“Mrs. Curtis?” said the voice on the phone.
I froze. It is never good news when someone is calling me that.
It is never Publisher’s Clearinghouse asking where they should deliver the check. No, the only people who call me “Mrs. Curtis” are the bank officer re-financing our mortgage, and my children’s school or camp nurses.
This time it was the nurse from camp.
“Your son has just had a little spill, and he’s conscious but he’s injured his arm. His counselor has taken him to our local emergency room for some X-rays, and ….”
I couldn’t really tell you what she said next. At least he’s alive, I thought. Conscious. That’s good, right? But bad enough to need X-rays. Yikes.
It was only four days since we had dropped that child off at camp. Just four days into his very first sleepaway camp ever.
I know people who booked trips to Europe after dropping their child off at camp. Good thing we didn’t have the money for that, I thought.
As the nurse continued, I flashed back to the sign I’d read on her office door, four days earlier:
“Don’t hover!” it had said. “Don’t come rushing back to camp for every little scrape or bruise. Your child is in good hands – even if they break a bone. Don’t be a helicopter parent! ”
“Don’t be a helicopter parent,” I muttered. In fact, I was so busy repeating “Don’t hover” to myself that it wasn’t till the third time around that I registered I was being asked a question.
“How long will it take you to get here?” the nurse was asking.
I had no idea. Who can predict how long, in a metropolitan area, it will take to get anywhere? I was trying to find the words for that, when I finally realized – she is telling me to come hover.
“We’ll be right there,” I said.
It actually took several hours. As with the phone call, most of that trip was a blur, though I do recall someone calling while we were still dodging deer on the Taconic, to ask me how much my son weighed. “I don’t know!” I shouted into the cell phone.
My husband had a more concrete suggestion.
“You’ve got him right there with you,” he yelled into the phone. “How about you tell us?”
By the time we finally reached our son’s bedside, he was fast asleep, sleeping off the general anesthesia required for the surgery to put pins and plates in his right forearm, to repair it.
After seven days home on our couch watching television, he got a water-proof cast and was allowed to finish the last two weeks of camp.
I don’t want to be a helicopter parent; I truly don’t. I would much prefer spending time at the spa – or at least the library – while my children go about their lives.
But I keep getting calls.
I remember once having an argument with my therapist about why I felt the need to keep my cell phone on during our sessions. “Because I want the school nurse to be able to reach me if anything happens,” I explained.
“Don’t you think that’s a little paranoid?” she asked.
At that very moment, my phone rang. It was the school nurse – of course! – explaining that my other child, then in first grade, had walked himself into a wall and split open his eyebrow; it would probably need stitches so as not to heal crooked. “Gotta go,” I said to the therapist. “Chopper’s waiting.”
And just yesterday, my boy with the bionic arm called from his summer job on a distant campus, to explain that he might have re-injured his arm, falling from his bicycle.
I thought his bicycle was collecting dust in our garage – along with his helmet. But apparently he’d somehow gotten hold of another one… without a helmet. “Did you hit your head on anything?” I asked, my heart in my mouth.
“No, but I might need some X-rays.”
This time, I sent his father to check him out. For some reason his father is better at saying, “No more riding bikes without a helmet, young man.”
Several hundred dollars we don’t have, for JetBlue tickets round-trip. Plus a bicycle helmet.
You know what’s worse than being a helicopter parent? Trying to be one without the helicopter. So now you know what to get me, before Mother’s Day rolls around again.
That, or a jetpack. With a helmet, of course.
