Providential Architecture

Do you ever use activities to manage your stress level? 

I do. I started early in life to occupy my hands and mind in order to stay a few steps ahead of uncomfortable emotions that made me feel so out of control. 

Building beautiful ballrooms for Barbies out of boxes, bottles, beads and scarves also built - to a high degree - my coping mechanisms in an uncertain household. Looking back, with my mind’s eye on the detailed palaces which I constructed from age six or seven to twelve years of age, I see symmetry and color-coordination, developing into experimentation with asymmetry, after the divorce in 1959, and clashing, bold color schemes as we neared the 1960’s. I turned twelve October 6, 1960 and girls in sixth grade just didn’t play with Barbies anymore, so I put them aside.

It’s not like I actually played with the Barbies really, but rather used the scale of their impossible bodies to build my palaces. A cantilevered stack of flat and shiny beige boxes that my mom’s nylons came in became a perfect staircase descending to the grand ballroom. An empty white glass Luster Cream shampoo jar was an ideal sink in Barbie’s luxurious bathroom. I draped most of the boxes with colorful dress-up scarves which were plentiful at our house. Gaudy costume jewelry beads or pastel plastic pop-beads cascaded down most of the staircases - like Klieg lights, while the old cameo brooches my Grammy gave me hung like portraits on the wall - which usually was an up-ended produce box draped with a scarf. Many of the brooches hung at rather unfortunate angles, on account of the way the pin backs were set side to side rather than top to bottom, disturbing the symmetry I was trying to achieve. Fussing over these cock-eyed miniature make-believe ancestral portraits on a cardboard wall proved a useful stand-in for trying to fix my actual relatives.

The point of arranging things “just so” is that it calms a charged-up nervous system. As beautiful as the Lautner house I grew up in was to look at - everyone IN the house had a grotesquely over-activated nervous system. Dad managed his with binge drinking, sex and raging; mom with cigarettes and playing the piano, my older brother by running away as the inevitable fights began to escalate or by rebelling against mom when dad wasn’t around. I managed my worry, fear and stomach aches by building things, climbing trees, roller skating on the patio, and, later, by dancing. My closet was a great place to hide and there I created imaginary worlds which were so much more pleasant to occupy than that redwood-and-glass-house-moderne where we “lived” and where so many nightmarish things happened.  

By building Barbie Ballrooms, I learned proportion, math concepts, uses of color, texture, line and style and, most importantly, the art of self-soothing.

An educator friend of mine recently sent an email listing “THE Five Best-EVER Toys for Kids.” Boxes, dirt, water, sticks and rocks. Evidently, we need to use our imagination for healthy brain development. The more amorphous the medium with which we are engaging is, the better use we are making of our grey matter.

In his classic book, Uses of Enchantment, Bruno Bettelheim adds to my understanding  - that nondescript toys are better for kids - with a tangential concept: that it is better for children to hear open-ended, descriptions of heroes, heroines and villains than it is to have the heroic or villainous traits spelled-out to the tiniest detail. In a storybook, the witch can exhibit the perfect amount of witchiness which that child can handle. On a movie screen, if the witch is too scary, the child easily can be overwhelmed. Reading aloud to children has so many benefits it warrants further exploration in another blog! Creating a coherent narrative is essential to our healing from any event in which too much happened too fast. Books give us road maps forged by other travelers which can ease our own journey.

One purpose of imagining anything is to master our environment - both the external environment and our internal environment. Children with difficult histories are always trying to heal from their physical and psychic wounds. Play is the operating theater where they perform precise surgeries to remove the traumatic impact of real events by acting out the way it all should have gone down!  Grimm’s fairytales give us hope because the good guys always come through their trials to enjoy a righteous and just end. So might we. 

Can we give children the simple tools for sculpting their best selves? Can we offer them time and space in which to heal?

My gratitude is profound as I look back and appreciate the benign neglect which passed as “parenting” in my family of origin. I had oodles of alone time, simple things to arrange and work with and a grand and glorious out-of-doors, in the hills of Echo Park, which I used to great benefit in healing my external and internal worlds.

Ballroom building gradually gave way to ballet at ten and modern dancing when I was twelve, but I’m thankful that those years of providential architecture allowed me to survive elegantly enough until the dance fix came along.

What will the children in your life find in their gift boxes this season? Hopefully, some books. And hopefully some of the boxes will be empty of stuff - leaving S P A C E to be filled with the child’s imagination! S/he knows exactly how to heal through play.

Enjoy the season!