I wake up, switch on my phone, go straight to Snapchat and touch my daughter’s name. There on Snap Map, in a city 60 miles from mine, I see where she is right now – what road, what building. Even if she is still asleep and hasn’t used her phone yet, I can glean whether last night was a late one, where she was, what she did – was she cramming or clubbing?
Next, I might open my weather app – and see what it is like where she is. When I sit down to work, I now waste time on Twitter first: her college, her university library, her tutors all have accounts, so I check in, hoping for crumbs, for clues about her day. Then there is Instagram. If she hasn’t posted anything new, I can always scan her old posts for new “likes”, then follow those links to the accounts of her new friends. I can read their banter, size them up. It is compulsive, relentless, draining … and deeply dubious.
My 18-year-old daughter, Lucy, left home for university this autumn and I have become her stalker. I barely recognise myself. I have survived for years without social media. I am not on Facebook or Twitter, I don’t blog, I have no online presence. This summer, though, when Lucy went InterRailing, my children signed me up to Instagram and Snapchat so that I could follow her travels. To my horror (and delight), I discovered I could click on Lucy’s name and see exactly where she was on a map of Europe – which city, which street and, from that, which hostel, which club, which coffee house. I could Google the venue, visit the website, read reviews on TripAdvisor, imagine her there … It was fascinating, if borderline unhinged. When she returned, I forgot all about it. Eight weeks later, she really left.
When Lucy lived at home, my parenting was pretty chilled. Although she regularly went out until the early hours, I don’t recall waiting up or being unable to sleep while she was gone. I didn’t quiz her on her whereabouts or what she had been doing. There weren’t many rules – that I recall.
What mattered was our connection. I knew her life. I could see Lucy was happy, or at least OK. Conversations happened naturally, over the kitchen table or up in her room (until she would say, in the nicest way possible: “OK, Mum, can you go now?”). I knew – without registering – what kind of thing she was eating, wearing, reading or watching on Netflix. Over the years, I’d meet her friends, learn bits and pieces, build a picture. Of course, there must have been plenty she kept private, but I was fine with that because I could see she was fine, too.
And then she was gone. I knew it was coming, of course. There was plenty of time to prepare mentally, but I hadn’t grasped how “gone” she would be. Her room is cold and still (and, for the first time, in perfect order). There is no one in her place at family meals – it still feels wrong. When I work at home, I can’t hear her jamming on the piano or pottering in the kitchen or procrastinating in her bedroom. When there is a key in the door, it is never hers.
She is away, building something new, of her own, and I don’t want to bother her or bombard her with questions – so into this void steps modern technology. When I left home for university 30 years ago, my parents would have loved to know the detail of my days. Instead, they made do with a Sunday night call to the payphone outside my flat. Now the avenues of information are endless.
Everything is out there. Each university, hall of residence, faculty, tutor, society and sports team can be found on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. Daily menus are online. Bar nights, club nights, comedy nights. Library induction days. Internship opportunities. It’s all listed somewhere.
Each friend Lucy makes is instantly Google-able. Even my 84-year-old mother, on learning the name of a boy Lucy met in fresher’s week, managed to find him online, ascertain his A-level results, his love of theatre and the fact that his grandfather died in summer.
A friend whose daughter has also just started university sent me an email the other day headed: “They can run but they can’t hide.” She had scanned the tweets of her daughter’s university Labour club and struck gold – a photo of her girl sitting on a sofa at the first meeting. A dad I know told me that his son’s university newspaper has become his paper of choice and that he is even reading books from his son’s reading list, perhaps to live vicariously through him, perhaps just to feel somehow connected. (He also admits tracking his son on Snapchat, so he knows where he spent the night.)
Parenting expert Elizabeth Hartley-Brewer is horrified, but not surprised. “I remember, 25 years ago, seeing parents walking past the primary school at playtime, hovering at the railings to catch a glimpse of their children to see how they played and who with,” she says. “This is exactly the same.”
She even admits to doing it a bit herself. “My daughter is 30; she’s not on Snapchat, but I can go on WhatsApp in the morning and see whether she stayed up late – and from that I have an idea if she was at home or at her boyfriend’s,” she says. “If she’s on holiday, I can look on her Facebook page to see what pictures she has uploaded, to see the places she’s visiting, her drinking cocktails or whatever.” However, she doesn’t approve of my 24/7 stalking.
“Parents have access to so much information now, we have so many options, but they don’t get rid of anxiety, they create more,” she warns – something I can verify, having lost hours discovering nothing of value and often only raising questions (Why is Lucy still up at 5.30am when she told me she’s exhausted? And who is that odd young man liking her Instagram posts?) One thing is certain. It doesn’t make me miss her any less.
Hartley-Brewer suggests, in this early period, speaking to Lucy more often on the phone the old-fashioned way (we have spoken only once so far as I don’t want to hound her) and going cold turkey on everything else. “When I went to university, I was delighted to be independent,” says Hartley-Brewer. “If I’d thought my parents were trying to find out everything about me, I’d have been horrified.”
Lucy probably wouldn’t be horrified – maybe more amused and a little sad on my behalf. She is immersed in her own world now and I’m in the old one, watching from afar, hoping for the odd glimpse. I know it is pointless. She has gone. Yes, she will be back – but, for the first time, she has a chunk of life entirely to herself that is really none of my business. And that chunk will grow and grow.
In a few weeks, maybe a term, I will adjust to that and lose interest in her tutor’s tweets on the sonnet form. This stalking will be a distant memory and I will wonder how I ever found the time. I even plan to ask Lucy to block me from her Snap Map because I really don’t want to know where she is all day.
I’ll let go. Just not quite yet.
