we pleased.

I closed my eyes.

Fun has always been a risk for kids like us, so I booked both trips.

Bring on the pain.