We Plan; God Laughs.

I enjoyed lunch with a couple of my college roommates from freshman year yesterday. I couldn't help but think of all the conversations we had where we said things like, "When I get married..." or "I will NEVER..." or "What I will do is..." With almost two decades behind us now, I think that if you asked any of us, the road to the present has been twistier than ever anticipated.

The two Orange County girls both are currently in the East. One slaughters pigs on the side and the other raises chickens. The girl from the East lives about as far west as you can go. The two Idaho girls wound up in Utah, and the Utah girl who swore she was getting out and going as far away as possible (that would be me), well, she lives up the street from her old house and around the corner from her mom.

Some of us have more kids than we thought, some of us have fewer. One of us fights for kids that aren't even hers, doing what few are willing to do. All of our children (I keep telling myself) are perfect. And naughty.

See, the thing about making plans, is no one ever bothers to plan for something really BAD to happen.

As naive freshman, we never could have imagined that one of us would have lost her fight with brain cancer almost two years ago.

We didn't plan for infertility, for grief, for frustration.

Who does, really? But when these things happened, as they inevitably do, we could absolutely plan on having each other. And in the end, while perhaps we didn't do all the things we said we would do, we still became the kind of people we said we would be.