I physically gave birth to three children; they are currently 22, 16 and 10. For the last 11 years, however, I’ve counted two more in my brood – my youngest’s older sister and brother (from her father’s first marriage.) They are currently 23 and 18. Right after my youngest was born, her father finally got visitation through the courts for his older two children, and we began the every-other-weekend routine with them on New Year’s Day, 2000.

Over the next six years, I grew to love them as my own. When their father and I split, their only concern was whether they were still “allowed” to come to my house every other weekend. I have called them my step-kids, even though their father and I never married. In 2005, my step-daughter had a daughter, and I got the call, not her father, that I was now a grandma. (I’ve since learned that they refer to their father as “The Donor”, as that’s the only real and tangible role he’s played in either of their lives, even when he and I were together.)

So, this past summer, when their mother and step-father divorced, she started spending every weekend with us because there was no family life left at home. My step-son had moved out, leaving my step-daughter and step-granddaughter (who I suspect has either high-functioning autism or Asperger Syndrome) at home with their mom who decided to hit the dating scene with a vengeance. In October, after I had pushed my boomerang son back out of the nest for the 3rd (and in my mind, final) time, she asked if she and her daughter could move in. She actually said out loud, “I would rather live with you and be part of a family again. Please?”

How do you say no to that? I didn’t. I couldn’t.

Shortly after Thanksgiving, she announced she would be moving to Florida to be with the boyfriend who had transferred to a different college in Daytona Beach.

I sat her down and told her all the reasons I saw that made that a really DUMB idea, not the least of which was her special-needs daughter, but I also said that I would only try to talk her out of it this once and would then support whatever decision she made.

She decided to go. And go she did at 9am, Tuesday, February 23rd.

At 4:30pm, Tuesday, February 23rd, she called me from Mississippi saying she thinks she might have made the wrong decision. I bit my tongue and just listened while she talked it out. In the end, she decided she would go on and give it a try.

The next morning, she called me in tears, wanting to come home. So, I said, “Well, put your daughter back in the Explorer and come back.” Like, how hard is that? But she didn’t have enough money to get back home, so I wired her $200 and told her to get a good night’s sleep and start back the next morning.

The next morning, she called saying she was going to stay there that day, go to bed about 5pm and get up and leave at about 1am so she’d be home at dinner time, instead of the middle of the night. “Ok,” I said, “I’ll call you and wake you up before I go to bed.” And I did.

The next morning, my 16 y/o son came in my room at 6:08am saying the words every mother dreads: “Mom – wake up. She had a wreck.”

Instantly awake, I grabbed the phone and got the details. She and her daughter were fine – unharmed, not a scratch. They were at a Days Inn in Tallahassee, dropped there by the Florida Highway Patrol officer who had her truck towed off and wrote her 3 tickets:

• one for reckless driving (falling asleep at the wheel)
• one for driving with an expired license
• one for no insurance

He instructed her to call someone to come get her, because she wasn’t getting her truck back until someone with a valid driver’s license and insurance showed up to drive it home.

That someone was me. Of course.

Now, you all know I’ve been eyeball deep in risk with my 16 y/o son since what feels like forever, and I have reported in that he’s been doing a lot better. But can you imagine me leaving him at home alone for the weekend to tend to the animals (two dogs, 9 6-wk-old puppies and a cat) while I go rescue her?

Nah, me either. But I did.

I called my oldest son and asked if he’d be the second driver I needed and L-O-N-G story short, we left Tulsa at 4pm on Friday afternoon and arrived at the Days Inn at 9am Saturday. We went and got her truck, which by some miracle had no damage that would prevent us from driving it home. (She had done a 360 into a ditch.) We stopped and had brunch and hit the road, Oklahoma bound. By 1am Sunday morning, we’d made it to Memphis where we stopped to get sleep. (This old bag can’t do multiple all-nighters in a row anymore.) We got home Sunday evening around 6pm.

The risk I took leaving my son home alone paid off – the house was still standing, and all the spies I had looking in on him had nothing foul to report. Yay! Major points in his column.

A few days later, my step-daughter apologized for her “stupid move” and I told her there are some risks you take in life just so you don’t spend the rest of your life wondering if you should have, and in my opinion, this was one of hers. I told her there were some things you do when you are young and dumb that you know better than to do when you’re older – like calling yourself moving half way across the country and taking on a 1,200 mile road trip with no insurance, no valid driver’s license, and no money to turn around if you change your mind. I told her that most of the time, those risks turn out to be fairly expensive (as this one sure has) but you chalk it up to life experience, learn all you can from it and go on down the road…hopefully a little wiser, hopefully knowing yourself a little better.

I don’t know what it was that made her change her mind about Florida – likely it was a multitude of things, many of which I had probably outlined before she left – but I know one thing for sure: Before she left, she wasn’t acknowledging the extent of her daughter’s special needs the way she is now.

And even as I type those words, and despite how glad I am that she recognizes the situation now, I know that I am in the midst of taking a big risk (taking her and her daughter in on a more permanent basis and all the ramifications of that decision) solely because I don’t want to wonder later if I should have.

I know, too, that while this is not a risk I would ever imagine “knowing better than to take”, this will likely get expensive. But as a result, I will be wiser, and I will know myself better.

Suzanne Bird-Harris would like to say she made the leap from Corporate America to web coach / WordPress developer on her own terms...but no, she lost her job after the CEO ran off with the 401K funds and went to jail. So, she started her own business with 3 kids, 2 dogs and a cat in tow on Dec. 6, 2002. It's been a wild ride, worth every risk, and she now proudly deems herself "pyschologically unemployable".
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