I became a mom a few weeks ago. Not in the traditional sense, mind you. I was not pregnant for nine months and therefore experienced no stretch marks, no swollen feet, no strange food cravings, and no twelve hours of excruciating labor. Nope, none of that. (I actually wouldn’t have minded the cravings, to tell the truth.) I just woke up one morning and boom…three kids. Welcome to motherhood.
Really, it was that simple. Simple? Well, I'll let you decide...
On Monday night, I poured myself into bed after a fun filled Labor Day weekend with my best girlfriends in the Hamptons. It was the kind of 3 day weekend that most people only read about in entertainment magazines or see on “The Real Housewives of New York City”…full of beautiful people, lavish parties, decadent food, and plenty of alcohol. The summer was over and we celebrated in style. But a mere six hours after my head hit the pillow, the phone rang.
It was the call that would change my life.
My father's voice burst through the fog of my brain and I could only recognize two words…Julie’s dead. But those two words were enough. Julie was my best friend from college who had married into the American dream…handsome and successful husband, gorgeous house in an upper middle class suburb with the proverbial white picket fence, adorable children, and an SUV in the driveway. But all of that had collapsed around her when her husband had been killed in a car accident last year. Since then Julie had become a shadow of her former self and began acting out in seriously bad ways to deal with her grief and pain. She began travelling down a road that led her to dark and dangerous places, which eventually led to her death.
And that is the really short version of a really long story. Maybe someday I’ll share the horrible details with you, but not now.
As my father was talking, I was vaguely remembering a conversation that I had with Julie and her husband many years ago. And somewhere in that conversation, they had asked my fiancee and I to be their children's guardians. I was flattered that out of all of the people they knew they had chosen us, so we accepted whole heartedly. And then we put the conversation out of our brains. Fast forward three years...I'm still single and Julie and her husband are gone. And their three children were caught in the middle. This is where my journey begins...
