📌 Playing on a Tilted Table

Having *feelings* about Hungry Hungry Hippos, and so many other things related to my mother's passing

My youngest during a particularly grueling Hungry Hungry Hippos campaign seven years ago 😂

As I’ve already shared, my mom passed at the end of last year. It’s a strange thing to still be “realizing” it. It didn’t help that she was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer last May and passed in November, with several crazily close calls along the way. She (and, to an admittedly lesser degree, those who loved her) were thrown on an unfair, wouldn’t-wish-it-on-anyone journey, full of medical drama and scrambles, over and over and over.

When she passed, logically—I definitely knew it. Her diagnosis had been grim from the start, and as soon as I heard it, I buckled up for the worst. Yet, even after the shock of exactly when will it happen? turned into the shock of itactuallyhappened…, I think I still kinda felt like she wasn’t actually gone? Though I made sure to check in with her quite frequently post-diagnosis with visits and texts, historically, we weren’t daily talkers, and at first, it wasn’t super weird not to have spoken with her in a while; maybe she was just at her house, puttering around and ignoring my messages in her not-unusual-for-her way?

And then, a little while back, I had a dream where my youngest son Thomas and I were at some sort of market, rounding a corner of tables. And as we walked, I heard a voice that was unmistakably my mother’s, from not so far away. And though even in the dream, I knew—I knew it couldn’t be her—the voice kept on, with all her inflections, until I couldn’t take not investigating anymore. I followed the sound, tugging my son along with me, and there a woman appeared, dressed up as if for fly-fishing and in sunglasses, with exactly my mother’s figure and hair and mannerisms. I was flabbergasted. (Reader, I didn’t know, until this dream, that it was actually possible to reel in shock within a dream.) Dropping my son’s hand, I approached her, demanding why she had tricked us? What had we done that she thought it was okay to punish us by thinking she had died? To go fly-fishing? And, the dream-mom-lady took off her glasses to get a better look at me, I guess, and then I could see it wasn’t my mom. I looked at dream-Thomas to gauge his reaction—surely, he had thought it was Grandma, too?—and his confused look, and the other marketgoers’ expressions, made me realize that no one—besides me, that is—thought this lady looked anything like my mom. That, in my grief, I had harangued a stranger for reasons others couldn’t see, and would never understand.

Anyhow, I woke up sobbing, heart racing. Even in my dreams, I know she’s really gone. And I know it was just a dream, but it was also real, in its way.

There are many things I will miss about my mother. She *loved* television, and you could talk to her about literally any show, and she would know what episode/character/story arc you were talking about. She remembered my husband and I’s anniversary and would always send a card, usually with some money tucked in it, even though I told her she didn’t need to. She was genuinely interested (often TOO interested) in other people’s life details, no matter how seemingly trivial the fact relayed.

But though it feels unfair—maybe a bit cowardly—when she’s not here to defend herself (and she would, vehemently)…she could also be very mean when she is in the mood, and the mood could strike anytime—and often for reasons that were only known to her. It wasn’t just the mean moments (because we all can be a little mean, sometimes); it was that after the fact, she would remember it and…sort of relish reliving it? She would chuckle and, all too often, not be able to resist bringing it up with the person she had “bested” that day, over and over, for years and years?

Such was the case with one memory; in fact, I only have murky memories of the original story itself. My stronger memories are of her retellings of it to me.

Here’s the murky memory I have:

We’re playing Hungry Hungry Hippos, which I (an only child at the time) very much remember begging people to play with me, and we’re at a small card table in our rental home in Georgia. I’m in my ‘little-higher’ chair, which lets me reach the table better, and my mom is sitting across from me. I dump the white marbles in, say, “Go!” and madly whack at the little lever to add the marbles with one hand, all the while madly chomping the hippo with the other. THONK! THONK-THONK-THONK!

Years later, my mom (as she often did) says, “Remember that card table we used to have in Georgia?” And she gleefully informs me that the card table was tilted because the floor in that rental was sloped, and that she put my chair at the top of the tilt, so that when we played Hungry Hippos, I would always lose. “You mean, you never figured it out?” she says in this memory, which I do fully remember, and takes place in Shreveport, Louisiana; I’m seven? She clucks in pride. “You used to love that game so much,” she adds, almost as an afterthought.

But that was the thing with my mom. The satisfaction of winning at Hungry Hippos through superior strategy (even if against a preschooler) wasn’t enough for her. She needed me to KNOW how she had tricked me all those times we played. That I was a bit of a rube, and that I proved it by not realizing it on my own.

I reacted as I usually did: “What? Why?”

These sorts of reactions from me always delighted her. When she got under my skin, it meant she had another item to remind me of later. Which she did. “Remember how mad you got when I told you about the Hungry Hippos game table?” she’d say again later, seemingly out of the blue, when I was a tween, when I was a teen, when I was planning Nick and I’s wedding. Again, grinning. Again, happy to “stir the pot,” as they say.

And there’s the rub. Some part of me knows she needled me about things like this—and so many bigger, far more problematic things—because she thought I was too sensitive. That I needed not just toughening up—but probably also to be taken down a peg.

I don’t doubt I was sometimes a shit as a kid. (I mean, what kid isn’t?) What I do doubt, after having kids of my own, is that it’s normal to be so overtly competitive with one’s children. Not just at a tabletop game, but at life. To win at a tabletop game (rigged or not) and then bring up many (many!) times afterward to them as a point of pride. That not only did your child need frequent reminding; so did you, I suppose?

Even on her deathbed, my mom’s final message to me was disturbing: she told me that she was smarter than I was about some things, but that I had been smarter than her about (her emphasis) a lot of things. And that was just about the saddest thing I think she could have said, because I never even wanted to be her competitor. I just wanted to be a kid, with a mother that I could count on to love me more than they loved “winning.”

I guess, when it all comes down to it, parents and children always play at a tilted table. The question is: what do you do about it? Do set your kid up for effortless success and put them at the bottom of the tilt (which, at least, I’m glad she didn’t do)? Do you, yourself, sit on the advantageous side?

Me? I prefer to show my kids how to shim the table leg so that we can move past an unfair system and, hopefully, get to the fun of playing.

And that’s what helps me when I wake up in a sweat after a strange, strange dream. It’s what lets me eventually turn over—and try to get back to sleep.

Your “in process of time” friend,
Elayne

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