There may or may not be a connection between my 8-year-old son’s 3 a.m. confession that he knows he might be “going to heaven soon” and my sudden obsession with bullying teenagers on Roblox. Yes, I, a middle-aged woman, have been bullying teenagers on Roblox.
As we enter what might be the final days or weeks of my son’s life, ahead of a bone marrow transplant to treat the deadly disease adrenoleukodystrophy, I’ve been doing it with increasing fervor.
I assure you this is not a long-time hobby. I never set out to be a 39-year-old gaming troll. But as my son was forced to find new modes of social interaction after being sidelined from school, something strange happened.
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His real world became smaller, but he found a bigger one in the manic playground of Roblox, the online gaming platform that is hugely popular but also hugely befuddling in that it is not so much a game as an enormous virtual dumpster teeming with both bacteria and treasure.
I listened skeptically as my son began chatting each day with other kids all across the country, whose faces he’s never seen but whose voices became the last thing he’d hear each night before he went to sleep.
He has his own “clan,” as he calls them; they carry out raids and throw parties and unite against scammers and hackers, all while operating as kittens decked out in bling and shrimp with legs waving weapons. I didn’t understand it at first—it looked like a bad acid trip.
Then one day I heard a nasally voice offering my son a “great deal” on some convoluted trade of in-game accessories that have no meaning whatsoever apart from some kind of clout. It didn’t sound like a good deal to me, considering the dweeb’s preachy voice and the use of the phrase “help me help you.” So I chimed in, in my best constipated old man voice: “Shut up, BigBeanBurrito007, you know nothing!”
Gasps rippled across the chat. “BigBeanBurrito007” stuttered a syllable and then choked on it. And someone bellowed, “Dude, do you have a voice changer?!” as if it were the coolest thing in the world.
Suddenly my kid recognized the thrill of having his mother alienate other children at random. So it became a thing. He asked me if I would “roast” people in a Roblox virtual hangout where hordes of users gather with the sole purpose of chatting, dancing, and espousing embarrassing opinions.
Think of it like an 18th-century Parisian salon, but run by angsty teenagers dressed as Travis Scott and Big Bird. Some groups host Bible readings while others next to them holds twerking competitions; a lone child (or so I assume) sets up a booth to ask users to rate his singing (zero out of 10—sorry, kid) and another mounts a dais asking users to choose sides in a raging debate over the merits of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.
As with any event, most of those attending this “party” ignore the on-stage performances and instead mill about making awkward attempts to win social validation.
This is where I enter, dressed as a grinning pickle and reprising my old-man voice. Scanning the rogues’ gallery of cliques in search of the biggest a–hole. This is usually someone using the term “rizz” a lot, lecturing about the ways of the world and claiming to have the best taste in music.
Step 1 is to throw them off. It begins innocently enough: “Hey, don’t I know you?”
“Huh?”
Step 2 is confusion.
“Yeah, I remember you! You used to work at my retirement home! Hey, wait, is there a typo in your username?”
“No! What are you talking about?!”
“Did you mean to write ‘Garth?’ Are you a Garth Brooks fan?”
“What–”
“Makes more sense than ‘Girth.’ You seemed like a nice young man. Does your mother know you’re going by the name ‘Girth?’”
“What? Go away, you geezer, I’m trying to talk to this girl.”
“I’m calling your mother!”
“I don’t know this guy, I really don’t!”
“May I remind you you’re not allowed within 500 yards of the schoolyard, Girth?”
“I’m reporting you!”
My son tells me I am what’s known as a “toxic” player. I have sought to mitigate this toxicity by laying down ground rules: No harassing young children. Only the older ones, those well past puberty, who, in one way or another, don’t seem very nice.
“Pick that one! Pick that one!” my son says of a pink-winged dragon who’s been making strange sounds. I’m pretty sure the dragon is an uncomfortably young child, perhaps a 4-year-old.
“No, we don’t target preschoolers. Or even kindergartners.”
SigmaBob, on the other hand, keeps flooding the chat with unsettling sexual innuendos.
“No means no, SigmaBob! That levitating orange with a cat face does not want to play with you!”
“Take your finger out of that hole, SigmaBob! It does not belong there!”
I admit, I may have gotten carried away. “Mom, you got a ban!” my son exclaims at one point, with an unexpected note of pride.
Apologies to the young man I accused of giving gonorrhea to Elmo. Apologies also to Elmo: I don’t really believe you watch toon porn.
But sometimes lunacy beckons. Sometimes it seems like a good idea to get in trouble with your kid, engaging in the modern-day equivalent of prank phone calls. Especially when that kid is in the fight of their life and may soon lose it in any one of many ghastly ways, be it transplant complications or the rare genetic disease that necessitated it.
It was after that first Roblox ban that my son finally turned to me and voiced the hardest question, the one we’d both been so reluctant to say out loud.
“Is it true that the transplant might not work?”
“Yes, it’s true,” I said. ”But the doctors say that outcome is rare.”
“It’s OK, Mom. You don’t have to make me feel better. I don’t know why, but I’m not afraid to die.”
I let it hang there; I didn’t reassure him. That would be unfair. I can’t make such promises. It’s in this silence, as I hold him and stroke his hair, that I see the choice so clearly before me: Laughter or surrender.
Because there is a particular strain of sadness that is incompatible with life. It enters your bloodstream and spreads like liquid nitrogen, vitrifying every molecule in its path. And then you are solid now, solid glass.
The only effective vaccine is to laugh.
