Nobody Told Me the Empty Nest Had an Emergency Hotline

*Names of friends mentioned have been changed.

Picture this, at five-something this morning, my phone rang.

It was my stepdaughter.

Except it wasn’t.

There was a man on the other end of the line, somewhere in Guatemala, holding Maya’s phone.

There are certain sentences you expect to hear at five in the morning. Good morning, perhaps. Could you stop snoring. Maybe even something’s leaking.

A strange man in Guatemala telling you he has your daughter’s phone is not one of them.

Maya is travelling through Guatemala with friends. Roughly 8,000 kilometres away from home. My Spanish is not designed for international emergency negotiations before sunrise, so it took a while to establish the basics: he’d found the phone in a park in San Benito.

He spoke English, thankfully. He gave me his name and his number. He seemed to be genuinely trying to return it.

Excellent.

One small problem remained.

Where the hell was Maya?

The investigation begins

My first thought was her iPad. I’ll email her, she’ll see it on the iPad. I wrote an email with the kind of subject line nobody could possibly miss: URGENT, YOUR PHONE HAS BEEN FOUND, then opened Find My.

iPad: Brussels.

Of course.

AirPods: last seen yesterday, Guatemala City. No current location.

It was barely six in the morning and I was sitting in Brussels studying the last known movements of various Apple products scattered across two continents, like some low-budget intelligence officer. And I hadn’t even had coffee.

Then I realised the man hadn’t only called me. He’d also called my son Martin. Which told me something: of all the people in Maya’s phone, the two he managed to reach were Martin and I. There’s an unwritten rule in our family, Mum and Dad have jobs that mean they can’t always pick up immediately, so I usually do.

The kids all know this. If they call me, I answer. Apparently even when they’re adults. Apparently even when it isn’t actually them calling.

Whose bloody number do we have?

So Martin and I started trying to reach one of the friends travelling with Maya.

Noah? No number. Caspar? No number. Felix? No number. Robin? No number.

This is the moment you begin questioning your parenting. You let your child travel 8,000 kilometres across the world and you don’t have a single telephone number for anyone she’s with?

Well. Yes.

Because she’s an adult. Because these are friends we’ve known for years, they’ve sat around our table, we’ve watched them grow up, we trust them. This isn’t their first trip together, either. They’ve been skiing as a group. They’ve stayed at Maya’s mother’s place near Lac Léman. They’ve even been to Thailand together, so this wasn’t their first time venturing well outside Europe as a group. Every one of them has travelled independently before, and nothing has ever gone wrong, which is precisely why nobody thought to collect numbers in the first place. Trust, it turns out, is exactly the kind of thing that quietly talks you out of being sensible. And because part of parenting adult children is learning not to demand everybody’s number, address, itinerary and estimated time of arrival. You spend years learning to loosen your grip. Then one morning a stranger in Guatemala calls, and suddenly you’re thinking: whose bloody number do we actually have?!

Hindsight, it turns out is a wonderful thing.

I know Felix. I know his face, I’ve fed him at my table for years. What I apparently did not know was his surname, and suddenly that had become one of the most important pieces of information in my life. So I woke-up Marc.

“Marc. Sorry. What’s Felix’s last name?”

Nothing says successful empty nesting quite like waking one adult child at dawn to help locate another one in Central America. Why would I ever have asked Felix his surname over dinner? Would you like some more pasta, and while I’ve got you, your full legal name and your parents’ emergency contacts, just in case, several years from now, Maya loses her phone in Guatemala? Of course not. They come in and out of your house, you feed them, you recognise their faces, and you don’t notice what you don’t know about them, until you desperately need to.

Meanwhile the rest of the family came online. Martin went onto Instagram where he follows Maya, Maya follows her friends, and tracked down Felix and Caspar, sending them the Guatemalan man’s number. Tamara started working her own friendship network, trying to find someone who knew someone who might know somebody.

I called Maya’s mother. Straight to voicemail. She surfaced eventually: “Oh dear, thank you so much for trying to sort this out, I’m in the middle of nowhere in Italy right now.” 

Naturally. Maya’s father was in Austria, about to walk onto a conference stage.

