Meaningful Play in Surf and Family

This post is the first in my series of short essays “Be Surf with Baby: Essays on Surfing and Motherhood”.

I first heard this term meaningful play via a conversation on screen between surfer, writer, hydrophilic badass Lauren Hill and her inimitable partner Dave Rastovich. I lit up: YES.

It really was the perfect way to describe surfing. In fact, I don’t know what I would do on this spinning stone without meaningful play, I simply hadn’t heard the term before.

Surfing is one of the few activities (the only?) activity that I do for its sake alone. It’s the time I feel most free.

There are no strings attached. It’s for me. It’s the means, it’s the end. There’s no productivity, there’s no deliverable—I’m not producing anything, (except maybe stoke?). There are no judges, no scores.

Interestingly, but perhaps not surprisingly, play has been one of the most challenging aspects for me as a mama.

Where my daughter is so naturally given to play—it’s her top priority really, that, and eating chocolate chips atop her stool in the kitchen—to me, play seems onerous and difficult at times. I’m so tired, I find myself thinking.

After a long day of leading my team, of having to invent the way forward and “determine next steps, next steps, NEXT STEPS!”, the invention and letting loose required of play feels exacting, out of reach.

But when I am on my board, play comes so easily: I’m zipping up the face, sliding and inching my toes, leaping ninja style back into the water at the end of the wave.

I wondered recently about this—what lessons of play can I take from my meaningful play of surf and transfer them to my time playing with my daughter? As I turned this over like a shell in my hand, the one theme that kept arising was presence.

Surfing demands presence. Without presence, you’re, well, missing it. It requires the absorption of where we are, giving yourself completely to the moment.

And that is what I realize that often I have been missing in my play with Sunny. In the nook of my mind, I’m thinking, those dishes over there, or that email I need to send or that bill I need to call about. And yes—there’s a whole list of quehaceres and we can’t just let them all go to shit. They have to get done. But when my child calls “Mama” and reaches her hand for me—when she toddles up to me with a box of blocks—when she pours me “tea” at the tea party and shrieks “hot!”—the answer from me must be: I am here.

“Surfing demands presence. Without presence, you’re, well, missing it. It requires the absorption of where we are, giving yourself completely to the moment. ”

What my child deserves is presence and absorption.

This ride is the gift.

Long before my baby arrived, I knew that crafting my life around surfing—setting surfing up as the nucleus—was right. And so it would seem, among the many beauties of surfing, I’m crafting my life around meaningful play. Locked hands with connection, community, nature, movement, creativity, surfing and wait: presence.

Surfing has given me all of the tools to be a good mama, all of the pillars of humanity, all of the gifts I want to grant to my daughter. In turn, daily and eternally, she has given me the greatest invitation to show up, to be here, to connect.

I don’t want to miss it.

“Mama, come!”

I am here.

References:

Lauren L. Hill

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