Love Notes on the Group Chat
My family has been living in apart for years and years - the group chat is our love language
Welcome to Letters from a Muslim Woman!
I share the joys and challenges of being a visibly Muslim woman in a sometimes-unfriendly world.
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This week, unfortunately, there’s no voiceover to accompany the piece, as I’ve lost my voice to laryngitis. God willing, I’ll be able to record voiceovers again next week.
When I was 15 years old, my oldest sister moved across the continent, from Ottawa, in the north east, to Santa Clara, California, in the south west. It was 1997 and household internet was in its infancy. Our bulky computer sat awkwardly in our living room like a much anticipated guest. We kept it on a heavy wooden desk next to the furniture we only used when guests were over. Back then, My parents were early adopters of technology. The computer was the same one we’d had since the early 90’s. Beside it was a dot matrix printer you fed paper the way you might feed a fat, sleepy leopard: nervously, hoping to keep it happy and docile. Not to wake the beast.
The living room, that least used room in our house, was suddenly an important place to be. With email at my disposal, I wrote my sister lengthy messages to stay in touch. Long distance calling was expensive, but email meant I had a way to joke, to spin long, irreverent yarns without setting the phone bill on fire. Email meant I didn’t have to count out my words and finish them in under a minute.
I grew up in a deeply silly family. We say serious things too, absolutely. But! Nearly every conversation includes inside jokes, which then call back to older jokes that call back to the ones before them. And on and on until you have arrived at our early childhood.
We are a family of four girls. I sometimes marvel that our husbands have managed to understand the lore that is our common childhood, that they’ve managed to follow the threads back through over 40 seasons of the show we have been starring in since the day we each were born.
Few of these jokes, these conversational cornerstones, are truly funny, and yet we laugh because they fill us with that delicious familiarity, that sense of togetherness. Because the first time they were said, they may have been funny in the moment, and that moment became a memory which took on a life of its own.
This is a longwinded way to say that email gave me the chance to talk to my sister the way I always had, not about every moment of my day, but in jokes and riddles, in nudges and winks. And those jokes made me feel like she was still close, and that closeness was what I was craving.
I think of those first emails now as the precursors to our eventual family group chats, chats that became necessary as we took off in all directions, sisters and then parents, leaving town and coming home and leaving again. Home, that mountain of a word, slowly shifting its meaning. Home, suddenly transient, only partially physical.
Last week, in honour of Valentines Day,
talked about Love Notes, and asked if we could think of other examples of them.
My mind immediately went to our group chat. Three generations. Four time zones ranging across a 12 hour difference. 60 years between our eldest and youngest.
The group chat covers everything. My mother sends health hacks, duas and Quran recitations. My father sends screen shots of jokes in Arabic he got off another group chat with his sisters, my aunts, in Cairo. One sister sends videos of kids in Gaza, the other pictures with the same aunts from her year in Egypt, the other shots of the chickens on her hobby farm, or the plums, or the grapefruit. I send memes of cartoon dogs saying “this is fine” in the middle of a fire, or pelicans trying to eat capybaras, or screenshots of pun jokes.
My nephew, 16, sends a round up of pictures from their family Google Photo drive, and every time we are transported to a different series of memories:
My husband and I, newly engaged and so young, eating maple taffy with my parents at Winterlude.
My niece, a baby, now 18, cuddled up with Grandpa at the lake.
My youngest son, a toddler, now 10, face streaked with tears because I won’t let him drive the car at the age of two.
A gaggle of all the kids, faces painted, on Canada day one summer.
A newborn.
A wedding.
A cat on a lap in a now-sold Istanbul apartment.
There were in-between years, when everyone was in a different city or country, but the tech hadn’t yet caught up. I remember reloading my Skype balance to make calls to Dubai, looking up a different VOIP provider every few months, missing each other’s messages because they took hours to traverse the spotty network between us. “Are you free? Is now a good time?” sent in a brief moment of availability, arriving long after that moment had passed.
In those in-between years, when I grieved the distance of my sisters and took every opportunity to catch a Greyhound bus down highway 40 to my parents, I spent a lot of time thinking about my father’s first months in Canada. Baba arrived in the fall of 1973, when the Arab and Muslim community in Ottawa was so small that there was no mosque, that he co-founded Carleton University’s Muslim Students Association. In 1973, when calling home meant telling the operator and then waiting next to your landline for the next 48 to 72 hours, until they could get you a connection.
When my father decided to go home for a visit on a whim in the summer of ‘74, he just showed up, because sending a message beforehand was going to be near impossible.
How did he do it, alone, without a parent, friend, brother or sister a text away? How did he do it without TV in a language he could understand, Egyptian newspapers and radio on demand, a community?
Today, the group chat meanders from language to language, English to Arabic to Turkish with a little bit of French and German thrown in for fun. Voice messages punctuate text trails. Every variety of laughing emoji can be found.
The time difference also leads to the most delightful of asynchronous entertainment. I have woken up at 7 a.m. in Ottawa to 80 new messages, an entire conversation between my three sisters that took place shortly after I went to bed — two of them already onto the next day in Dubai and Cairo, and the last one not yet tucked in on the outskirts of Sacramento. It’s like my own personal sitcom, curated with my favourite punch lines, referencing characters nobody else knows, never to be discovered.
The quick back and forth, if it ever slows down, is nudged along with questions and exclamations from my father. He likes to keep a good joke going, so he pours fuel on the fire if he sees the embers dying.
I am addicted to my phone, have tried to put it down and put it away so many times. But part of that addiction is the ever-present possibility of an impromptu family visit. There are rare moments when we are all active at the same time, and 5 different conversations are happening, and the thread is moving so quickly you can’t keep up. These moments are the virtual equivalent of us all piled around my parent’s dining table, passing plates of my mother’s fatta and my sister’s potato salad, bellowing laughter, calling out over each other, to each other, loving up on every single person in the room.
The group chat is our love language, and we send each other love notes every day. Sometimes those notes say, “look at the green onions I grew in the garden.” Sometimes they say, “Don’t forget to order the Vitamin D,” or “I’ve landed in Chicago.” Sometimes they say, “Man drank apple cider vinegar every day for 100 days. You won’t believe what happens next.” The truth is, it doesn’t actually matter what they say. It just matters that the messages keep coming, that the language is spoken.
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Let’s chat in the comments:
Are you part of a group chat?
Is it for fun or for logistics?
What is your love language? Or, how do you send love notes?
Do you have inside jokes that take forever to explain to others? Do you keep trying to explain them anyway? 😂😂😂
I am continuing to share resources, links, and information that I have found helpful regarding the crisis in Gaza and the West bank. This week I’m sharing two pieces:
this article from the LA Times about the horrific things seen by an American Doctor who went to Gaza on a humanitarian mission: I’m an American Doctor Who Went to Gaza. What I Saw Wasn’t War - it was Annihilation
In light of Valentines Day that just passed, I was about to share this lovely series of photos of a couple in Gaza who got engaged in August, and chose to go ahead with their wedding in the tents and displacement. People looking for life and love against all odds. Yesterday, I found out that several days after their wedding, another couple who also got married in the tents was killed in their tent in an Israeli airstrike on Rafah. Truly, the devastation knows no bounds.
I don't have a big family, but I do have a groupchat like this with my close guy friends. This is definitely something I hope my partner and I can cultivate with the family we create.
This is delightful!