So: our child was somewhere in Guatemala without her phone. Her mother was in the middle of nowhere in Italy. Her father was about to give a talk. Martin was doing Instagram reconnaissance. Tamara was activating the friendship intelligence network. Marc had been dragged out of bed for a surname. And I was running International Family Crisis Headquarters from my kitchen, still without coffee.

Scattered across countries, living completely separate lives, nobody under the same roof, nobody quite knowing what everybody else is doing, and yet when one thread gets pulled, the whole web moves.

Enter: GDPR

At some point Instagram wasn’t enough, so I called Maya’s old school, she left three years ago, and found myself explaining the absurdity of the situation to a perfectly innocent administrator.

Hello, I’m sorry, this is going to sound slightly ridiculous. My adult stepdaughter used to attend your school. She’s currently travelling in Guatemala. She’s lost her phone. A man in Guatemala has found it and called me, but we can’t reach her. Two of the young men travelling with her were also students there, and I’m trying to reach their parents. Would you possibly have their contact details?

There was a long pause. And then came the inevitable: data protection. GDPR. She’d need to speak to the headmaster and come back to me.

To be clear, she was absolutely right. You cannot ring a school with a sufficiently dramatic story and have them start handing out people’s personal information. But there was something wonderfully absurd about standing in my kitchen thinking: Madame, I completely respect European data-protection legislation. But could we perhaps move this along? There is a man in Guatemala holding my child’s phone.

The unpaid work is real

Somewhere in the middle of all this, something else occurred to me. I’ve been writing a lot lately about empty nesting, about letting go, about our children not belonging to us, about the quiet house and the lovely view and sitting in the sunshine. Rather romantic about it, actually.

Apparently life decided I was getting carried away!

Nobody sees the phone calls. Nobody counts the hours awake. Nobody invoices for the emotional labour. There’s no job description that says available at all times should a stranger on another continent find one of the children’s telephones, but somehow everyone knows who will answer. This morning, apparently, that was me.

The network

But I don’t want to lose something underneath the comedy of it all.

Family, not the neat tidy version that lives under one roof, because ours certainly doesn’t anymore, but family as a network. Nobody had to assign roles. Martin moved. Tamara moved. Marc, reluctantly and half asleep, handed over his piece of the puzzle. Maya’s mother answered when she could from somewhere in Italy. Papa was reachable from Austria. Everyone held one small piece. Nobody had the whole picture. And somehow, collectively, we tried to reach Maya.

Perhaps that’s what family looks like once everybody grows up. Not control. Not knowing where everybody is. Not having access to every part of their lives. Not even necessarily knowing the surnames of the people at your dinner table. Just an invisible web, sitting quietly in the background, until one thread gets pulled, and the whole thing comes alive.

And then…

After Find My. After Instagram. After emails and calls and waking people up. After involving siblings, contacting an old school, and considering all manner of scenarios involving drug lords, human traffickers and God knows what else that no parent should be contemplating before breakfast -

My phone pinged.

Maya: Thank you, Sasha. I’ve got my phone.

That was it. Across several countries, various members of this family had collectively aged approximately seven years. And Maya had her phone.

Great.

[laughs]

I wrote back: please call your mother and father. Because somewhere between independence and adulthood, nobody has yet invented the developmental stage in which a child understands that “I’ve got my phone” is insufficient information after their family has spent several hours wondering whether they’ve been kidnapped in Central America.

And then I finally made myself a coffee.

—

I still believe in letting our adult children go. I still believe they don’t belong to us, that they need to travel and make mistakes and lose things and find things and build lives we don’t supervise. I don’t want to know everything. That’s part of the letting go.

But letting go isn’t the same as disappearing. Their independence doesn’t cancel our care. Trusting them doesn’t mean we’ll never be frightened. Most days those invisible threads sit loose, Guatemala, Italy, Austria, Brussels, everybody getting on with their own life, exactly as it should be.

And then the phone rings at five in the morning, and the whole bloody network comes online.

So yes, I’m still enjoying my empty nest. I’m still learning to keep my hands off the steering wheel.

But this morning added one small footnote to all my romantic reflections about parenting adult children:

Before your adult child travels 8,000 kilometres across the world, get one of their friend’s bloody phone numbers.

Because apparently the nest may be empty. But we’re still on call.