I haven’t talked to my parents over the phone in over a week. It’s mainly because I was scared for them to hear my voice; this is the worst I’ve ever heard my own voice, and it often hurt just to speak given how heavily coated with phlegm my vocal chords were. I didn’t want to scare them into thinking I was dying, so I just emailed my dad to let him know I was a bit under the weather and would call when I felt better and could speak. I guess this didn’t go over so well with my mom, who freaked out and thought I was dying. I eventually revealed to them that I contracted whooping cough, so of course, dad printed out Web MD articles about the most extreme cases of whooping cough, where people have broken ribs, gotten brain damage, and had to suffer from extremely violent coughing for over 100 days, and I’m sure this added to my mom’s paranoia. The important thing, I thought, was that I caught it before the 3-week mark (that’s when my doctor said you would be doomed to violent coughing for three months because it would have reached maturity in your body and at that point be indestructible), so my antibiotics would work and help cure me by Christmas day. I thought they would be happy about this, but my mom freaked out even more.

“I know who is responsible for you getting this, but I’m not going to say,” she said in her accusing tone. That’s her nice way of saying she blames Chris. “You traveled and got this in that country.” No, not really. It’s not Australia’s fault. Everyone’s immunized from it here. Colds in New York don’t just magically become whooping cough in the Southern Hemisphere. I picked it up in New York. She wouldn’t hear it, though, and insisted she was right and “has wisdom,” and that she didn’t want to hear my lies and excuses. “And why didn’t he bother calling me when he knew you were sick and I was worrying? There’s absolutely no respect here.”

You can never really win with irrationality and paranoia.