PLAY vs. MAGIC

Why one is better than the other. Plus: a Made by Momtown Gift Guide addendum.

A CASE AGAINST PLAY

me: The Love Witch

At 5:14am this morning, my bedroom door squeaked open to reveal a four-year-old in a silver sequined ball gown, carrying a plastic star wand in one hand and a shopping bag in another. Tears streamed down her cheeks. “Liv won’t come to be a customer in my fancy dress shop,” she sobbed. “Will you please come buy fancy dresses from my shop? Please can you buy my fancy dresses? Please?”

This was a pitiful sight for two reasons. The first was that it meant that the children had not, despite the previous night’s mercilessly pushed bed time, recovered from jet lag after a week of visiting grandma in New York. The second was that I don’t play with my kids. So the answer would be, as it always is, no.

My husband plays. As in: gets down on the floor to make Lego figurines speak in silly voices, acts like a monkey and runs around the room beating his chest, flips them upside down to hang like bats from the ceiling. Except for entering “Mommy Robot” mode and carrying them to bed on my back—and only then if the robot is issued the correct commands via an unpredictable system of ear pulls and head taps—play isn’t really my thing. I take their frantic, contradictory instructions as personal attacks (what the fuck do you mean that my LOL doll can’t swim in the fake pool because she’s “not wearing sunglasses?) I spend each aggravated minute of tickly giggling convinced that I’m about to get hit in the face. My back starts to hurt the instant I’m pulled down to the floor for a train set or some blocks. I can’t pretend not to know how to win tic tac toe for more than one round.

Instead, my purview is MAGIC.

I don’t remember exactly when the fairies first started coming to our house. My best guess is it wasn’t supposed to be fairies at all, but instead, a Scandinavian house troll, or tomte nisse, who, I learned when visiting my Swedish husband’s home town, comes sneaking around the house at night during Christmastime. When I told my older daughter, then three, that a troll would be visiting us in the night, she became so terrified that the story needed to be revised. Tiny nice fairies that would not stomp on her while she slept, I promised.

I went upstairs to the living room and began to improvise—the book didn’t say anything about fairies. I gathered a few fallen leaves from our patio and arranged them in a trail, leading from the window. With some glitter glue, I tapped out a set of teeny tiny footprints. Then I put a big pink salt crystal at the end of the trail, as a sort of offering. And then I went to bed. In the morning, I woke up to a new kind of scream, unlike anything I’d ever heard come out of my daughter’s mouth before: “THE FAIRIES CAME! THE FAIRIES CAME!”

Each night, the fairies did more mischief. They took all of our spoons out and made a trail across the floor. They hid unicorns in the fridge, Christmas presents in the dryer. They hung nightgowns from the ceiling and left “wing marks” of glitter on the windows. They hid gems inside of shoes and built themselves zip lines out of shoelaces. We hung a small door for them and cast a spell on it. Then, they started leaving notes.

the first leaf

Christmas came and went, but the fairies have never left us. They find us on vacation and show up at friend’s houses. They bring chocolates, find keys, leave flower seeds that they wish for us to plant. As my daughter has learned to read and write, they have answered her questions as best they could, via sparkly notes rolled up into tiny balls: “Who is the devel [sic] and do you know him?” “Can you make spell so that I’ll be a kid forever?” “Can I start fairy training and go to fairy school in a castle?”

Over time, the fairies and the magical world they came from have become my partner in parenting. Can’t sleep? Here, try this magical sleeping crystal which I’ve charged in the moonlight. Hiccups? That means a fairy has crawled inside your belly and you’ll have to wait until he flies out for them to go away. Nonsense spews out of me effortlessly, improvised on the fly: look at that pile of rocks kids; classic fairy architecture! Check out those leaves bobbing in the rain; must be fairies, dancing! I tell them that my husband needs to leave town for work because his job is unicorn trainer, and they only train unicorns far from cities; that the clouds outside an airplane window are made of real cotton candy; that the owl who visits us at night has come with a message from another world.

