Illustration by the author.

Taking inventory of how you spend your hours, auditing and editing, etc., is a lifelong task, at least for most of us. You get a new job with a longer commute, and you have to let go of some of the hours you set aside for gardening. A new relationship blossoms and you start saying no to more group hangs with your friends. You notice you feel unsatisfied or unhappy, and you try to decide what you can add (an hour of exercise?) or subtract (eleven hours of “Grey’s Anatomy”?) to feel better.

Having a baby magnifies this evaluation, because the baby is all day every day, every week, every month, every year, for the rest of your life. (At some point it stops being “the baby” and starts being “my 28-year-old daughter who won’t leave the house,” but you get it.) I have let go of drawing cartoons as consistently, leaving especially thoughtful notes on graded assignments, and reading basically altogether.

But I have not let go of playing “Through The Ages.”

I stopped playing “Candy Crush” seven or eight months ago, which was a big accomplishment, because I was incredibly addicted to it. I liked how it soothed me, and kept me from eating entire boxes of Oreos, and how I could play it while watching TV or listening to a podcast and feel like I was multitasking. But when my daughter was born, it was the first thing to go. There simply wasn’t time for it, and there was no real benefit I could discern. I liked to tell myself that it helped me to unwind. (“Candy Crush” knows that its players believe that it helps them to unwind. When you open the game, the load screen says “time to unwind,” trigging the part of your brain that is like, “This is healthy for me” and turning the reward circuit on overdrive.) But I knew in the depths of my brain that ultimately this “healthy unwinding” story wasn’t true, and it was much more relaxing to put on lotion or look out the window or paint a blob than it was to play “Candy Crush” and watch TV.

“Through The Ages,” however, is a different story.

For the unfamiliar (which is probably most of you, since most of you are women who aren’t into competitive colonial games with war elements in them), “Through The Ages” is an app-based version of a popular engine-building board game called “Civilization.” The object of the game is to have the most Culture Points by the end of the fourth age, which is also the shortest. You build a civilization that balances technology (Alchemy! Computers!), physical resources (Iron! Oil!), military strength (Cavalry! Tactics!), agriculture (Farms! Selective Breeding!), and a slew of cultural features (Arenas! Wonders! Journalism! Colonies! Leaders!), and try to make it objectively better than the other players’ civilizations. Like “Settlers of Catan” and “Dominion” and other games that found popularity alongside “Civilization,” this game is problematic and makes light of, or entirely erases, a lot of terrible things about humanity.

And yet, it remains something I make time for every day, and it is never on the list of things I am willing to cut back on. This is because “Through The Ages” is an online game. My sister Alexis introduced it to me at the start of the pandemic, and I got my husband and my boyfriend on board pretty quickly. As the pandemic stretches into its second summer, I am reflecting back on easily the most difficult year of my life. (TBH, 2020 was pretty sweet for me; but 2021 and into 2022 have been really hard, for pandemic- and non-pandemic-related reasons.) Alexis and I had to cancel trips to see each other; we got in arguments with each other; we had long stretches of sisterly tension. But nevertheless, basically every day — including days each of us respectively gave birth to our daughters — we played “Through The Ages” with each other. Every time I get a message that it’s my turn in a game with her, it’s like she is saying, “Hey. I’m alive. I’m OK. I love you.”

One of the things that’s most difficult about living far away from the people you love is that you want to know they’re surviving, without needing to make a whole big thing of it. Like when you look to see if someone’s car has moved, because that would mean they’d left the house. Or, in modern terms, when you check someone’s Instagram to see if there’s any activity, because that would mean they are at least partially functional. It’s so uncomplicated to play a turn in “Through The Ages.” The math of the game is fairly easy. And yeah, I’m trying to win (I like winning!), but that doesn’t really feel like what it’s about.

My husband and I play “Through The Ages,” too. It’s felt like sort of a godsend since T was born, because we used to play a lot of board games in real life, but that’s suddenly a lot more difficult, logistically. Being able to lie next to each other silently while she sleeps between us, interacting and having fun while also being totally quiet makes me feel connected to him. It’s nice to not always be having a conversation with someone; it’s nice to say, “I want to give my time to you, but I don’t want to do any emotional labor right now.” And this game has given that to me.

In the past year, we added “Wingspan” to the repertoire, which is NOT a problematic game, and is BEAUTIFUL on the phone. (The birds MOVE!) It is, however, a little harder to drop into and out of; I think the logic of it is a little more difficult. On the OTHER hand, it feels less competitive than “Through The Ages” (you can play “Wingspan” alone, without an opponent), so it’s easier (pride-wise) for me to play with my boyfriend Bob, who is so much better than me at winning games.

And then in the past WEEK, my mom started sending her Wordle score to a group chat with my sister and me. I am the worst of the three of us at Wordle, but I love seeing Mom’s little stack of yellow-and-green squares. I love knowing Mom is OK enough to do the Wordle and tell her daughters about it. It is something I have missed, not living in the same house with her. Just feeling her energy; her aliveness; her being.

Do you have ways of staying in touch with the people you love who are far away, that are easy, like being in the same kitchen making different breakfasts in real life? I’d love to know about them. It’s so hard to love so many people (from so many places!), when there is finite time and access to travel. But the last two and a half years, I think (?!), have made us creative in how we keep in touch.

And if you’re using Candy Crush to unwind, GOOD ON YOU. What a harmless, easy way to decompress from the rhetorical trash-compactor of the world.