I Agreed To Be the Legal Guardian to a Baker’s Dozen
This is a guest article written by Bonni Berger, as originally seen in DCAreaMoms.com.
“Will you be the legal guardian of our kids if we die?” My husband and I were not expecting this. Our friends, who were asking, had two little ones and were perfectly healthy. This was pre-COVID, when the likelihood of a premature death didn’t feel like a plausible possibility.
They were just doing their due diligence and getting all their chicks in a row, as it were. I knew the anxiety they felt imaging their children without a family or a home to call their own. They wanted this decision to be made, secured and then forgotten, as quickly as possible. As a young parent myself who was getting her own affairs in order, I knew the familiar weight of this question and also the tremendous relief when I heard the answer, “of course.”
So we said “yes.” My husband and I knew what parenting was all about. We were smack-dab in the thick of raising our own three. Being a parent to children who weren’t our own wasn’t something we agreed to lightly. But our friends were our extended family. Both local and afar. We played, disagreed, vacationed, celebrated and mourned together – adults and kids, alike. Saying yes to this request seemed only natural.
But what happened next was unexpected and scary.
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