Being a parent sucks. Bigtime.

My first baby, daughter #1 got her first new car on her own about eight months ago. She came up with the deposit and lined up the financing with very little help from DH, and she's been making her payments promptly and vigilantly following the maintenance schedule. I though this was pretty impressive for a nineteen-year-old.

Today, she has no car anymore, but she is alive. She's walking around today. I'm not sleeping and all I can see are pictures like these when I close my eyes.

Yesterday was a nasty, cold, rainy day. About 6:20 I got a call from daughter #1 who we knew was on her way home from work. "Mom, I've been hit!" I handed the phone to DH (because he's ex-military and a volunteer fireman and always awesome at crisis-management) and threw my shoes on. She sounded so scared, my stomach felt as if it had been rolled in ground glass and knotted. We rushed out the door and drove the few miles to the scene. She had pulled her car off the highway, turned the flashers on and was standing out of the way on the side of the road. The woman who had hit her was standing in the middle of the highway, talking to a bystander. She came over and tried to make small talk as we waited for the police. DH and I made daughter #1 sit on the hood of the car and suggested the other woman sit as well. Our girl had some cuts, there was blood on her face, she had glass in her mouth, her left side was in a lot of pain and she had an awful bruise across her collarbone from the seatbelt. I walked around to the driver's side to see where the impact was as I could see the airbag had deployed. I can't begin to describe the fear, the anguish and the intense anxiety which rushed through me and threatened to spill out when I saw that side of the car. I've seen some pretty bad accidents. She shouldn't have lived. I walked back to her while the fire department arrived and we waited for the ambulance. It was then that I saw her hat lying in the middle of the road about thirty feet behind us. She got hit so hard her hat came flying off out into the road as her windows shattered. I rode with her in the ambulance and she got checked out at the hospital, where DH met us after he had the car towed. We brought her home and medicated and iced her up, and spent the entire night thanking God.

The woman that hit her was going at least 55 mph. The only damage to her car was a crumpled left front quarterpanel.

I don't know how my daughter lived. All I can think about is how close she came to death, how she looked when we got there, how her car looked, how everytime she started to shake she'd make herself stop. I think I freaked a bunch of people out on my way home from work today because I couldn't stop crying. God, I hate loving anything this much. I hate being a parent. I can't handle the thought of losing one of them. Why don't kids come with a manual, and with a big yellow warning label that says it's really really going to suck?