Did Montaigne even know his children that well? He doesn’t write any specific descriptions of who they are or what they are like, even though he has glowing things to say about his own parents. Most of this essay feels like an estate management discussion, with everything else left to the mothers to manage.

We live in very different times. Yesterday was my birthday, so I naturally thought that any texts I received during the day would be from well wishers. But the first I received yesterday was a disturbing middle of the night message from one of my sons away at college. He has been going through some mental health issues since returning to school this year, and the text seemed to indicate an escalation of that.

So I was in a minor panic most of the day trying to figure out what to do with a child a five-hour drive away. I arranged to visit him this weekend and, a few hours later, received a thumbs up from him about it, which was relieving considering the hours of radio silence in between. He later seemed to hedge on whether I should come up to see him at all — saying he might have the flu and had other things to do this weekend. I considered it for a bit and decided, no, I’m going up. Whether he makes time to see me is up to him, but I need to be in the vicinity.

Part of why I feel I need to be there is to help guide him through his mental health options, since this is a subject I have some knowledge about. But I also don’t want to give him a blank check to put his mother and me on hot coals at his whim — to create alarm and withdraw it. It’s quite possible that he’s speaking his most direct truth about his condition when in his worst state, and I don’t want to ignore that.

Anyway, I don’t wish to make the opposite error to Montaigne — dragging my children’s personal issues into a public (well, quasi-public) place. Rather I want to point out that children are entering an absolutely insane world right now and mental health care should be considered the norm at this point, as routine as seeing a dentist twice a year. The hardest part of getting that kind of help is entering it — and we cannot expect people under distress to make those kinds of decisions alone.

So, if my approach is doing a little too much, I’m glad to do it, because the risks of not doing enough are enormous. If I had the ability to drop everything and go to East Lansing immediately after receiving that text, I would have done that too.