My Husband is a Gamer. This is What it’s Like for Me.

Motherwell, 10-27-2021 https://motherwellma ... ke-for-me/

It’s 6:00 pm. The witching hour at my house. It’s that cursed time between twilight and dusk when the youngest children become possessed by the tiredness of the day and their hunger for the last meal before bed. They’re rowdy, they’re loud, they act out, they cry. It also happens to be the hour where I stare at the clock like it’s a ticking time bomb. It’s the time where my patience is at its last drop. The time where I might snap more at my kids and have a perpetual scowl on my forehead. The heaviness of the day is wearing me thin.

It also happens to be the time when my husband should be coming up from our basement stairs and “coming home.” Since the pandemic, his office has been his gaming center. With a crying baby in one arm and an ingredient for the evening’s recipe in another, I open the basement door and yell out to him.

“What are you doing?” 

A few seconds of silence.

“Nothing,” comes his predictable and infuriating answer. 

But the loud, frantic clatter of a keyboard and the rapid swooshing of a mouse sliding on a mousepad give him away. He’s playing. Again. I close my eyes, sigh, steady my breathing, but I can’t conceal the anger in my voice.

“Get up here now, please!”

The clatter stops. The swooshing ends. And he sighs in return.

“I’m coming,” he answers.