The Eternal Guest Room

I often wonder: What would life be like?

If things had gone according to plan. If we had conceived when we expected to. If we had had a child when we intended to.

We would have a 2 1/2 year old. We would probably be working on #2. We would have never known this struggle. We would have been blissfully ignorant. We would have thought that life went like it was supposed to, like it was intended to. We would have followed the path of “how things are supposed to be.”

Would we be stressed out? Would we think that a child was a burden? Would we realize how blessed we were? Would we take it all for granted?

Would we be as close as we are now? Would we have known each other as well as we do? Would we appreciate any future children as much as we will after all of this?

I can’t picture the “other.” I look around our house and try to imagine a child here. I can’t do it. I look in the guest room and try to visualize a crib. I can’t. It’s just an extra room full of junk. We recently discovered a cat threw up in there, and it went under the radar for days, because we never go in that room (boo for cats sometimes, really…gross…please don’t think less of me).

What would life be like? Would it be full of joy? Would our house be full of laughter? Would we cherish every moment? Would we be truly happy?

Would it be full of stress? Would it be full of whining about how hard it is to be parents? Would there be regret? Would we have wish we had waited?

What would it be like if there were 3 of us? How would the days go? How would life play out?

I have no idea. I really don’t. If there’s one thing I know for sure, it’s that we can never predict the future. We never know how we would act in a particular situation. We can never say for sure what we will do, how we will feel. There is dreaming, there is wondering, there is planning…and then there is the now, the here, the real.

The “now” for us is that we continue to wait, continue to wonder, continue to hope, continue to fear. We don’t know how it will end. But the sun comes out every morning, even if it’s hidden behind the clouds, and we get up and go on with our lives.

The future will always be the future.

The challenge, right now, is living in the now.