Confessions of an overstimulated parent

Confessions of an overstimulated parent

On a recent Sunday, I was working in my yard, marveling at all the charming little buds and bulbs of early spring. I was listening to This American Life on my iPhone, when I heard a text ding through. It was from my husband, Isaac, inside the house. Here is what it said:

“Hannah just called. There is a meningitis outbreak on  her floor. She is under quarantine at the hospital with everyone else.”

Our daughter is in her first year at college hundreds of miles away. I’m not sure why my husband of nearly 22 years opted to deliver this news to me in this way. He’s well acquainted with my propensity for worry. I raced into the house hurling concerns at my pathologically unconcerned spouse.

“A quarantine? What does that mean?” 

“How many kids are sick?”

“How long will it last?”

“Where are they being kept?”

He waved off my barrage of questions with a casual ease. He hadn’t asked any of these questions. DIDN’T EVEN SEEM CURIOUS! 

Next, I called Hannah. She told me all she knew. The “outbreak” consisted of only one case so far. The boy was in serious condition — on a ventilator. She was in a room at the hospital with everyone else from her floor and they didn’t know how long they would be there. I could hear the violent chatter of dozens of teenagers in the background. I imagined them all on the phone with their parents dispersing the news like hundreds of airborne seeds blown from a dandelion’s downy head.

It may have been helpful if I could have offered comfort to my girl in that moment. If she had expressed any vulnerability at all — sadness, fear, loneliness — I might have stayed on the phone with her, but all she seemed to be feeling was boredom and irritation. Plus, she didn’t have the information I was after. I hung up, feeling helpless and scared. I called my mom and got teary as I told her what was happening. I texted several of my friends about it. I called a friend who is a doctor. I left a message at our doctor’s office asking for information about Hannah’s immunization status.

While all this was happening, Isaac left to go to the grocery store. 

After my initial breakdown of fear and worry, I began to feel something new. Anger! Why hadn’t authorities at my daughter’s expensive college contacted me about this. Why was I finding out about this serious situation in such a janky fashion? My network backed me up. Seriously! Someone dropped the ball!

Charged up by the support, I called my daughter’s campus. A sympathetic student operator served as my enabler by providing me with many different phone numbers to call. I began a campaign. I mostly got voicemail, so I left some mildly hyper messages about the situation. By the time I reached an actual person, I was riding a wave of emotion that some might identify as hysteria. 

“I’m just wondering why no one has been in touch with us to explain why my daughter is in quarantine. I mean this is pretty crazy …” I said. (I might actually have been shouting.)

The man cut me off. “First of all, there is no quarantine.”

I was incredulous. “Then why would my daughter tell me that there was one? Why is she being held at the hospital if there is no quarantine?”

“Ma’am,” he said (I really hate to be called Ma’am), “we don’t even have a confirmation on what this is yet. There is no official diagnosis at this point. But we have advised students to seek medical help if they were experiencing any signs of sickness and what with the social media, Twitter, Facebook, Yik Yak, what have you, a large number of students decided to go to the hospital to get checked out. But there is no quarantine.” The man sounded harried. I might not have been the first parent to contact him.  

I paused. “So you’re telling me there is no quarantine?” I repeated dumbly, “and that these kids all just went to the hospital on their own?”

“That’s right.” He went on to explain that with the sudden arrival of dozens of non-sick kids who may or may not have been exposed to the possible case of meningitis, hospital staff had no choice but to corral them and check them one by one for signs of illness. The students were being examined and given doses of Cipro, an antibiotic used to treat bacterial infections. I felt my indignant outrage evaporating as I listened to the man’s exhausted voice. He told me that he and his team, as first responders to the incident, had actually been directly exposed to the sick student. But since then, they had so busy dealing with the fallout (read: overreactions of a fleet of helicopter parents) that they hadn’t yet been able to get to the hospital for the treatment.

Feeling chastened, I thanked the man for the information and hung up. But I still wondered if he might be wrong. Hannah might know better since she was actually there, I reasoned.

I called Hannah again and explained that I’d been calling all over campus trying to get answers. She seemed oddly irritated with my actions. “Don’t do that!” she admonished.

“I’m worried!” I said. “Anyway, I just spoke with someone who said that this actually isn’t a quarantine and that you kids just went to the hospital on your own.”

Hannah paused. “Look, I don’t know what they’re calling it. They just told us we had to go to the hospital.”

“Who told you?”

“I don’t know. Someone one my floor.”

“Like a kid?”

Another pause. “Yeah.”

“Hmmm. Well, do you know how much longer you’ll have to be there?”

“I’m not there anymore. I’m on my way back to school now.”

“Oh! That’s good! So did they give you the pill?”

“Yup.”

“Okay, good. Well, keep me posted on what happens next.”

We said our goodbyes and hung up. I texted all my supporters to let them know there was no quarantine and that Hannah was okay. As I did so, I pondered what had just happened.

It occurred to me that 30 minutes earlier, I had believed that I had too little information. But, in fact, my real problem seemed to be that I knew too much.

If this sort of thing had happened when I was at college just over two decades ago, things would have been different in many ways. Without social media, word of the illness would not have spread so rapidly among the students and there might not have been the mass movement of students rushing to the hospital (especially without the help of Uber). And even if we had ended up in that hospital holding room, we wouldn’t have called our parents at that point, because we didn’t have phones in our pockets. My mother wouldn’t have heard about any of it until after I had already been treated and released. She might have had some sense of lingering worry about me contracting the illness, but not the sort of alarm that had been set off by the word “quarantine” being used by 50 uninformed first-year college students trapped into a hospital room with nothing but their handheld communication devices to keep them busy. 

It’s something I’m sure we’ve all thought about as parents in this digital age. As a matter of course, we provide our increasingly independent children with these tools that allow them to communicate with us whenever and wherever they are. This somehow translates into an expectation that we will know where they are and what they’re doing at all times. But the result of all of this information seems to cause more anxiety than comfort.

Do we know too much about our kids and all the many dangers they may face from moment to moment? By the time I was 16, my own parents had relatively scant knowledge of where I was and what I was doing most of the time.

And sometimes, I envy their ignorance.