Lisa Bedford - Survival Mom: How to Prepare Your Family for Everyday Disasters and Worst-Case Scenarios

M y transformation from suburban mom to Survival Mom has taken a lifetime. Maybe it began in junior high with my A+ in a desert survival class or with the tales of true survival I read each month in my Nanas copies of Readers Digest. Whenever or wherever the seed was planted, it dug itself into my consciousness and grew deep roots.

By the time I was married and the mother of a toddler, Y2K rolled around. A part of my brain said, This is much ado about nothing. Y2K+1 will be no more significant than any other day. But something deeper and more primitive spoke up and said, Im a mom now. Its my job, my sworn duty, to protect my family. So, I stocked up on toilet paper.

I am learning all the time. The tombstone will be my diploma.

EARTHA KITT

My focus on the basics of survival never disappeared. I began storing blankets beneath the backseat of our Tahoe, and at least one case of water bottles was always stowed in the trunk. My husband began to tease me about my favorite sentence starter, Just in case

Really, survival should be the last thing on my mind. I was hardly born to a homesteading or survivalist family. Rather, at an early age my mother taught me the technique of calculating percentage discounts in my head on our frequent trips to the mall.

Last summer when we were hiking at Lake Tahoe on a paved, wheelchair-accessible path (my favorite kind), I noticed that my mother was sporting a brightly colored sequined fanny pack. I was impressed. I knew she read my blog daily and figured that she had paid close attention to my lists of emergency must-haves. If I needed insect repellant or an energy bar, shed have it. Right? Wrong. Halfway through the hike, she sat on a rock, opened the fancy fanny pack, and pulled out twelve, a dozen, different lip glosses. That is my survival heritage!

What spurred me into the foreign world of food storage, firearms, and preparedness as a lifestyle was the downturn of the American economy. If my friends could lose jobs and homes, so could we. If nothing else, Im a realist. Every dormant survival instinct in my body awoke, and I knew that this time was no dress rehearsal as Y2K had been. I felt a sense of urgency, as though an F5 tornado was storming toward my house and I only had the briefest of time to prepare. My familys survival and our future well-being were, in large part, in my two French-manicured hands.

At this point, my background as a manic researcher came in handy, and I devoted every spare minute to learning about food dehydration, oxygen absorbers, comparative rifle calibers, and an NRA membership. In no time I could cite the advantages of a gravity-fed well and had Bug Out Bags packed for each member of the family. I was dead serious about being prepared.