What Do You Do When Someone Changes Your Plans?

Life has a funny way of changing your plans doesn’t it? There’s a saying I love, “you make plans and God laughs”. That’s how I became a Mom, it’s how I started dating Mark, and it’s how we ended up in San Diego. I had a lot of plans for life when I got pregnant at 18. I’m sure you could’ve guessed that, but what you might not know is that never wanting to be a Mom was one of them. I had no desire to ever be a Mom. Crazy right I know!!! It wasn’t just that I didn’t want to be a 19-year-old single mom, who had just finished my GED not want to be a Mom, but I had no desire to ever have children. Now don’t take that the wrong way, I absolutely adore and love Nicolas, I say it all the time he is the best thing that ever happened to me and Mark is the best thing that ever happened to us. But that doesn’t change the fact that when I was a little girl playing barbies I was never a mom. I was the fun convertible driving aunt. I would jump in my sister’s barbie plane and go on vacation after vacation. Looking back now it’s funny because I am still the fun aunt who vacations all the time, I just happen to also have the world’s best sidekicks who do it with me. It’s not a bad thing when plans change, it’s not the “end of the world”, but it can change you as a person. It can reteach how you view your life and change your outlook on the world. When I met Mark, I was on an anti-boyfriend movement. I was finding myself again after going through hell. I was figuring out who I was, what I wanted and most importantly what I brought to the table. But again, I planned, and God laughed. The two best things I have, I didn’t want. The two best things ever given to me, found me. Because if I had anything to do with it, my choice wouldn’t have been to be a mom, a girlfriend or settled. I’d be off in some place running amuck in the world. This doesn’t mean I regret my decision. I love both of my humans with my entire being, but I didn’t choose them, they chose me. I say that because they were molded and made just for me. They both have these little details to their personalities that only they can blend and mesh with mine. I say all the time, Mark is the yin to my yang, Nicolas the moon to my stars. There are so many people who try every day to become parents who would give up everything they have for something I never even wanted. I would give anything to give them what I have. To give them the ability to know that no matter what happens they are worthy, and they are deserving, sometimes it has nothing to do with them at all. To give them one sliver of hope that somehow, someway, it will work out just how it has for me. Because even though this wasn’t ‘my plan” plans change. Sometimes like in my case they change for the better and it isn’t until years later that you learn the reasons why. My why, I don’t talk about often nor do I say all the things Nicolas and I went through but maybe this blog will help us get there. There’s a reason I am Nicolas’ Mom, and there’s a reason I had him at 19, he saved us. This isn’t the post for that story, but I will say that Nicolas and I went through hell and then he got sick. Really sick. The kind of sick that he wasn’t supposed to live past 4 sick. I prayed every day that he would get better and if he couldn’t get better that instead it would be me. We finally got Nicolas’ seizures under control and cue Mark and shortly after my illness. See I might not have wanted Mark, but I was going to need him. I needed him whether I knew it then, or whether I like to admit it now. Mark has been the person who held us all together. Sat through months of hospital stays, months of sleeping on a hospital chair when they’d yell at him for sitting on the bed. Months of his girlfriend being paralyzed relearning how to walk, talk and function. Months of stepping up when I couldn’t be a Mom. So, while he was never my choice or what I thought I wanted, he was what Nicolas and I were going to need. He was going to be the glue when our life was falling apart. He is exactly who I need him to be, and everything I could ever wish for, if I knew what life had in store for me. But that’s the thing, we don’t know what life has in store for us. We don’t know what the future holds, so we just make these plans and hopefully we’re making the right choices. You hope that the plans you are making now are the plans you are going to look back on and say you made all the right choices, but we never really know do we? When we magically jump on some guys lap or get pregnant at a young age maybe those are the things that happen for all the right reasons. Even if they don’t seem like it in the moment. Don’t be so hard on yourself, don’t worry about what everyone else has or what you don’t have yet. Be grateful for the life you are living. You don’t have to want the same things everyone else does. You don’t have to have the same plans today, you did yesterday. These are all small moments making up the most wonderful thing, life. You only have one, if done right, once is enough. Maybe this place, this moment right now is exactly where you are supposed to be. Life has a way of doing that to us, being exactly what is supposed to happen when it’s supposed to happen. Maybe, in this moment while you’re making plans, someone upstairs is laughing. Life has a way of working out if you trust in the process. Maybe we should spend less time hyper focusing on plans, and lists of accomplishments and instead living it. Enjoying it. Spending quality time with those surprises, or those we planned for. Spending time living towards goals or finding paths that lead us to new ones. You never know if the day you’re making plans is really just setting you up for the bigger picture of your life. Keep an open mind, and most importantly live each day to the fullest extent of your ability, we only get one of these things so make it worth it.