With seven adult children, Meredith Thornton of Arkansas keeps her phone on every night, a habit she adopted when her eldest first got a driver’s license.
“Even though they’re grown, it scares me to think about them on the road at night,” Thornton, 54, tells TODAY.com, noting that staying reachable has come in handy over the years, especially as the family has faced “legit emergencies” in the past.
“They know I’m always available,” she says.
Recently, however, Thornton experienced a rare lapse.
When Thornton’s eyes popped open after an uninterrupted sleep, she was greeted by a string of back-to-back missed calls from her 18-year-old son, Van.
“My world stopped. My heart stopped,” she recalls. “What made it worse was the timing. He gets off work around 11:30 at night, and those calls came about an hour later. It lined up with something terrible, like a car wreck, or a mental health issue.”
Thornton, who says she was “paralyzed” with anxiety, managed to summon the courage to check on Van. She didn’t expect to find him safe and sound in his bedroom at home, but there he was, fast and asleep and completely unscathed.
He was also very confused.
“He mumbled something about texting me,” Thornton says. Sure enough, when she checked her phone, there was a message from Van.
The emergency, it turned out, was far less dire than Thornton had imagined. Van needed a Microsoft code — just a simple code — that had been sent to his mother’s email.
Thornton had a feeling the mix-up would strike a chord with other parents on TikTok. And she was right. Her video recounting the ordeal quickly went viral, racking up more than three million views.
“Girl!! 11 messages from my son asking about Roblox code and I’m thinking he been kidnapped,” one person wrote in the comments.
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“I was legitimately on a stage speaking to over 300 people. I keep my phone on silent, but I use it to know the time. My son called eleven times in a row. I apologized to the audience and turned my mic off and took the call. ‘Can I spend 7 dollars on roblox.’ Thank God it was all teachers.”
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“What about the text messages that just say….MOM followed by absolutely nothing else.”
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“Ooooh I get those. Heart attack city.”
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“This happened to me last weekend. And my kids were calling because A BEAR WAS OUTSIDE THEIR TENT.”
Thornton says she was too relieved to be angry at Van for giving her a scare, especially over something as silly as a passcode — and after all, he had texted her.
“Kids today are up all night,” she says. “I think they forget that some of us actually sleep!”
This article was originally published on TODAY.com
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