Word Searches Over the Phone
When I was young, my mom was working a job in human resources that required her to travel a few times a year. From Chicago, she flew and worked in Burbank, California for a few days at a time. As a little girl attached to her mom by the hip, these trips were always hard for me. When I was 9, there was one trip specifically that felt harder than the rest.
While she was gone, I was assigned a wordsearch as a homework assignment. I remember calling my mom sobbing over the phone because I couldn’t complete the word search on my own and she wasn’t there to help me. What I don’t remember is why my older brother or dad weren’t enough to help me find these words in the sea of letters I felt I was drowning in. It’s important to note that this was before Facetime was even an option. Instead of telling me to figure it out (which thinking back now, maybe she should’ve done) my mom told me to read her the letters line by line. On the other side of the line, across the country, she began writing the letters down to duplicate my wordsearch in her hotel room. Once they were all copied and I told her the words we were looking for, she began telling me where to find them. She started with the row the letters were in and then told me how many letters over I could find the word she had found. We kept going until all of the words were crossed out.
This moment is really funny to think back on now because I do think that I was capable of completing the word search on my own. What I wasn’t able to do was tell my mom that I just wanted to be on the phone with her. I wanted to hear her voice and at 9 years old, I didn’t have enough of my own words to keep her on the line so doing a wordsearch together was my best bet.
I’m now 24 and there has been a bit of a role reversal. I now live in Arizona while my mom is still in Chicago. I jump at every opportunity to travel and we're just about as far as we were when she was traveling for work. Only now, I chose to be this far away. I’m searching for different things at this stage in my life but nonetheless, I still feel like I need my mom’s help. I’m still the 9 year old girl on the phone but we’re no longer searching for words. I still want to hear her voice but I now have the words to keep her on the line.