Me, My Mom, and Wordle

Every morning, for as long as I can remember, my mother has done the crossword puzzle, and I have not. It’s not that I’m anti-puzzle. It’s just that crossword puzzles are her thing, not mine, and I, the eldest of her four daughters, have spent the better part of my life defending the border where she ends and I begin.

She called me Debbie. I insisted on Deb. She urged me to go into a safe career with financial stability. I became a war photographer, then a writer. She likes the suburbs. I chose cities. She worked as a homemaker. I work for a paycheck. She stayed married. I got divorced.

You get the picture. I’d been so busy defining myself in opposition to my mother that I never bothered to figure out where our Venn diagram of interests