I have a confession to make. I’m a woman in my (early) 40’s, and I still need my mom—a lot. Like, call her every day, send a lot of texts. Need her. The good news is I am so fortunate that she is still healthy and well and living just about an hour away in Brooklyn.
However, to keep her safe, we haven’t gone to visit in months. For someone used to seeing her very often, this has been painfully difficult, not just for me but for my kids as well.
Thank goodness for phone calls and video calls. I’ve even enlisted her as a “virtual babysitter” for my younger daughter when we had a recent quarantine situation and the grownups in our house were trying to work without our 4-year-old begging us to play every two minutes. My mom read books to her. They played and even somehow did some sort of scavenger hunt. Don’t ask me. They figured it out!
But through all of these things, I still missed that extra connection. Cut to internet Scrabble! Early on in the pandemic, I needed something to keep my brain active, and I missed my mom so very much, so I had this idea to find a way to connect, and we’ve been playing ever since.
Scrabble has a special place in my heart. Growing up, I was a voracious reader. My mother used to joke that I “ate books” because of how fast I would read them. Thinking back to a kid going to the library, I can still smell the books on the rack. To this day, I have never read a book through a Kindle or any other digital medium, and I doubt I ever will. Being such an enthusiastic reader, I also had a fairly good vocabulary, and Scrabble was my favorite game.
In the 10th grade, I developed Mono and was home sick for a while, and my family heard my daily whining and begging anyone to play Scrabble with me. And of course, it was usually my mom who played.
Back to the present day, yes, I’m surrounded by colleagues at work during the day and my husband and children at night and on the weekends, but I truly miss that connection with my mom. And so, I call her most days on my way home from work to catch up. And every night, I check our Scrabble game to see if she’s made her move.
We have played dozens of games, if not more, as the pandemic that was to last “just two weeks” has raged on for over a year. Sometimes she wins, sometimes I win. There’s a chat feature that we can leave each other little notes on if we choose to. And in the middle of the night, when my “pandemic insomnia” keeps me from sleeping, I open up our game and make my move. It’s a little thing that keeps us connected, and I am so thankful for that. And now, I can’t wait to start playing with my daughters.
