Today I celebrate my wee-est little one. One year ago I got to see her face to face for the first time. I was already in love, but the bond was cemented in the first look, the first brush of finger against soft baby skin. I knew right then that she was the miracle I never knew I needed.
These days when I take the littles out this comment invariably gets uttered by some stranger, "Oh wow, twins and then another one so soon? Aren't you brave."
At which point I want to laugh. Brave? Not the least bit. I am the most fraidy-cat person I know. A planner and dreamer and prideful son-of-a-gun who likes to know how things will turn out. Who likes to touch a toe into the waters to test before she gets in too deep. Heaven forbid I try something I may not be good at and look a fool. I can plan and scheme my way out of anything to preserve my image.
You think after my planning and scheming of starting a family in my timeline faltered and flopped I would have learned. You think after months of crying in bathroom stalls and more months of drugs and treatments and procedures I would have learned. I thought I had learned.
All of our plans, our dreams, our best thoughts for how our life will go are nothing but illusions of control. The grasping at straws at the notion that life works as an if/then statement.
After the treatments and the hallelujah positive pregnancy test and the news of twins and rough pregnancy and bed rest came the most beautiful creatures I had ever seen. A beautiful girl. A handsome boy. They were not a part of my initial plans. They were the product of a journey focused on hope and forged on trust in a God who does indeed fulfill the desires of our hearts. In his own time. In a way more beautiful than we could have imagined. In a journey in which we realize that its not the end game that matters. Its the things we are being opened to, made aware of along the way.
But how easily I fell back into my old habits. The need for control. The planning. The belief that my life was back to normal. The twins were in a routine, sleeping through the night, things were all rose-colored glasses and half-full cups! There had not been time for testing the waters here - newborns don't allow for such a luxury, but after 9 months I was proud of what we had accomplished and conquered. We had made it through the better part of infant twin-dom!
And I had even been coming around to my husband's notion that we were done with kids with just these two. I had even uttered to my mom, "We know our odds of getting pregnant naturally - if God wants us to have another one, he's going to have to work a miracle."
And then the pink lines. The stunned look I saw reflected in my husband's face. This just could not be. This was not in my plans. This was not how I thought it, life, would be.
But then, there you were. All 8 pounds of wondrous you. And in that first moment I held you, I learned all over again. We won't always get what we think we want. The safe and tame plan might just yield the safe and tame, but the wild and crazy reality is what builds a story.
