So we have to play

"The sky's awake," says the ever-eager Anna, hovering over her still-sleepy older sister's bed, near the beginning of Frozen. "So I'm awake. So we have to play."

At 5:12 this morning, our hungry cat played the role of Anna, waking me just as dawn began to take shape. A few minutes later, as I made a cup of coffee, I heard a thud from upstairs - Cleo, jumping out of bed - and the rapid patter of feet. And then her little frame, dressed in the thin blue cardigan that she had wanted to sleep in, and a tousled tangle of bed head. Sure, it was 5:19. But it was time to play.

A large part of parenthood, it seems to me, is a rapid toggling between roles. You sit down, ready to scroll through the newspaper headlines - and suddenly remember that your daughter, now making her way downstairs, slept without a diaper (but don't worry: this night passed, happily, without incident). You spend the afternoon in a library, reading mid-century studies of the Campidoglio - and are then a moaning monster, slowly careening from one piece of playground equipment to another.

Of course, parents are hardly the only ones to face such challenges. Sociologists have long told us that we wear a series of masks as we move from one social environment to another. And men and women who perform for a living are often acutely aware of that. One of Cleo's CDs, for instance, focuses in large part on Tchaikovsky's apprehensions about appearing onstage: a narrative twist rooted in the fact that he did suffer from debilitating nervous breakdowns. And the actor Ed Dixon recalls the moments before he was about to sing Gremin in a performance of Eugene Oregin - even though he had never met the conductor. "Sind Sie nervös?" a soprano whispered to him, as they waited in the wings before the show. "Nein," he replied - only to hear her, in turn: "Sie lügen." And, he says, she was right.

This morning, at 6:29, I'm not nervous. Cleo's getting dressed upstairs, and so I can act, for a few minutes, as an adult: legs crossed, tapping on my keyboard. But now she's done, and wants me to know it: "Ready! Ready! Dad, I'm ready!" And so I'll close, once more, the laptop, and assume again another role, for which I often feel only partially prepared.