This isn’t so much a rant as more sharing my heartbreak…

My 13-year-old daughter (firstborn) was recently invited to go camping with her best friend and their family. I’m very good friends with the mom and they are our neighbors so we regularly hang out all together, both families. They were camping for about a week, we also joined them but only for one night. It started raining the day we were leaving, so my friends oldest daughter took all the kids home the day after we did and my friend and her husband stayed at the campsite for the remaining night.

My daughter came home and first thing she did was go back over to her friends house after dropping off her stuff (Totally fine, she was invited to join them for dinner) and as she was walking out the door, I just reminded her to keep her phone on so I could reacher if I needed to. She got all mad at me saying “I don’t know where my phone is” and then ran out the door. So, here I am thinking “Oh Goddamnit my daughter lost her expensive smart phone and there’s no way we can afford to replace it!” Well, a couple hours go by after that & my friend calls me from my daughters phone to let me know that the office at the park they were camping at found it, and she’s claimed it and will bring it back for us.

Now, this is the part that made me really sad… my friend told me, laughing about it, that I guess my daughter has her listed as ‘Mom’ in her phone and I am just listed by my first name. The office workers at the park would tell a smart phones AI to ‘call Mom’ as a way to get phones back to their original owners when lost, and it worked out so my friend was there and able to grab the phone - awesome, glad we don’t have to replace it now like I originally thought.

But, I am absolutely heartbroken that my daughter doesn’t call me mom in her personal phone. I don’t think I’m a perfect mother by any means but I know my kids know they’re loved and they’re always taken care of and I like to think they can come to me with anything, though I know as a teen talking to your parents about sensitive subjects can be uncomfortable, so I’m not upset if she wants to go talk to other trusted adults first. I love that she trust my friend, her friends Mom, with things she’s not comfortable talking to me about. I just never thought that she would not want me anymore as her mom at all…

I brought it up to my daughter and told her that my feelings were really hurt that she didn’t want me to be listed as her mom, she tried to tell me that someone else must’ve gone in her phone and changed it, but I saw the look on her face she looked caught and guilty. Honestly, it made me more sad.

I’m not sure that I’m looking for advice per se, just to share my upset. Has anyone else had a similar situation happen? How did you deal with it? What was the outcome?