Slowly, we sink into the depths of winter.
Around half four on a cold, if not bitterly so, saturday, F and I are playing at Plikta, the big playpark in Slottskogen. The light is gone, so the park is floodlit and increasinly deserted. Occasional joggers go by, helicopters sometimes rush overhead on the way to the nearby hospital (which F loves) and the usual muffled city noises fill the night.
But the park itself feels somwhat chill. Too much blackness and not enough children running about playing - a playpark can be sinister in such conditions. F is not done with the swings yet, however, so I hold on a little longer.
She won't wear her gloves, although her hands are pink and cold. It's not below freezing, quite a mild night compared to the rest of the week in fact, even if the rising night makes it seem colder. We are, however, the last people there.
Playgroup is a mixed blessing, I have been thinking. F has breakfast and dinner with us during the week, but little more than that. She is tired by the end of a week of dagis. Midweek she's pretty happy to arrive there, reciting the names of her teachers and friends. She waved me off before I had a chance to last week, rushing off to push a toy pram about without a lookback.
But by Thursday or Friday, the smiles are faded, replaced with the blank look of someone who knows she can't do much to change the day ahead and will have to suffer through it. Saturday and Sunday are good, we can catch up and play. Then on Monday she looks mournful when we leave her again. She tried to climb the bars of the sandpit the other morning, in fact, giving us a desperate sad smile as she asked us to come and play with her this time.
Oh, wee lady, you just wait until school starts. Or a job. I often hear my fellow European immigrants complaining that Swedish schools don't get children ready fast enough, that they let them play for too long. Bloody Protestant work ethic, it makes me think. Why not just get them to stitch shoes if you're so hell-bent on getting them industrious? Let them play. Plenty of time to work later, and having nine-to-five daycare away from the family is quite work enough when you aren't even two.
Anyway - this is why I've stayed longer than I meant to at Plikta, and why we're the last ones at the roundabout in the gathered dusk.
Good old parental guilt, it's a highly horsepowered engine. F at this moment is eschewing the various equipment of the park and has settled on a good old-fashioned slope, which she is practising running up and down. But as she turns her back on the floodlight pole at the top of the slope, she becomes first dismayed, then angry.
"Pappa! Pappa! No! NoaaAA!"
"What is it, lovely? What's the matter?"
"Feya vill noha sadow!" she wails dramatically, pointing and hopping from foot to foot. "Pappa tah bot!"
She's doing this because stretched out in front of her, stark and deep, is her shadow. And she wants none of it, and because she can't shake it off, she'd like me to take it away. At least she's given up on the moon for the moment, not that this is an easier ask.
Much as I'd like to remove them, life is full of shadows. I settle for getting her to turn back to the light, so at least the apparent pit at her feet is not distressing her, and then we go home and have pasta.
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