She Said, 'Go Find Something to Do'

She told me, “If you’re bored, I’ll give you something to do.” So I learned to wander—and that saved me.

The bike that taught me how to find my own way.

When I was a little girl growing up in Lake Charles, Louisiana, there was a rule in our house—unspoken but absolute.

If I wandered into the kitchen and said, “Mama, I’m bored,” she’d barely look up before answering,
“If you’re bored, go find something to do. Or I’ll give you something to do.”

And “something to do” didn’t mean fun. It meant folding laundry. Sweeping floors. Dusting baseboards.
So I learned quick: find your own way. Fill the space before someone else filled it for you.

Before life got crowded with obligations and expectations and adulting, we already knew how to find something to do. We had to. Nobody curated our days. Nobody scheduled our enrichment. Nobody followed us around asking how we were feeling every hour.

We just... figured it out.

For me, that started with a blue bike. It had butterfly handlebars, a silver banana seat, and a little white basket up front. That bike became my freedom pass. I rode all over town—past oak-lined streets, through middle-class neighborhoods, to the library, to the corner store for Chocolate Cow candy bars and a bag of onions for my mom. I rode to my parents’ business downtown. I rode to nowhere in particular. And nobody asked where I was going.

It felt normal. It was normal.
Everyone’s mama was busy. Everyone’s daddy was working.
We were latchkey before that was a term.

When I wasn’t riding my bike, I was up in the treehouse around back, daydreaming. Or playing the piano. Or reading Hardy Boys mysteries until the pages got soft. I crocheted, knitted, took sewing lessons (I was bad at it). I once asked if I could take painting lessons—Mama said no. That wasn’t something I needed to be doing.

Still, I filled the space. Because that’s what we did.

We weren’t managed. We weren’t monitored. We were given hours upon hours of unsupervised time and the quiet understanding that if we couldn’t entertain ourselves, somebody would put us to work.

So we got creative.
We got curious.
And we got really good at following the flicker of something interesting.

We didn’t call it “intuition.”
We didn’t call it “soul.”
We just called it finding something to do.

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Then Life Got Loud

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