When Life Doesn't Turn Out the Way You Planned

By KCY

“Happy birthday!” my husband said, giving me a hug from behind.

I looked up, giving him a weak smile. I moved my hand to release the suction apparatus from my engorged breast. The fourth time today.

“Happy Birthday!” he said again, “Aren’t you happy? You’re thirty-nine! We need to go out and celebrate!”

I sighed. Ugh. Thirty-nine. That was old.

“Nah,” I said, “I’m too exhausted.”

And I was. It’d been a four months since Ethan, my son, was born. A grueling four months. From the minute the doctors pulled him out of my womb, he didn’t cry, he SCREAMED. At first it was funny. “Well, he definitely wants to make sure we know he’s here,” one doctor said. It became less funny when the screaming occurred all night and every night. And it was me who was up, every night. It was awful.

So, here I was utterly fatigued with a newborn and now my husband was telling me that I was one year closer to forty. Not exactly something any woman wants to hear.

“I’m going to go lay down,” I told him. I went to our bedroom and shut the door, collapsing onto the bed. I closed my eyes shut. How did I get here? How was it that I was nearly forty and still dealing with dirty diapers?

My mom had been thirty-four and my dad forty-four when they had me. Although my parents looked and acted young, I was always keenly aware they were older than all of my friends’ parents. As a kid, I vowed I’d be younger than my mom when I had kids. Somewhere in my early twenties.

As I became older and went through high school then college, that number changed. Married with one child before the age of thirty.

Thirty came and went with no marriage or child.

I met my then boyfriend and now husband just shy of thirty-one. We traveled, stayed out late with friends, slept in. Marriage and children were forgotten.

So, here I was now, thirty-nine, with a newborn.

He should be thirteen, at least ten.

I squeezed my eyes even tighter.

There was a soft knock at the door.

My husband entered with Ethan.

“He wanted to say good-night,” he said, gently placing our son into my arms.

Ethan’s eyes were wide open. He gave me a smile and gurgled.

My heart filled with love. He was perfect. And he was my son. It wouldn’t be him if we’d had a baby sooner.

We all have dreams. We take those dreams with us everywhere. Sometimes those dreams become reality. Sometimes that’s all they are: dreams. And we need to let go of them. We can choose to be disappointed or we can choose to move on and accept what life has given us because sometimes the things that happen to us are the dreams we never knew we had. Like a perfect newborn son at the age of thirty-nine.