Playing House

Remember the days when we were little girls playing house?  I remember dressing my dolls, cooking food, doing the ironing, sweeping the floors, washing dishes and enjoying it.  Of course all this was make-believe with plastic toy food, a plastic toy iron and a miniature broom, but it was fun.

Somewhere between 5 and 25 all these fun things became work.  At 5 years old the concept of work doesn’t exist, except maybe the thought that daddy goes to work each day.  Somewhere around 7 years old we get introduced to homework.  At first it is fun because you are in “Big School” and you are learning new things each day.  Then we begin to realise that it is something we have to do.  And as soon as it becomes something we have to do, it stops being something we want to do.  That is when the whole system falls apart.  We start procrastinating, we begin to leave things to the last minute so that we can play now and avoid our chore as long as possible.

I thought about all of this while packing the dishes away from the drying rack.  The 5 year old version of myself would have loved this “huge” doll-house I’m living in.  (For those of you who don’t know, my home is the size of a double garage).  My 5 year old self would jump at the opportunity to get to “play house” in here.  Why has my housework become a chore?  Perhaps it is time to see the world through different eyes… the eyes of the 5 year old me.

As I continued packing the dishes away, I actually started enjoying the task.  I thought to myself “This is what I’ve always wanted.  I’ve always wanted my own home and now I have it.” My 5 year old dreams are real. Okay, I’m not married and there are no children yet, so they are almost real.

Sometimes happiness is just a change of attitude.