"I Just Need My Friends To Be Okay"

....was the simple, conflicted plea of my 17 year old daughter when I got home from my usual Tuesday night meeting this week. "Mom, I just need my friends to be okay." She was referring to the fact that not just one but two girls her age and her acquaintance had suffered major medical attention for alcohol poisoning over the weekend.
The next day, during my work and her school day, my phone started pinging with updates about one of these girls, now in a medically-induced coma, as a result of her party intake efforts. I work in an active classroom and typically keep my phone in my pocket so as to know if a critical call comes in, but texts like this waver on the threshold of garnering responsiveness. On the one hand, I know my daughter will call if she's in a very difficult moment, but on the other hand, the reach of a connection that the texts provide (I'm sure she was in her Senior Privilege block at the time) is like a rare olive branch of mother-daughter relations. I couldn't respond at the time. But I immediately started thinking about how it's the very same with young children, reaching for us whenever they need emotional backup.

Emotional backup for the young child often sounds something like this, "He won't let me," "She's not letting me," "I don't want her to."
And in my 4's class this year, it's particularly similar to how some of my students empathize so greatly with their peers' needs that they too just need their friends to be okay.

UPDATE: 

This draft, above, was originally started 4 years ago, 9/28/16. I am fairly sure there was a connection going on in my classroom, a young student who was transferring all his anxiety to the more outward display of what was happening with peers experiencing dramatic separation anxiety. How odd that I revisit this moment almost exactly 4 years later, 10/26/20 with no daily physical classrooms to hold us.

My youngest daughter is now 17. We are entering the 7th month of a global pandemic in which her school life is based out of her bedroom. My meetings are online, for which she closes the only separating door to dull the sounds of those, her bedroom door. The anxiety I feel when that door stays closed for hours is the kind of anxiety I felt when I didn't feel 100% freedom to answer my phone during my work days at school 4 years ago. There are very few texts between us, because we are mostly home together, although she has the respite of her dad's house to change her scenery. She has uttered these same title words to me recently, for entirely different reasons, along with more regular intonations of "My friends are not okay. Nobody is okay."

I hear that. I feel this way too, in increasing intervals. The swings between high levels of productivity and lows of listlessness are overwhelming. 
Many of us are existing in this state of not having access to so many things we want. I just need my friends to be okay, too.