And now I am 27

So yesterday was my birthday. Normally, this is a cause for great celebration. My mom has always made a huge deal out of them, and I have always looked forward to my birthday each year as this exciting, magically day. I know that as we all grow up, this day becomes less exciting to many, but not for me.

All of that has changed though. This has been a difficult year, and I am sad. I am tired, and I feel such loss... and for whatever reason, as my birthday approached, I began to dread the day. It was a day filled with so many "supposed to be" milestones and the idea of turning a year older was filled with mixed emotions.

I have always been a planner, and for the most part, my life has gone pretty much according to this plan. I met a lovely, perfect boy in high school, fell in love, and married him, I graduated from a good college, got a good job, started graduate school, bought a nice house, practiced my parenting skills on two sweet puppies...and it only made sense that I would become a mom next. This plan that I have followed has also always included the idea that I would have a child when I was 27. My mom was 27 when she had me, and for some reason the age of 27 has always represented motherhood.

But the likelihood of my "planned motherhood" seems to have vaporized into thin air. I was "supposed to be" 35 weeks tomorrow with our first sweet baby (we called him peanut). Celebrating my 27 birthday with a huge, round, fat belly. I had imagined taking one last, final vacation to celebrate this day as we entered the last few weeks of just being a twosome... but that isn't the way it is. But then if that wasnt the way it was really "supposed to be" then surely it was supposed to be that I would be 19 weeks pregnant on this birthday, celebrating my birthday by cutting into a cake filled with either pink or blue filling and learning if our baby would be a he or a she... but as quickly as we discovered our second "would be" blessing, that too disappeared. I guess that wasn't really how it was "supposed to be."

The grief and the tears are still most fresh from what I had truly started to believe would be our "supposed to be" baby. Just a few weeks ago, I had had a conversation with my husband sharing my cautious excitement that we might actually get to announce our pregnancy at a birthday BBQ this weekend... but again, I guess that wasn't "supposed to be."

I am blessed beyond measure in so many areas of my life, but when it comes to motherhood, it just wasnt "supposed to be" this way, and yesterday, my 27th birthday, served as a painful reminder of all the plans I had made, all the hopes I had started to believe would become real, and all the dreams I had so naively bought into.

It is easy to blame God, and to be angry in this situation, but I'm not... really, I'm not. If anything, this horrible nightmare that has gone on for far to many months has made me rely on Him so much more. Everyday, I wake up and make a conscious choice to believe that He is preparing my heart for something that will make all this heartache worth it. He is teaching me that his plans are greater than my plans, and I am choosing to submit my will and the planner in me to his will. It's a process. It's a fight that I have every morning in the car when I cry on the way to work. Because everyday I question why this is happening to me, and why things are the way they are, and why they aren't the way they're "supposed to be." And then everyday, I try to make myself believe what Isaiah wrote... that his thoughts are nothing like my thoughts, and his ways are far beyond anything I could imagine (Isaiah 55:8).