Turns out there's no turning back. Decisions are about deciding, and other than somehow arranging to inhabit parallel universes simultaneously ... a handy little trick, unfortunately not physically possible, that would allow each potential path to be followed to its conclusion ... the choices made are the ones we live with.

At seventeen, getting married ... that choice seemed the lesser of four evils ... took me off the path I'd planned (college, Peace Corps, grad school, safe and happy life) and straight on to a side track that held me for years. Living up to the statistical probability, the kids' dad and I divorced after a few years and I single-parented my daughter and son, worked three jobs to make ends meet ... barely ... for more than a decade.

My twenties were tough, but it was my life. The kids were great ... smart, funny, healthy, loving ... and I had friends and family around. I worked very hard, and learned the value of that. I was independent, self-sufficient and busy. Few of the people around me had children, so while my buddies were toddling around Europe, backpacking through India, auditioning for off-off-Broadway shows, cutting demo records, enrolling in law school and volunteering in Ethiopia I was working as a dental assistant, waiting cocktails, going to night school, keeping immunizations up to date and attending parent-teacher conferences.

My thirties were no piece of cake, either. I married a second time for wrong reasons, but additional income made it possible to put my daughter through college. I traded self-sufficient suffering for second-class citizenship in an unbalanced relationship ... there was always a thumb on the scale tipping the thing in the other direction ... and passed far too many years standing barefooted on egg shells.

Twenty-something years after I chose option number three my nest emptied. My daughter moved east, my son moved south and I moved on. At the age of forty-one I bought myself a backpack and a round-the-world ticket and off I went.

So, is there a moral to my story? Many.

My personal favorite came from John Lennon: Life is what happens when you're busy making other plans.

That 'stuffed dog' thing works, too.