$600 and a Prayer: The Drive That Changed Everything | by Pink Monkey | Jul, 2025

I’ve been thinking about courage lately — what it really looks like when you’re living it versus how it appears in hindsight. Because in hindsight, loading three kids into a car and driving 1,200 miles to start over with someone I’d spent exactly three days with looks either incredibly brave or completely reckless.

At the time, it just felt like the only choice I had left.

It was 1999, and I was 30 years old, stuck in a marriage that had started when I was still a child myself. Fifteen years of trying to make something work that was never going to work. I had three kids — my babies — and I knew they deserved better than watching their mother disappear a little more each day.

Then came this man I’d met online. In 1999, meeting someone on the internet was still considered pretty sketchy. A month earlier, he’d driven all the way from Missouri to Arizona to meet me. Three days. That’s all we had together in person — three days where he talked to me like I had thoughts worth hearing, dreams worth pursuing. He was kind, driven, and those eyes — God, those eyes just melted me.

He lived in Missouri. I didn’t even really know where Missouri was, had never been there, could barely picture it on a map. I didn’t drive in big cities, had rarely driven outside my small Arizona town, and here I was planning to drive across the country with three children to a place I’d never seen to be with a man I’d known for three days.

The day I decided to leave, I counted the cash in my wallet three times: $600. That was it. That was supposed to get us from Arizona to Missouri and somehow turn into a new life.

I remember sitting in my driveway, engine running, kids buckled in the back seat with their little backpacks and favorite stuffed animals. My hands were shaking so hard I could barely grip the steering wheel. What kind of mother does this? What if I was making the biggest mistake of my life?

But then I looked at my kids in the rearview mirror and thought: What if I’m not?

The drive took three days, two nights in the cheapest motels I could find. We ate gas station food, and I pretended this was all a big adventure while my stomach churned with terror. Every mile marker felt like a point of no return. Every big city we had to drive through was a white-knuckle experience.

I was driving toward a man I barely knew, to a place I’d never been, leaving behind my life, my hometown, my family, my friends — everything familiar.

But I knew what staying looked like, and I knew my children and I deserved the chance to find out what else might be possible.

That drive wasn’t the end of our struggles — not by a long shot. But it was the beginning of discovering that sometimes the craziest risks are the ones that save your life.