saying bye-bye to my car...

Not a huge loss in the scheme of things. Let's be real, I have been through much tougher times than this and I will be fine through this, too.

Yesterday, at 5:21pm (or so my cell phone told me, that was the time I dialed 911), I rear-ended someone and totaled my precious car. We had all been driving in stop-and-go traffic, and the person in front of me stopped short and I bore my weight down on my GAS PEDAL rather than my brake pedal. I crashed into the person in front of me, who was then forced into the person in front of them. Luckily, no one was hurt, besides me, and even that was a minor damage. I sprained my driving foot and my left shoulder is so sore that it's nearly immobile, but all is well otherwise. I would have been hurt a lot more had my seat belt not been on.
It was a huge wake up call for me - in fact, it was almost as if God, or someone, slapped me across the face and said "get your shit together." My mind has been so preoccupied lately that even I have recognized that I feel like I am not mentally where I am physically. I can be in a room with 5 people, engaged in a conversation, but my thoughts are truly elsewhere. I know what I was thinking about at the time, too, which is the scariest part. I was thinking about the last conversation I had with her father, and how in the middle of it, as he was saying something I deemed important, his phone died. He never called back, which I found strange. (I know, I know, we should not even be talking at all. I know this. It's just so hard to break a habit, but even that is a poor excuse. That is a whole 'nother story in and of itself, for another day.) I was also wondering, since it was around 5 and all, what my little girl was doing. Was she at music class? Eating dinner? Babbling and laughing? All of this was going through my head in the .5 seconds when I realized, hey, my car is getting way too damn close to the back of that Camry. Then, CRASH. It is by far the worst accident I've been involved in - I had a little fender bender (or, rather, my driver's side door bender) when I was 17, pulling out of the parking lot of my high school. Other than that, I have a clean driving record (sans a speeding ticket or two!!)
My car is valued at almost $9,000 (even though it's a 2002), and I owe close to $7,000 on my loan, so I am praying for a miracle. Hopefully, I can get enough to pay off my loan, and then start from scratch with a $4,000 - $5,000 dinger to get me from A to B for now. I am no longer going for looks or luxury; I learned the hard way that I do not have the money for that at this point in my life.
I can say this for sure: this was the very first, and probably only, time that I was happy that my little baby girl was elsewhere. The impact was 100% in the front and she would have been in the back of course, but the way my car hit the other one, it was jolted forward with such force that not only did the two front air bags go out, but the air bags on the passenger door and the passenger back door did as well. I know it's a stretch to think that, it's like something a mother would say when she went out to pick something up quickly. "Thank God I left my baby at home with her dad" or whoever. For me to say it, it sounds crazy. As if it were a chance I took, as if it were even an option to have had her with me on this particular ride.
I need to start making some more positive changes in my life, and not focus on things that so clearly distract me from doing majorly important, risky things such as driving. I'm still just thankful no one was hurt, and that I walked away from it, and, if nothing else, I will be rid of a car that has been nothing but bad luck since I got it in October '09......but I will still miss it deep down! :(