Silly times with my handsome hubby
Since I was a little girl, I’ve spent hours daydreaming, making plans about what I would do with my life, where I would live, how I would live and who it would be with. Some of you know me as a list girl – that is not a new thing. I have had lists running in my head ever since I can remember.
This evening at dinner, I voiced something to Shaun that solicited only a wry smile and a knowing nod from him. I told him, that over the last few weeks, I had been thinking quite a lot about my life and how it had panned out. The fact that I had done almost nothing the way I had planned to, bar my profession, but that was always hazy so hard to go wrong there. I was going to get married at 26, to a gorgeous dark haired man, preferably Spanish. We were going to have 3, maybe 4 kids. The first was going to be a boy, so he could look after his younger sister, and I was happy to not plan the sexes of the rest. My kids were going to have straight dark hair, and I spent hours toying with how long I would let my son grow his hair before he reached that critical stage where strangers comment on your ‘daughter’ instead of your son. There is a crucial limit there! I was going to have my first child at 28 and space them every 2 years so the gap wasn’t too big or too small…..
I know most of you are starting to see a pattern here. Firstly, Shaun is not Spanish. Not even if I trace his roots waaaay back!… so I knew I was starting to veer off course. Not a train smash right, I could still mother the dark haired kids I’d spent hours daydreaming about.
…And then there was Lola. Girl, blond, curly… Beautiful.
Of my list of plans, I got the ‘… gorgeous’ and ‘… man’ part right, and that’s about it. I married a surfer-blond, long curly haired, hippy man, 2 years before I had on my plan. Had my first child a year before I turned 28. My second the very next year, in the wrong order, and have subsequently waited substantially more than 2 years for the next.
But it has taken me 31 years, travelling many thousands of kilometers from home and being out of my comfort zone, to realise that my plans could never have turned out as wonderfully, or perfectly suited to me, as my life has, and I can stop worrying that I’m 2 years past when I should have had my 3rd baby! It might sound ridiculous, but I am still trying to ‘plan’ even though I’m so useless at it, instead of just enjoying the tiny particulars that make my life mine, and rolling with the changes when I decide to change my mind!
Shaun has never been a ‘plan man’, and my pathetic attempt at making plans has always fitted in really well with his attitude. So all these years of planning when we will do something, and how it will be done, has been something he’s been happy to indulge, because it almost never happens that way. So tonight at dinner when I got the wry smile and knowing nod, I knew he had been waiting a long time for me to grasp this insight, and while this realisation might not look so profound on paper, I feel an overwhelming sense of relaxation about my life. I don’t have to follow the plans I made when I was ten, and if I don’t actually know what my plan is, then that is ok too. It is a liberating feeling to have opened a chapter that hasn’t been written in yet.
