A near death experience

I am a mother of three - I have two boys and a beautiful little girl. They can be a real handful at times. I take care of my children by myself for the most part. I split up with my husband a couple of years ago, and nowadays I'm lucky if he takes them for a weekend every two weeks. To be honest I don’t think he's capable of having them for more than two days a fortnight. Financially he helps a bit, but it's basically up to me to make sure that I have enough money to provide for myself and my kids. I have a decent job, and we get by.

My job sees me driving a lot. I have 60 miles to drive to get to work in the morning, and 60 miles again to drive home. I drive fast; some people say too fast, but it's never bothered me in the past - I consider myself a very good driver. But an incident last week made me consider things in a whole different light.

It was a normal morning's drive to work. I drive along the bypass at 70 mph after dropping the kids at the pre-school club. I'm always in a rush, after managing to get the kids into the car. My hair's usually a mess; my makeup hasn’t been done, and my breakfast is in my lap. As I think about it now, driving at 70 mph with no hands, as I eat my breakfast, or fix my hair, probably isn’t a smart thing to do every morning. I was cruising along with my bagel in one hand; fixing my hair with the other hand, as I looked at myself in the mirror, and held the steering wheel with my knees. Just then my car drove over a piece of a car's engine from a previous accident. If I'd have been watching the road I could easily have missed the object. If I'd had my hands firmly on the wheel then I could have controlled the car, but because of my compromising position I lost full control of the car. It steeply swerved into the barrier, and as I grabbed the wheel to take the car away from the barrier the car swerved the other way, and spun a couple of times before the grip of the tires took the road side on, and the car flipped on its side and rolled for a couple of hundred metres.

My life didn’t flash in front of my eyes, but my children's did. I seen them living with their dad in uncontrollable anarchy. I seen them growing up as problem children: coming from a background of no money and no control. My kids are great kids, but I can see that without me they could grow up to be bad kids.

After the accident I was only left with cuts and bruises, but I had a new vision of how things should be. I decided that I should be more responsible with my life: for my kids' sake and I should plan for the kids' future, in case something did happen to me.

I got myself some life insurance - I actually purchased it online while I was at work (http://www.barclayslifeinsurance.com/iapp/part_00.php ) - and I've decided to drive more responsibly. I now take an extra couple of minutes to eat my bagel before I leave the house; I make sure my hair and makeup are done before I leave, and I keep my speed down to under 60 MPH. It means that I have to get up earlier in the morning, but I'd do anything for my kids. My next objective is to move house, to somewhere that's a lot closer to work. Then things will work themselves out, and I wont have to worry so much about my kids growing up in a way that I haven’t planned.