When my daughter Sarah was about fifteen months old, I was commuting from Santa Monica to El Segundo five days a week, hyper focused on scaling my company’s marketing division. Forty minutes each way on the 405 freeway — time I’d catalogued, with the precision of a working mom’s guilt, as hours I wasn’t with my daughter.

Every Friday, while I was at my desk, Sarah and her nanny Lucia were at Baila Baila, an adorable Spanish-language dance class five minutes from our house back in Santa Monica. I would get photos: Sarah under a parachute, Sarah with rainbow sensory balls, Sarah absolutely losing her mind over bubbles.

And every happy photo was also a small indictment: I wasn’t there. I had outsourced this.

So one Friday, I decided to do something about it. I carved out the time, arranged to take a call while driving, and planned to walk through the door right as class was starting. Play as intervention. Guilt, solved.

Of course the call (authors can get very cranky about their audiobooks!) went sideways.

I sat outside Baila Baila in my car in my power executive outfit — mustard pencil skirt, kitten heels, flowy button down blouse— watching through the giant glass windows as Lucia and Sarah started the class without me. I was texting 5 more minutes, I’ll be right there while managing a situation that was decidedly not wrapping up. Twenty minutes later, I finally got off the call, rushed in, and made it just in time for Sarah to climb into my lap for the alphabet song segment.

That’s when I smelled it.

My brain was still dragging in call-aftermath mode, trying to transition into Baila Baila mom mode, so I ignored the first wave of scent. Mid-song, I could no longer ignore the blowout. It was real, significant, and had already made its way through Sarah’s pants, her shirt, and onto my pencil skirt.

I was devastated. Twenty minutes late, and now this.

I guided Sarah into the bathroom, and what I found when I undressed her defied the laws of containment. I will not attempt a full description. What I will say is that the diaper bag was stocked (thank you, Lucia) and I got to work while from the other side of the wall, cheerful Spanish songs drifted in.

Naturally, Sarah wanted to be back in the fun zone and could feel my frustration and rush. I was internally cursing the diaper gods, clean-up felt like it took years and Sarah devolved to tears as I was trying to get her dressed again. Eventually we emerged, re-dressed, clean as a whistle and ready for bubbles.

But bubble time was over. Class had just wrapped and it was time to leave.

I drove back to El Segundo crying — furious at the cranky author, furious at Lucia for the poor diapering that had led to the blow out (I’m sure the diaper was fine), furious at myself for thinking I could manufacture presence by showing up in a pencil skirt with twenty minutes to spare.

I’ve thought about that bathroom a lot since then. Not with shame, but with recognition and compassion.

Here’s what I now understand 7 years later: the funzone of play wasn’t over when I walked into that bathroom. I had just stopped playing the game.

The Gamemaster move— the shift I wrote about a few weeks ago from win/loss thinking to crafting the game itself— isn’t reserved for the moments that go according to plan. It’s most available in the moments that don’t. A Gamemaster doesn’t need the right conditions to play because makes the conditions and controls the rules.

What I wish I had done 8 years ago that fated Friday: invented the “Poo Poo Blowout” song while I peeled Sarah’s clothes off. Stuck my head out the door and asked the teacher for a waterproof toy from class. Let Sarah be part of the cleanup with a naked baby dance party with wipes. Put the new diaper on and let her do bubble time in just that (who cares, right?) Left the bathroom cleanup for after.

Instead, I brought my work-brain into that room. I brought my agenda — the one that said play happens out there, en Espanol, under a parachute — and I made the bathroom a task to power through rather than a moment to inhabit. Sarah didn’t care where we were. She just wanted to be with her mom. It was me who decided that cleaning up a blowout couldn’t also be play.

This is what Play as Care / Care as Play actually means in practice. Not the ideal version — Sophie the Giraffe doing circus acts on a clean changing pad. The real version, on the floor of a dance studio bathroom, in a Baila Baila inappropriate pencil skirt, with Spanish music coming through the wall. The caregiving moment is the game and you don’t have to wait for it to be over to start playing.

That's what The MOI Nest, my diaper changing pad, is designed to do: build the muscle at the station. Rep by rep, in the controlled environment of the nursery or other parts of the home, it cues you toward play — the same prompts, the same rhythm, until the frame becomes instinct.

Baila Baila's bathroom is where the mastery shows up. The nursery is just where you practice for it.