The main road leading to the lane where I live crosses over a busy four lane US highway. There is a little turnaround in the middle, two lanes on each side of it running north and south. It's the sort of deal where you have to size up all four lanes before making a dart across the first two lanes to the island in the middle. The safest thing to do would be just to wait until there's no traffic coming either way and make a run across all four lanes, but that usually isn't possible. Traffic is usually flowing at least 60 or 65 mph and there are no lights for miles in either direction.

My mother, bless her heart, has totalled TWO cars there by pulling into oncoming traffic. Miraculously she wasn't hurt either time except for bumps and bruises from the airbag deployment. Babygirl wasn't so lucky.

When she was learning to drive I about lost my nerve as co-pilot everytime we pulled up to this particular spot. In the early days she simply waited for a clear shot. Later on she got braver and would jump the first two lanes, land in the middle abruptly and then floor it to make it across the other two. One day during the spring of her senior year, she was carless and caught a ride home with a friend who hadn't been out this way very often. I was doing my Wednesday routine at the Cancer Center, which is always an adrenaline filled day of endurance. Lovingly dubbed "the chemo factory" by us workers, it is an offsite clinic for patients to receive treatments locally instead of travelling to a city 80 miles away...not unusual to see 70 patients in a day.

I answered a line that was lit up for me, and the voice on the other end was hysterical. It was BabyGirl's friend Les and I could barely make out what she was saying. All I could make out were the words "wreck" and "hurt" between her sobs. I finally got it out of her where they were and I was off in a shot. When I arrived I couldn't find Lauren anywhere and Les and the driver were wandering around like idiots wailing and such. Frantically, I searched the area around looking for my daughter, and found her already loaded up in the back of an ambulance with a neck brace and collar on, her body covered with blood. The paramedics reassured me that she was okay, but would need stitches and some x-rays of her head. Everything looked so dramatic that Les decided she probably needed to be transported TOO ;)

It all ended well, in spite of Lauren's many stiches in her scalp and her goofy concussion like behavior for several days. Turns out the driver, unfamiliar with the danger of the crossover, had just run across all four lanes and never looked for oncoming traffic. The car was T-boned right behind the back seat where Lauren was sitting. She did NOT have on a seat belt ( yeah, duh..i know ) and the impact threw her all over that backseat. This was the second car that THIS young driver had totalled, but her sweet mother was only worried about the welfare of my child, one of her favorite kids.

That was only one of the many hair raising adventures I had raising just ONE teenager. I feel sorry for y'all with more than one!! I'll share some more joy later on in another post...involving the law and such. Yowza.