Playground, Closed for Maintenance

I make play a priority. Not as a concept. In the wild. I’m usually running some small, ridiculous prank that makes my wife roll her eyes and then laugh, which is its own kind of medicine. The laughter is permission. It tells the child in me he can come out without being told to tidy himself away first.

One of my greatest hits (i have many !) involved proper cable ties, the click-and-lock kind. My wife was out. I raided her knicker drawer and linked every pair of pants and every bra into one long festive chain. A sort of lingerie bunting. Then I waited. Sometimes till the next day. She’d open the drawer, take hold of one sensible item, and out would come the entire parade, clacking through the runners like a carnival with better engineering. I’d be useless with glee. Not cruel, not mocking. Just daft, human, very much alive. The watcher in me hates this sort of thing. My wife’s laugh keeps it at bay.

Many of us who grew up with trauma can play, but only under supervision. There’s an inner CCTV that clears its throat. It doesn’t approve of bunting made of underwear. It barely approves of paper aeroplanes. It stamps the word SILLY like a caution. Which is why I think so much about the sign on the railings: PLAYGROUND CLOSED FOR MAINTENANCE. Next to it, another in library tones: QUIET PLEASE. Behind the signs is everything. The slide. The tyre swing. The dizzy bit. The life I’m trying to let back in.

If you grew up with trauma, you might know that red light. Play was technically available, emotionally restricted. A playground with everything you could want, wrapped in tape and policed by a sign that reads: OPEN, QUIETLY. The toys arrived at Christmas. The noise was confiscated with the crinkly paper. You could swing, but not too high. You could laugh, but not out loud. It’s a particular loss to be granted the equipment and denied permission.

I learned early how to play under supervision. My dad was a carpenter of the Flintstones school: furniture you could park a small car on. His toolkit fascinated me. I had full run of the shed with proper saws and chisels that children these days would only see in a museum, and yet the whole scene was oddly unsupervised in the wrong places. The chisels had dried glue on their tips, as if they’d moonlighted as spoons. The screws and nails lived in one communal bucket, a metal soup of threads and points you had to sift by hand. Even now I keep a similar, ridiculous bucket. I tell myself it’s practical. It’s also an imprint.

I made bats and a guitar out there, the way kids make rockets from boxes. Back in the house, my dad’s coffee table arrived like a felled oak in the living room. Sharp corners, fat legs, no mercy. One afternoon my sister and I were play-fighting on the floor. She tickled, I wriggled, my head smacked the table leg. I put my hand to the back of my scalp, felt warmth, then saw the blood. I walked to my mum with my palm out, expecting—what? A flannel, a fuss, a “come here”. I got a slap. I still don’t know the charge sheet. Bleeding without permission? Making a mess? Daring to need anything when the house was already at capacity? The watcher took notes: fun is fine until it isn’t, and when it isn’t, it hurts.

Another time my sister and I were at the kitchen table pulling faces, the kind of daft, private theatre children specialise in. My mum told us off. We tried to behave. My sister, loyal and wicked, kept the show going behind my mum’s back. I laughed. My mum saw only my shoulders shaking. I was booted into the garden. Through the window I could see my sister gurning like a silent film star. I snorted again. The back door flew open and my mum came at me with scissors held high. I was six, maybe seven, and learned to hurdle fences faster than fear could think. Nobody said sorry. Nobody called it anything. It filed itself under “normal”. Another report for the internal CCTV: joy has consequences; keep it down; run if you must.

This is the thing about surveillance: it’s sticky. The external camera migrates inside. Eventually you grow up, leave home, and take the watcher with you as hand luggage. It’s very employable. Offices love it. Partners find it responsible. It keeps time, keeps tone, keeps you in line. Promotions come to the guard, not the child on the floor with felt tips. The body colludes. Breath halves itself. Shoulders narrow. Jaws learn to hover a millimetre from release. You can do holidays like this, and sex, and art, and parenting, and applause, and grief. You can even make it look effortless. But there’s a cost to living in a playground where the swings are technically open and the sign next to them says SHUSH.

I can hear the clinical translation if I need it: playful energy is designed to surge, swoop, meet other bodies, collide safely, then collapse into warmth. Supervision interrupts the arc. It converts play into performance and arousal into compliance. When you’re small, you adjust. When you’re grown, you forget you adjusted. You just notice that you can run a meeting, fix a website, pay a mortgage, even write a book, and somehow you still can’t throw a paper ball at a bin without logging it as an incident.

People sometimes think trauma always looks like headlines. Often it’s more domestic: “Here are your toys. Mind the floor.” That’s why the imprint lasts. It’s tidy. It passes as preference. “I’m just not a silly person.” “I don’t like mess.” Underneath, the watcher is still working unpaid overtime, auditing your laughter, censoring your volume, asking for a permit before you climb on the swing.

I notice how I still build like my dad: big, improvised, from scraps. I love bringing a dead plank back to life with sanding and oil. It’s one of the few places the watcher loosens its tie. Something about sawdust gives me a temporary amnesty. But even there, I catch myself filtering for acceptability. Is this chair too odd? Is this table too loud? The red light blinks. I nod at it like an old colleague and carry on. It’s surprising how humble a rebellion can be.

What does this do to relationships? Intimacy without play becomes logistics. “Have you put the bins out?” becomes the love language. Friendship without play becomes a calendar of coffees. Creativity without play becomes content. Sleep without play becomes collapse. The day ends and the body hasn’t once been safely ridiculous. No wonder the nervous system keeps the motor idling. It was never allowed to skate, fall, and be scooped up, so it hovers, on-call, ready for the next report.

It would be neat to pivot here into a list of five things to fix it. I don’t have one. I’m wary of anything that tries to domesticate this. There isn’t a worksheet for “permission”. There is only the lived fact of giving it or not. And permission, when you weren’t given it, begins like a strange noise in your own house: faint, easily dismissed, oddly embarrassing.

What I can say is this. The watcher isn’t evil. It kept me alive. It kept my sister partially safe while she made faces behind a tired woman with a sink full of dishes. It learned the layout of that kitchen and calculated the odds and taught my legs to jump fences. It got me through school and jobs and into rooms where the door stays open. It’s just not qualified to run a playground.

So I stand sometimes in my own kitchen with a daft object in my hand, feeling twelve kinds of foolish. I notice the breath parked high up, the jaw pretending to be polite, the shoulders trying to be narrow. And I think of a sign on iron railings: PLAYGROUND CLOSED FOR MAINTENANCE. Next to it, another, tasteful as a library card: QUIET PLEASE. Behind the signs is everything. The slide, the tyre swing, the climbing frame with its varnished rungs. A small scuff of old joy on the tarmac that no one bothered to scrub out.

Nothing gets solved. Nothing dramatic happens. But the wind lifts the corner of the tape and it loosens a fraction, just enough that the swing moves on its chains. Not much. Just the shape of a possibility. Somewhere a drawer opens, and a secret length of bunting tries to make a break for it. I don’t write an incident report. I don’t announce anything. I leave the tape as it is and walk home with sawdust on my sleeves, a bit of glue on my thumb, and a ridiculous little smile no one can file.

Jimi Katsis