We had a plan for this. It was all in reach, totally attainable, and it made sense.

1. I’d procure a good raise at work.
2. Jeremy would get into grad school.
3. He’d start teaching in the fall of 2020.
4. Then we’d start a family.

Things had finally started to fall into place.

I went in the week of Jeremy’s grad school interview in March to ask for my raise. Armed with data, charts and graphs, and lists of accomplishments that were capped with a record-breaking auction I’d helped to plan the weekend before, I knew I’d nailed it. That raise was mine.

1. Check.

Then came Jeremy’s grad school interview. Everyone who meets with Jeremy can’t help but like him, and he was prepared and filled with passion for the work he wanted to pursue. He was as good as in.

2. Check.

Everything was going according to plan. We shared a bottle of wine that night to celebrate our future.

The next morning I swung by the drug store and picked up a pregnancy test. I just needed to assure myself that the “off” feeling I had was lingering exhaustion from that killer auction, not something else.

Well…

I was pregnant, and if my calculations were right, I’d be giving birth right around Thanksgiving — less than halfway through Jeremy’s grad school year and a whole year prior to his new fancy paychecks that would allow us to, you know, take care of a kid.

This was not the plan.

But it’s not like that should have been a surprise. The whole premise of my novel is figuring things out when your life doesn’t go to plan. It’s about adjusting, pivoting, and finding joy in the unexpected because, as I’ve learned over and over in my life, it’s rarely the plan that makes you happy.

The greatest joys in my life have come from plans, large and small, upended and having to figure something else out.

It’s the boxes of pizza on the floor when the stove goes out for taco night.

It’s the detour that led me to one of the most breathtaking vistas I’ve ever seen on one of our many road trips.

It’s the love of my life that I stumbled across while trying to mend a heart broken by someone I thought was the love of my life.

I won’t stop making plans. But I will remember what Mary tells Sadie in a salty bar in Bolivia: a plan is just hope with a spreadsheet. It isn’t meant to come true just because you planned it that way, and clinging to plans lost just makes you miss out on what’s in front of you, on the things that do bring you joy, and not those that might have.

As our due date draws closer, I find myself excited and not just horrified. I’m looking forward to meeting our little something-or-other, to being a mom and watching Jeremy be a dad. I’m disappointed, sure, that we won’t be as financially secure as I’d hoped, or that Jeremy won’t be able to take any time off after the baby is born, but there’s so much joy ahead of us.

Probably.