It's a Lot More Fun to Play Make-Believe With Your Kids If You're Slightly High on Weed
In DepthIn Depth

I’ll never forget a dad I saw one of the first times I ever took my toddler to a playground. As I nervously followed my son around, this dad and his daughter—she must have been around six—were engaged in a completely immersive game of make-believe. They were running around, hiding behind stuff, shouting code words and urgent communiqués across the play-structure. They referred to each other by special names during the game, and I never saw the dad break character. “Quick, Bumble-Bee! Use your transmission beam to confuse them!” he shouted. “They’re coming up over the slide! Duck down, Yellow Jacket!!!”she yelled back.
They played like that for a very long time before breaking for snacks. As I watched them in awe, I silently apologized to my son: This could be us but I’m not playin. Because the truth is, I’m not great at playing. It pains me to admit this in writing, more—like, a lot more—than it did to write about getting an abortion. True fucking story.
To cheer myself up about this, I try to remind myself that childhood is a social construct that’s only about 150 years old. I feel like generally I do a good job of honoring my children’s mysterious child-ness. But I have limits, and make-believe is one of them. I suck at it, I have no patience for it. It makes me feel really tired. My husband’s pretty awesome at make-believe, but even he needs to be in a very optimum mind-frame to engage in one of his highly coveted evening-long games of Robin Hood.
I’ll go in for some Lego, drawing, low-key baking. I’ll do sidewalk chalk till the streetlights come on. But play, in general, is something that I find hard. I’m ashamed to admit it. To be a good mom is to be good at play, right?
It turns out that there’s a way to make playing with your kids—really getting down on their level—easier and more fun! I’ve been looking into it. It turns out a lot of people do it. All you have to do is get high on weed. I would try to sound like less of a narc and write “smoke weed,” but that’s inaccurate in this case. Most of the people I spoke to for this piece don’t smoke around their kids; they vape, or consume edibles. It’s the future, man.
Marijuana is being gradually decriminalized across North America, so it’s not hugely shocking that people are using newly available, less psychologically potent, more precisely tailored strains of it for recreational use. And, as pot decriminalization is happening alongside a huge, tragic opioid epidemic, the debate around legal drug use is freighted with strong opinions on either side. In the middle of this tangle is a group of people you never, ever hear about: Parents who occasionally smoke some weed to have more fun playing with their kids.
I’m not much of a pot smoker myself. But I have a few parent-friends who consume pot semi-regularly, so I recently tried vaping, and was given a nug to bring home and try around my kids. (Please refrain from wigging out. My husband was home, it was the end of the day, no one was endangered.) The vape is a bit weird, honestly, if you are like me and unimaginatively associate weed with hippies and the earth. The vape experience is vaguely Patrick Bateman. The hardware has a light that goes on when it’s ready to use, and the inhale was so smooth that I was surprised when I exhaled a little cloud.
Being a little stoned around my kids was, frankly, excellent. It was a Sunday evening and we had made homemade ice cream earlier that day. (Mom of the year, I know.) When I set their bowls in front of them and we started eating, I normally might have said something like, “Pretty good ice cream huh guys?” But tonight, I waited until the kids had a few bites and said, “If you could make this ice cream better in any way, how would you improve it?” Needless to say, I was speaking my five-year-old’s language and we spent the next several minutes speculating about the deliciousness of different flavor combos. Some of his ideas were so intense that he had to come and whisper them in my ear, to protect his little brother from having his mind irrevocably blown.
Here’s what I noticed when I spoke to people about their pot-and-parenting habits: They keep their habit hidden from their kids, even if hanging out with the kids is part of the reason they’re getting high. By contrast, people who recalled their parents’ pot-smoking habits—we’re talking by and large about baby boomers here, raising their young kids in the late ’70s and early ’80s—described a very different approach.