The Plans We Make

I want to tell you about a birthing plan.

With my firstborn, my husband and I spent months preparing. We researched, we practiced, we created a beautiful focal point to fix my gaze on during labor. We had a plan. A real one, carefully made with love and intention and every good thing that preparation is supposed to represent.

When the actual moment arrived — when the pain was real and the room was loud and nothing felt the way I had imagined — I took one look at that masterpiece on the wall and said, I can't look at that.

What I needed, what I actually reached for in that moment, was eye contact with my husband. Close, steady, human contact. That wasn't in the plan. It was something the plan couldn't have predicted, and something better than the plan could have prescribed. It was the correction that the moment required, and it was the thing that brought my child safely into the world.

No one would say the birth was a failure because we abandoned the focal point.

Plans are made in the abstract

Last week, a death in our family reminded me of this again — painfully and tenderly, the way grief always does.

There was a DNR. A carefully considered, pre-planned document expressing clear wishes for end-of-life care. Thoughtful. Intentional. Made with love and clear eyes and everything we are told a good plan requires.

And then, faced with the actual moment, the actual person, the actual grief in real time — the plan dropped away. Because plans are made in the abstract, and life happens in the concrete. Because standing in a hospital room is different from sitting at a kitchen table imagining a hospital room. Because sometimes the most humane thing we can do is look at what is actually in front of us and respond to that, rather than to the scenario we anticipated.

This is not a failure of planning. It is a confirmation that we are human — that we feel things, that love overrides protocol, that the territory is always more complex than the map.

Begin with the end in mind

Stephen Covey wrote that we must begin with the end in mind. Know your destination. Hold it clearly. But the route — the route is always subject to revision. What cannot be revised is the love underlying the journey.

The birthing plan was not the destination. The baby was. The DNR was not the destination. A peaceful, dignified, loving passage was. When the specific plan gave way, the destination remained. And love — love was the navigation system that kept us pointed toward it even when the route changed completely.

This is the distinction that takes most of us a lifetime to absorb. In youth, we measure success by how closely reality tracks our plan. When life deviates, we grieve the deviation rather than update the map. We hold tightly to the specific path rather than the deeper destination it was meant to serve.

The plan is the map. The destination is what matters. And the map is always, always negotiable.

And sometimes, the map we've been handed wasn't even one we drew ourselves.

Some of us spent years — decades — navigating by a map made for us before we were old enough to have any say in the territory. And the work of adulthood, particularly for women past forty, is often the slow and tender process of figuring out which parts of that map were ever really ours to begin with.

That's where today's conversation begins. Listen HERE.

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