There are things I have not revisited since spring 2020 because they remind me too much of the darkest days of the pandemic. Puzzles, for instance. I have not done a puzzle in three years, nor have I eaten frozen Costco salmon (my parents panic-bought us roughly a million fillets in mid-March, and it took us months to get through them). There are pairs of pants I refuse to wear because they remind me of being extremely depressed. My one solace, in those days, was playing Animal Crossing on my Nintendo Switch. There, I “saw” friends by visiting their islands while chatting with them on Zoom, and I built a virtual house and a virtual garden and nobody there had COVID. I even wrote about its questionable ethics here in July 2020.
Recently, I logged back on after months away from my island. Weeds surrounded my virtual orchard; my villager friends said passive aggressive things like, “We were worried about you!” I had a few dozen messages in the mailbox outside my house: the local airlines sending me a note of thanks (spam); Fuscia, the pink deer who is my best friend in the game, inexplicably sent me a refrigerator (?); and there were multiple gifts and notes from “Mom.”
When I saw my first message from Mom, probably sometime in early 2020, I paused — had my mom somehow discovered this game, and figured out a way to send me a message? But no; in the game, players receive letters and gifts from a mysterious entity called Mom. She has always intrigued me, and I have been thinking about her again in light of Mothers’ Day. On your birthday, Mom sends you a cake, along with a note that says, “You’ll always be my baby.” She sends you quilted tissue holders and hand-knit sweaters,
My own mother loves me but not in this way. She’s not one to send me flowery letters in the mail with gifts; her way of showing me she cares is to leave me with a freezer full of dumplings at the end of a visit. The game is developed by Japanese illustrators, writers, and programmers; their mothers might not be like the Mom they wrote, either. Is this what they think American moms are like? It’s wild to me that no one, in the course of the eight years they put the game together, suggested that the sudden appearance of Mom might be jarring for folks whose moms are no longer with us, or who have fraught and complicated relationships with their mothers. (There are, at least, a couple people who have written about how their island Mom helped them cope with their real mother’s death.)
In the game, Mom’s letters are the only evidence of her existence. And, according to the Animal Crossing wiki, the relationship is one-directional: “It is not possible to send letters back to Mom.”
And maybe that’s all for the better. Five messages in, I realized that what I was doing on Animal Crossing was just the Nintendo version of a task I hate in real life: checking my email. I close the game and haven’t been back since.