Survior

At the age of 20, I was a headstrong young woman who thought, “ I know everything.” I did not realize my naiveté until I found myself in tears on Interstate 95, with $15 in my pocket and a half a tank of gas, driving a 1980 Yugo.

Against my mother’s strong advice, I had left my home in Georgia to work as a live-in nanny in Jacksonville Florida. Without so much as an interview, I had been hired. My mother said it would never work, but what did she know? She had no faith in me. She wanted to dominate me. She didn’t even know me!

“You’ll be home within six weeks,” she said. She was wrong. I lasted eight weeks, and didn’t know how to get home. With echoes of “I ...