One of these days we’ll both be fine
Radical Honesty
I made up a fun game.
Well, maybe I didn’t quite make it up.
Perhaps it’s a version of a game I played as a child, but I revamped it yesterday when visiting my mother in the hospital and a little at a loss for how we could pass the time.
I called this game “Am I Psychic?” and the goal of the game is for Player 1 to guess a number between 1 and 10 that Player 2 is thinking about. They get three guesses before Player 2 reveals the number and then it’s Player 2’s turn to think of a number and for Player 1 to guess. There are three rounds in “Am I Psychic?” and each round concludes when a player is the first to win three games. And the prize? A cookie bought for them by the loser.
For extra fun and to extend the game, I suggest doing a recap occasionally like a sports announcer. Something like “The stakes are high! Joyce has won two games in round one and Kathryn has only won one. Now it’s Kathryn’s turn to guess the number between one and ten. Who will win the cookie? Is Kathryn Psychic? We don’t know but are about to find out.”
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This was the perfect game to play with someone in the busy and noisy acute floor where the bed alarms and screaming patients are frightening, but I also it’s a good game for kids, for anyone with anxiety, for anyone who needs to distract themselves from the terrible world or to kill time.
“Am I Psychic?” (the way we were playing it without writing the number down) required radical honesty, which I reminded my mother who at other times in her life was prone to lie.
“White lies are okay,” she told me once, “as long as they don’t hurt anyone.”
The problem though is that sometimes they do.
Having a complicated relationship with a parent you’re caring for can be difficult. The little hurts bubble up when you’re not expecting them.
Playing a game that requires radical honesty with a woman who has lied to me more times than I can remember is, well, ironic to say the least.
My mother would lie about everything. In her drinking years she lied about that, but also she lied about things she didn’t need to lie about like where she was going for coffee with a friend and I’d find out when we’d accidentally be at the same coffee shop. Or she’d lie about whether she still smoked or the man she was going to Europe with. I wondered if the lying had something to do with her mother who was judgmental, controlling, and intrusive, a protective instinct she developed for privacy and independence.
My mother lied about more serious things too like getting me at the age of twelve to sign over the savings bonds that my grandparents bought for my education by telling me she would lose the house if I didn’t. Or when she lied about her debts and gambled away all the money her parents left her. This my sister and I suspect was the beginning of her dementia.
In any case, while I note the past in these moments, I’m trying not to dwell on them.
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We played “Am I Psychic?” for over an hour. And it was fun because it let us be in the moment and not think about where we were or the hard times facing us. The game also has the perfect ratio of win-losses to be satisfying for all players.
As for my mom’s radical honesty?
She was.
Or rather her face gave her away every time.
May 4, 2025
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Kathryn Mockler is the author of Anecdotes.
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Great game. And family relationships are just so fraught.