When I lose control of my plans.

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I am a planner.  I always have been and most likely always will be.  I cringe when I meet soon-to-be parents who aren't finding out the sex of their baby and are OK with it.  I get hives just thinking about that.  There is no way I could go the full nine months without finding out because in my mind, I have to plan for it. I mean, what the heck will the kid wear?  I'm a P.L.A.N.N.E.R.  It's in my blood.

The hardest thing about the past month is having to let go of all the plans I had.  I had to sit by and watch them slip away, moment by moment, piece by piece as I learned that my baby would not be mine.

It's an innate habit when you find out you're pregnant to make plans.  Or maybe I should say, it's an innate habit to dream.  Dream about who they will be, what they will look like, how they will change you.  You dream about the family you will become, the adventures you'll have, and the parent you will be.  My problem is that I turn my dreams into plans and when they don't work out just how I figured they should, I am crushed.  It's perfectly OK to dream.  It's not OK to get stuck in your plans.

I've always had a plan in my head of how having kids should go.  I clearly didn't learn after it took almost a year to get pregnant with Gideon that my plans aren't always a reality.  In my mind, I would have my second baby so that he/she and Gideon would be around 18 months apart.  I have always wanted my children close in age and I was so pumped when I got pregnant and counted the months and realized they would be less than 19 months apart.  Plan in my mind, check.

Reality, it's not meant to be.  It's hard for me to know that this plan of having them so close in age, and the picture of how our family was going to be, is not going to happen.  I get so upset sometimes when I think of how this perfect thing that I was counting on, is no more.  And I don't write this to continually dwell on it.  I write this because I know that I am dangerously teetering on the verge of doing it to myself all over again.

I find myself calculating when I would have a baby if I got pregnant now.  I'm deciding in my head, all over again, when it will happen and why it should happen at this time.  And I know that if I continue to make plans of my own, I will end up with a broken heart.

I just need to share where I am at and where I am struggling.  I don't always have it together and all the beautiful quotes in the world don't make it easier for me to stop making plans.  I'm asking for prayers.  Prayers that I will lose the fear I have of not planning.  Fear that if I don't decide how things will go, they won't go anywhere.  Prayers that I will dream, but be able to relinquish control.

It is easy to say that I trust the Lord's timing.  And I do.  But, it is a daily fight to remind myself.