I have puzzled over why I can’t last longer than thirty seconds of making animal noises, but can (and have) spent hours sourcing miniature food to create a scene of post-banquet aftermath for my children to discover at dawn. Part of it: focusing on magic allows me to participate in their life without taking up a lot of space. Playing makes me feel too powerful, too center-stage, like I’m smearing my adult-ness all over their fragile little ideas. (The fairies make me powerful too, of course, although in a way I still find astonishing: when it comes to magic, my kids believe absolutely anything I tell them.)

Most of all, I think play doesn’t agree with me because it makes me feel like a fake. I can’t keep the energy and artifice up, I get annoyed or distracted, and I wish I was doing something else, which makes me feel guilty, and when I feel guilty I get angry, and so on.

Which is ironic, because fake is the charge that has been leveled at me most often by fairy skeptics. “Won’t your kids be mad when they find out you’ve been lying?” is the question I’ve been asked most of all, and I’ve always found it baffling. In a culture of childhood so devoid of awe and wonder¹, wouldn’t you do everything you could to provide it?

(I know that the answer is a resounding no for a lot of parents.²In fairness, this does involve a lot of scattered glitter.)

I suppose we all project our own emotional needs onto our kids. What I need, more than anything, is a way to stop time. The real reason I can’t play is because I struggle to *be present*, to *just exist*, for as long as the game takes—the minute the clock actually does slow down, my need to do / plan / achieve goes into overdrive. This is the last thing they need, and the worst thing I could give them. Instead, I hope they grow up able to look at a hunk of rock salt and see a universe. To fall asleep every night knowing that it’s alright—wonderful, even—to have no idea what they might find when they wake up.

sometimes the fairies don’t come for a while. but they are never gone for good.

GIVING, GIFTING: AN ADDENDUM

A few days ago, Momtown itself led me to discussion of LA department of family services’ Adopt a Family program, where you can accept a wish list from a registered family and help brighten their holiday. I took on two families and it’s been extremely gratifying—a drop in the bucket and no substitute for more organized giving, of course, but a joyous way to redirect my extra-lucky children’s greed. Rather than focusing on their own wish lists (which, to be clear, is left for the fairies, who return only what Santa approves) they have been picking things out for other people, volunteering their favorite stickers to go in “the big box.”

MEANWHILE, a little addendum to the 1st ever Momtown Gift Guide, which many people say is the best Momtown Gift Guide ever created: Made by Momtown.

• Extraordinary coffee and more from Zelle Bonney’s company Itadi, which sources everything from her family’s farm in Togo.

• Jeanne Leitenberg makes the most in-joke cinephile meme clothes ever seen on Etsy — Arclight merch??

• Did you know that Liane Balaban does custom portraits of pets (and maybe other things, you should ask her, I would but I’m shy)???

• Some very slinky little kaftan numbers from Kadimah, Michelle Isak’s swimsuit line

• Sarah Dolin’s friend makes nice candles

• Eunie’s beautiful floral embellishments are by request, or she’ll teach you how to do it yourself at an upcoming workshop; become crafty in 2026!

• I KNOW that there are more of you making cool things too, so please hit the comments!

• AND, a debut: if you would like an advance holiday copy of the instruction book + fairy door kit I’ll be manufacturing by hand / at an absurd profit loss beginning in 2026, please message me, Alicia, here:

…it’s a whole kit in a box with everything you need to get your own community of house fairies, including magic crystals, potion recipes, spell casting instructions, etc, with illustrations by two junior fairy experts, Liv and Louie. GLITTER IS OPTIONAL. Tragically, my seven-and-a-half year old is beginning to respond to my bullshit storytelling with the words I’ve dreaded since all this began: “is this real?” I know I only have a year or two of magic-making left, tops, and have to make do with infesting other people’s houses.

1. One of the great shocks (and failures!) of kid’s media, to me, is the abundance of enemy-fighting, problem-solving super teams—apart from the dialogue-driven, closed-ended storytelling formula that leaves zero room for interpretation or mystery, this focus on ‘naming feelings’ and ‘comprising to work better, together’ all smacks of obedience training. It’s like skipping over the only true privilege of youth—unfettered imagination—in order to teach 3-year-olds to be communicative little co-workers at the corporate office of life.

2. It’s no from my husband, who, despite growing up in native fairy country, has been a reluctant spectator in this whole enterprise from its inception. He can’t even bring himself to make his handwriting teeny tiny when I make him write the notes because I’m out of town.