I track my children. Let’s just get that right out there. 

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I have three children—all capable adults, all living in the Twin Cities, twenty-six hours of hard driving away from me—and two of the three show up in Find My People on my iPhone. Full disclosure: they know I can track them. They could disconnect, withdraw their permission, at any time. But they don’t. This is a great kindness on their part and I try not to abuse their kindness: I never text them “Go home! It’s late!” or “Are you out with that idiot again?” or “Whose house is that?”

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Still. It makes me feel better, sometimes, to know where they are.

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I have my reasons.

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On a warm October evening in 2011, before any of us had an iPhone and before I had ever heard of Find My People, I was chatting on a cute little Nokia phone with our wild-child firstborn, who had recently moved to the Chicago area. He had called to tell me he’d just been to the jeweler to pick up the engagement ring he had ordered for his girlfriend.

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It’s a special kind of joy to finally get confirmation that all those years of reminding (Never run with scissors! Always wear your seatbelt!), all those sleepless nights, all those worst-case scenarios (carjackings, freak tornados, alien abductions) fabricated out of nothing… have had the desired outcome: a child has made it safely to adulthood.

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But such joy can be short-lived. Out of the big city background noise came a second voice, a stranger’s voice, intruding on the conversation. My son said, “Hold on a minute, Mom.” Muffled words, something about cash, then “No, you can’t have that.” Then a loud “Fuck!” and scuffling and grunting and a crack that might have been the phone hitting the pavement—or might have been something so much worse—and then nothing.

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Nothing but me, staring at a tiny gray screen on a tiny gray cellphone, my own heartbeat pounding in my ears, brutally aware that I had no idea where he was.

 

To be clear, it’s not just the burning memory of long-distance trauma that drives my current-day people finding. No, no. I also tell myself stories.

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For example: I want to call our uber-responsible daughter, but only if she’s home. Not, of course, if she’s driving, or grocery shopping, or out with friends. I’ll just take a peek. The story: The tracking is a courtesy on my part. Really.

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For example: our no-fear youngest is going to a wedding three hours away. Was that this weekend? I’ll just take a peek. The story: I’m just making sure he got there okay. Nothing creepy about that. Really.

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Tracking is not without its downsides, of course. You sometimes learn things you’d have been better off not knowing.

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For a spring break a few years ago, our youngest planned to drive from his then-home in Nebraska to visit us in Arizona.

“Just go almost to Denver and turn left,” I told him.

“I know how to read a map, Mother.”

On the agreed-upon day, I resisted until eight o’clock in the morning before I took a peek.

He hadn’t left Lincoln, yet.

Ten o’clock. Noon. Finally on the road!

“Can you believe it?” I said.

“Put the phone away, honey,” my husband—their father—said.

I provided said husband with regular, if largely unappreciated, updates on our son’s progress: Ogallala. Fort Morgan. Nearly to Denver.

“He should stop for the night soon, don’t you think? It’s getting late. Maybe he’ll stop a little further south in Colorado Springs.”

Wait. He didn’t turn left. Why is he west of Denver?

“Oh, dear God. He’s going to cross the Rocky Mountains. In the middle of March. In the middle of the night.”

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I couldn’t—wouldn’t—call or text him: he was driving. I’d only be adding to the ludicrously long list of hazards he faced.

“You know what this is?” I fumed. “This is him listening to Siri instead of his mother.”

“Put the phone away, honey.”

But…how could I? Surely, keeping an eye on him was keeping him safe.

Hadn’t that always been my job?

From ten hours of hard driving away, I watched the little circle with his grinning face glide past all those ski towns in the dead of night. I pictured avalanches, black ice, guard rails missing or in disrepair. I pictured him dozing off, hitting a moose, getting lost in a blizzard.

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And then, close to midnight, Find My People returned these chilling words: "No location found."

“He’s in the mountains. It’s not surprising there’s no signal,” said my husband, clearly deficient in the skill of Imagining the Worst.

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The story: Something terrible has happened to my baby boy.

 

Still.

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The silence after something hitting the pavement in Chicago was the longest twenty-six minutes of my life. More numerous than the stars in the sky are the dark tales a mother can conjure when given twenty-six minutes of ominous silence. When our firstborn finally called me back, he was wandering through a downtown pharmacy, buying first aid supplies to bandage the gash in his forearm. He was fine, he said. Sorry to have worried me. He was fast enough and strong enough to have recovered the little velvet box and its precious diamond ring from the meth-addled young man with the knife. Hardly any harm done. Not worth calling the police, he said.

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The story: He’s okay. My desperate staring at the phone had worked.

 

Judge me if you will. I make no apologies. Every morning, the hatchlings burst from the nest and make for the sea, scurrying across beaches riddled with hungry gulls and coyotes, tangled nets and fishing line, broken glass and broken hearts. They do this whether we are watching or not. We are all–truly–just one phone call away from being driven to our knees.

 

In Colorado, our youngest had pulled over at a rest stop to sleep in his car, turning off his phone to save battery. When he arrived—perfectly safe and sound—the next day, he said he’d been “surprised” to wake in the morning and find himself surrounded by mountains and snow. He had been flying blind and unconcerned. I had been hovering over a screen, sick with worry.

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No location found.

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All good stories teach a lesson, and this is mine: I'm not protecting them. Seeing is not saving. Every scramble across the beach is their own to navigate.

My job is to teach them to keep themselves safe and trust them to go out into a dangerous world and make a difference.

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Still.

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Most nights, I pick up the phone one last time before sleep, do one last Find My People. Our daughter, safe at home. Our youngest, safe at home. And the firstborn? The one who started me on this demented path? He is the only one who never got an iPhone. The only one I cannot track. With him, I’ll just have to have faith.

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And hope he calls.

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[A version of this piece was published in businessinsider.com:  NoLocationFound]

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