My son came home from watching Emma Memma and the Wishing Tree with his school friends absolutely buzzing — the kind of full-body excitement that only a four-year-old fresh out of a live-action theatre can produce. He recapped the entire plot to me in fragments, out of order, with sound effects, and somewhere in the middle of that chaotic retelling, I realized I was enjoying it more than I expected to. Watching someone experience pure, uncomplicated delight is its own kind of contagious.
Then, over the weekend, we watched The Cat in the Hat together as a family — my pick, admittedly, mostly out of nostalgia. And it struck me partway through just how much that story is actually about adults who’ve forgotten how to play, having their world turned upside down by something wild and a little chaotic until they remember what fun used to feel like. Watching it as a parent instead of a kid completely changes the joke — you’re not rooting for the chaos to stop anymore, you’re quietly rooting for it to keep going a little longer.
What struck me most, watching this particular version, was how much more heart they gave the Cat himself. Earlier live-action attempts always leaned into the manic, slightly unsettling side of the character — fun in short bursts, but a little exhausting to sit through as an adult. This one let the mischief stay, but underneath it there was something gentler: a Cat who wrecks the house not out of pure anarchy, but because he genuinely wants the kids to remember how to have fun. It’s a small shift, but it changed the whole feeling of watching it with my son — less “brace for chaos,” more “wait and see what this actually teaches him.”
That one didn’t come out of nowhere, either. I’d been reading him the book and its sequel (The Cat in the Hat Comes Back) for a week before that, night after night, because he kept asking for it again and again. A lot of it, I think, was that he genuinely couldn’t wrap his head around why the Cat was allowed to wreck the whole house like that and get away with it — he’d ask the same confused question every single time, as if the answer might finally change if he just heard the story one more time.
Two kids’ movies in one week probably shouldn’t have added up to anything resembling a revelation, but here we are. There’s something about having children that hands you your own childhood back, piece by piece, except this time you get to watch it from the outside — through someone else’s wide eyes instead of your own. I spent years assuming parenthood would just take things away: time, sleep, spontaneity. Nobody really tells you it also gives some of it back, just in a different shape.
I don’t think I’ll remember much else about this particular week. But I’ll probably remember my son re-enacting an entire wishing tree scene from memory, and the look on his face when the Cat finally showed up and wrecked the living room, happy to let both of those things take up more space in my head than anything from my actual to-do list.
xoxo
JEAN
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