Scrabulous and Crabby

My DH has been on me to get onto Facebook so that he could play Scrabulous with me. I pointed out that we actually have the Scrabble boardgame, we could just get that out and play it, yada yada yada, but being a techno-geek he is addicted to his laptop and finally wore me down. I set up my Facebook account and we finally had our first game of Scrabulous last night. And I LOST. I try to be a good loser most of the time, but the truth is that I am very competitive and I hate losing. Really hate it. Especially when it's a game that I know I'm good at, like Scrabble. It was really close--I lost by 4 points. Four measly points!! I pointed out to DH that he has been playing this game online for months, refreshing his memory about all the two letter words, best strategies, etc., and he just laughed at me.

Look, here is why this bothers me. Games like Scrabble and Scattergories and Trivial Pursuit have historically been MY DOMAIN. My brain likes these games, I do well at them. My DH, on the other hand, has not historically done well at any of these games. It used to be that he didn't want to play any of them with me, because I would cream his butt every single time. Now, he is all of a sudden uber-competitive with me--what gives??? I used to be the Queen of the Board Game, and now I'm not! And I admit that I don't like it! What happened to the woman who was so dissatisfied with the limited entries in Roget's Thesaurus that she had to go out and find the most comprehensive thesaurus and buy it? (The Synonym Finder, in case you wanted to know...) The gal who could string together three words starting with the same letter to get bonus points in Scattergories? Who could usually find at least ONE word in Scrabble that used all her tiles at once? Where has she gone? Because she has clearly left the building.

I used to laugh about stay at home moms who talked about exchanging their brains for a bowl full of Cheerios, but that's me! I'm there! Those clever and witty parts of my brain that could attack wordy games with gusto and come out on the winning side have gone on vacation, and I fear it is permanent. Ask me where my kids' discarded socks are! Ask me where the missing pieces to the Lil People farm are! Ask me the best place to put the recycling before it goes outside to keep our son out of it! Ask me what are the three most pressing projects around our house/lot, and when all the bills are due! Where's the board game for that?? Because I'm good at that right now! Yet another example, as if one were needed, of how even in the little things all the things moms do are just lost in the background noise, and totally unrewarded by daily life. *sigh* Yet more fodder for feeling low in life station (as if it were needed...sheesh, it's work to convince oneself that housework & happy, healthy kids are reward enough, even though they clearly ARE). And people wonder why SAHMs sometimes feel a bit blue. I just want to know, do you get back those pieces of yourself that you set aside or somehow lose along the way?