The Phrase I Texted My Kids 133 Times

Too loud.Too loud. Too loud. If you were to scroll through my archive of texts with my children—from the start of the coronavirus pandemic, in 2020, to the end of last year—you would find that I sent 133 of these messages.I discovered this a few weeks ago, sitting alone on the couch in my living room, when, on a whim, I searched for the phrase on my phone. My youngest daughter, age 19, has been the most frequent recipient of the text, though each of my three children appears in the archive. Typically, I sent these messages between 10 p.m. and 2 a.m. The backstory to each, I’m sure, was relatively consistent: I was in bed, thinking about my schedule for the next day—a board meeting, a difficult conversation I needed to have—when from downstairs came the noise. Shrieks of laughter. Trash talk escalating over a video game. A heated debate about a book or a TV show or a person, infused with teenagers’ fierce intensity. Or perhaps it was someone deciding at 11 p.m. that they would absolutely die without a McFlurry, kicking off a negotiation over who should place the DoorDash order.In every instance, it was the same routine: I picked up my phone. I typed two words. I put the phone back down.About 80 percent of the time, the message really did say just that: Too loud. Sometimes, depending on my mood, I would write a little more: Too loud. Love you, good night. Or, when I was feeling more like a school administrator than a father: Too loud. Shouldn’t you be working right now? Occasionally, someone would text back: Sorry. More often, the signals that the message had been received were subtler—a brief dip in the noise, maybe half an hour of relative quiet. Then the laughter would find its way back up the stairs. And I’d text again.[Read: In praise of ‘difficult’ kids]Read one way, the archive is exactly what it looks like: evidence of a dad who wanted to sleep and couldn’t, a catalog of minor annoyances sent into the dark and mostly ignored. Only in hindsight have I realized