Unanswered texts have me thinking the worst
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The last thing I do before falling asleep each night is to text my daughter to say goodnight. She’s in her second semester at college, and that goodnight is usually my one chance in the day to confirm that she’s OK.
That first semester, I couldn’t keep my fingers off the texting keyboard. What was she doing? Was she eating? Did she go to class? How are things with the roommates? The way she tells it, I texted her every three minutes. In reality it was more like every couple of hours, but it was still enough to get on her nerves.
“Say less,” she once texted back. At first I thought it was an auto correct for something that would have made more sense. I poked my head into the office next to mine, where a couple of college interns were working.
“My daughter just texted me ‘say less,'” I said. “Does that mean something?”
“It means stop texting,” said the one, the guy, with a snorty little laugh.
“Or it could mean ‘say no more,'” said his sidekick. I decided to go with that version as what my daughter meant. She wasn’t exactly telling me to leave her alone, she was saying she had all the information she needed. No need to text any more.
I pay for my kids’ phones, and there are strings attached. They must always respond to a text or a call within a reasonable amount of time. Both my son and daughter are good about it. But occasionally, for whatever reason, they don’t text back.
And that’s when the panic starts.
There are pie charts making the rounds of social media, illustrating what we parents are thinking when a kid doesn’t answer the phone right away. A quarter of the pie is “stuck in a ditch.” Another quarter is “locked in someone’s trunk.” The other half of the pie is divided between “ignoring you because they blame you for ruining their life” and “having unprotected sex.” The last piece, wedged in between, is “phone battery is dead.” It’s a teensy sliver of pie the size your skinny aunt always ate.
Mothers’ minds go for the biggest, scariest pieces.
It’s a constant anxiety that covers us like a film, interrupting our day and keeping us awake at night. Our parents probably worried about us, but they didn’t have a phone with which to torture themselves. If I weren’t always connected to my daughter by phone, I wouldn’t be tempted to check in, and I wouldn’t have those few seconds or minutes of worry, waiting for her to respond.
Some would argue that cellphones have allowed parents to worry less. But that theory only works when the kid on the other end of the line picks up right away. I had a few hours of panic during one of the bad windstorms last fall, when my son didn’t answer his texts. You can imagine the Stephen King movies playing in my mind during those couple of hours, waiting for my son to respond. He was at work.
Now, every time I think about texting one of my kids, I stop and ask myself: What if they don’t respond right away? Will it launch me into my worry? Will it distract me from my day? How long will it take for me to start assuming the worst?
I’m writing these words around bedtime. I stopped a few paragraphs ago to text my daughter good night. She responded right away. Now I can sleep.
Beth Dolinar can be reached at cootiej@aol.com.