The Best-Laid Plans

 
   
Planning.

There are so many clichés about plans, some of them don’t even have endings, “You know what they say about the best-laid plans…”   I’ve heard that cliché at least a hundred times, and I really don’t know what they say.

I looked it up, in case you were wondering… the real quote is, "The best laid schemes o' mice an' men / Gang aft agley."  Boy, I’m glad we cleared that up.

I was 14 or 15 when I first laid out my life plans.  Encouraged by an underpaid guidance counselor at my high school, I scratched out a list of what I wanted to accomplish.  It looked a little something like this:

1. Get out of this town.
2. Go to college, preferably nowhere near this town.
3. Get a masters or doctorate in the science or medical field.
4. See the world.
5. Have a successful career.
6. Get married, preferably to Keanu Reeves or Ralph Macchio.
7. Have brilliant kids who will guarantee I end up in the good nursing home.

I had plans.  I never really stopped to consider if those plans were really my own or the echo of parents, friends, society with their notion of what defines success.  But I was ambitious and I wanted to succeed.

With each passing class in the sciences, I grew more and more miserable.  Finally, in a moment of eureka I made an appointment with a much-better-paid guidance counselor at my university asking in what other field I could graduate in time that wasn’t a science but toward which all these science credits wouldn’t be lost.

Kind of a desperate question, isn’t it?

“What do you love to do?  You have to plan for your career and work backwards,” he advised.  “Decide what you want to do, and I’ll help you know the steps to get there.”

Fair enough.  Except I was 19.  I had no idea what I wanted to do.  I only knew that if I had to take another organic chemistry class I was going to curl into the fetal position and weep.  I still believed I was in charge of my life.  It’s okay, you can laugh.

That was fork-in-the-road moment for me.  All the preconceived notions of what success would mean for my life – that science major, a medical career – I realized sounded like a prison sentence.  I didn’t want to see sick people every day.  I don’t like crying babies, contagious people or trauma.  My best laid plans…

I graduated a couple years later with a degree in Speech Pathology and Audiology and a minor in Italian.  I moved to Europe for a while, enrolled in an Italian school and earned enough credits for a major in Italian.

Plans.  What next?  I had a degree that was useless without a graduate degree, and a love of language, beauty and foreign coffee that I acquired living in Florence.  I went from planning my career to finding a job, paying bills, eliminating my student loans and affording my coffee addiction.  That was 1999.

Ten years later, I find myself married (to a man so much more than Keanu or Ralph), the mother of 3 beautiful boys, living in Iowa.  My unplanned-degrees are surprisingly useful, although I don’t have a “career” in either field.  My student loans, as well as my husband’s are a memory.  They’ve been replaced with a mortgage, a car payment and lots of medical bills. Wait, medical bills?

Those were not in my 5-year, 10-year or 20-year plan.  Maaaayybe in my 80-year plan.  Maybe.

The scary thing about all those plans is that if someone would have shown me this part of the destination, at least the part on paper… I probably would have avoided it.  No one plans to have a difficult pregnancy, traumatic birth and a “special needs” son.

And if I were truly in charge of my plans… allowed to control all of life’s uncertainties...  I can promise I would make the wrong ones.  In choosing to avoid the scary pregnancy, my son’s long NICU stay and the boy he would eventually become, I would be missing out on the only things in my life about which I am certain.

This little boy – the one who looks like a toddler, has multisyllabic diagnoses, who is labeled “special needs” - about him I am perfectly sure.

And he wasn’t in my best-laid plans.

My husband, my boys.  I couldn’t have planned life this well.

Now solidly in my thirties, I can say it’s the unplanned things in my life that have proven to be the best.  So, while I still make plans for what’s to come in my mid-thirties and beyond, I can only say that I’m thankful that Someone Else has better-laid plans for me, surely those plans don’t gang aft agley.

by Darcy