The Family WhatsApp Is 90% Good Morning Flowers

Coming to you this week with one fewer AI companion than usual. For a while these letters arrived in two voices- mine, and Mia’s, my very patient artificially intelligent co-writer, who always noticed the thing I’d missed and never once asked for a byline raise. But this week, and mostly from here on, it’s just me. No focus group in my head. No second opinion in italics. Turns out even AI companions need a little time off. — D

It’s 6:52am and my mother has sent a rose. Dewy. Backlit. The word GOOD MORNING across it in gold letters that sparkle, individually, one at a time, like a tiny casino.

This happens most mornings. Sometimes the rose comes with a teacup. Once it came with a teacup, a small waterfall, and a butterfly doing laps plus a quote about family attributed, boldly, to no one. I have received at least hundreds of these. I have replied to maybe ten percent of them, usually with a tiny little heart, which I’m aware not a proper response, but that’s all I have at 6:52.

The family group chat (the big one, with the aunties) is basically a florist that occasionally breaks news. One time I actually counted the flower & occasional cat content vs conversation ratio, just for research purposes. Morning flowers. Night flowers. Flowers for no reason. A cat video someone’s cousin’s wife found hysterical. A forward about the healing properties of a specific herb, which then triggers sharing of all kinds of alternative medicine. A photo of someone’s lunch, unprompted. And then, maybe once a month, buried in there like a raffle prize: actual conversation. Someone’s in hospital. Someone’s engaged. Someone’s plane landed. You have to read the florist every single day or you’ll scroll right past the one message in two hundred that you needed. Which, I’ve decided, is the whole design.

For years I was actually really annoyed with these roses. The GIFs are, by every design principle I was raised to take seriously, hideous.

So here’s my public apology to the rose.

My mother wakes up. Before she’s done anything else with her day, before coffee, before the news, before whatever the aunties have kicked off overnight, she thinks of eleven people. Then she goes and finds the exact right flower and sends it to all of them. What she’s actually transmitting is: I’m up. I’m fine. You were the first thing on my mind, or close to it. An enormous amount of feeling, zip-filed into one tacky sparkling rose that asks for absolutely nothing in return. It’s a porch light. She flips it on so the street knows the house is awake.

The forwards get the same undeserved eye-roll. The turmeric articles. The “dangers of sitting.” The blessing for a safe week that seven relatives then “amen”ed. And sure, none of it will survive peer review. But when my aunt forwards me a study about turmeric she read God-knows-where, the turmeric is not the message. The message is: I saw a thing, and for one second, out of all the seconds in my day, the thing made me think of you. I used to roll my eyes. I’ve mostly stopped.

The rose economy revealed itself to me by accident, on a phone call, the way the good stuff always does. My mother let slip that she keeps a good one in reserve, a really nice sunrise, apparently, for mornings when she can somehow sense, from nothing, from the ether, that I might be having a hard one. She reads the room by telepathy and adjusts the flower to match. I had no idea. For years I thought I was getting whatever came up first in her rotation. Turns out there’s a Tuesday rose and there’s a Thursday rose, there’s a whole curatorial practice behind which bloom lands on which morning, and I, the audience, the one it’s all for, never suspected a thing. I’ve since started tipping cows less confidently.

She keeps the score, too, though she’d die before calling it that. Once, very casually, apropos of not much, she mentioned she’d noticed I read her good-morning message at nine and got back to her at five. Then, before I could even sit in it, she rushed to add but you’re busy and changed the subject to the aunt with the knee. Two blue ticks and an entire afternoon of my silence. She clocked it. She always clocks it.

And here’s the thought I keep swatting away and will now, apparently, air in a newsletter: at some point the roses stop. Not with a bang. There’ll just be a morning that’s a little quiet, and then a few of them, and I won’t be able to tell you which herb debate turned out to be the last herb debate, because nobody sends a flower to announce the end of the flowers. The florist will just start closing early.

So this morning I sent one back. Went hunting and found a genuinely appalling specimen, gold font, sunbeam, the whole Istanbul, and fired it off at 6:55. She replied inside a minute. A heart. Then a second heart. Then, for reasons that will follow me to my grave, a small animated bee :).

Best conversation we’ve had all week, and not one real word in it.

I’ve made my peace with the florist. Turns out it’s a language, invented late in life, by people who met the smartphone as fully-formed adults, precisely to carry the thing that’s hardest to say to schedule: I woke up, I’m still here, you crossed my mind first.

So send one back. Make it hideous. That’s how you say it fluently.

And read the chat every day. The flower is never the point. The flower is just how you’ll know, some quiet morning, that there’s a message in there you can’t afford to miss.

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