“Parents bobble between a nostalgia-filled yearning for their children to play and fear that time spent playing is time lost to more practical pursuits.”
This sentence might not take your breath away but I think the word choice is fun to ponder. It’s from a New York Times article by Robin Marantz Henig titled Taking Play Seriously. What if the reporter had written “parents go between,” it would have been a weaker sentence. If she’d written that we “decide between,” it would have sounded much more conclusive than parenting really is. Instead, she used bobble which means to fumble and is an accurate word for the uncertain world of parenting. With our Sweetpeas, we feel our way (sometimes awkwardly) and hopefully find a path which works. It’s not a straight line; we need to bobble.
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