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I didn’t get a smart phone until I was 23. I’ve always been a little directionally challenged, despite my dad trying to get me to pay attention to his driving for as long as I could remember. So I spent a lot of years printing directions off of Google…or scribbling out directions on some scratch paper.
As just about anyone who drives can tell you, there are often detours, missed turns, and traffic to worry about. I can’t tell you how many times I got lost trying to drive somewhere. When my directions were no longer applicable because I got off track somewhere along the line. When I had to go a different route to avoid stop-and-go traffic so my engine wouldn’t overheat and had no idea where I was.
I would panic.
I would wander around or pull over and decide to just go back home and miss the baby shower. I hated feeling lost. I like being in control. I like knowing exactly where I am, what I’m doing, and what to expect. I think a lot of people probably do.
Now I have a handy dandy GPS built into my smart phone that goes absolutely everywhere with me. I can look up all the restaurants around me. I can look up how long it would take to get to anywhere by car, bus, train, or foot. I can look up the city my husband is in to find out how long it will be before he gets home from hunting.
It’s so nifty and I can hardly believe I went without it.
And yet, there are places I go all the time and don’t use my GPS for. I have it, but I don’t have to turn it on to get to Target, my parents’ house, or the children’s hospital. But there are still times when I have to take detours.
I don’t panic anymore.
I know I’m fine. I know I’ll be able to get where I’m going. It will just take longer. Whether I do an extra loop, go down a few roads to get back to somewhere familiar, or ultimately pull over and use my GPS, I’ll get there.
This may not seem significant, but I’ve thought about it a lot lately. I used to have a plan for my life. I knew exactly what I would do and when. I even had contingency plans. In a lot of ways, the big things went the way I expected. I went to college, got married, bought a house, had kids…
The details are a little more messy.
From annoying things like gaining weight and having an hour commute for work to big things like depression and a NICU baby. I can’t say I handle things particularly well now days. (Thanks anxiety and depression.) But I do feel like I have a better grasp on things that don’t go my way.
Gaining weight taught me that I could take control of myself and do something hard (something I get to learn all over again after the baby weight!). My hour-long commute taught me how blessed I was to have a job in my field. It taught me to be grateful for a car that never failed me and had amazing gas mileage. Depression is still raking me over the coals to teach me more lessons than I can list here.
My now 20-month-old is what really got me thinking here…I never thought it would be me. To go to the hospital for monitoring and end up induced. To need an unplanned c-section (seriously my biggest fear). To have a baby lifeflighted, spend 39-days in three different hospitals, come home on a feeding tube, need oxygen, have three surgeries, or need feeding therapy, physical therapy, and early intervention.
But I can’t tell you how grateful I am for every bit of it.
My baby was less than two weeks old in his second NICU when I was informed he would be transferred to the children’s hospital that afternoon. I was just getting used to that NICU. I’d been at the hospital for hours already and quickly texted my husband to let him know what was going on. The nurses started packing up his room and having me fill out paperwork. I pumped when I could and tried to be ready for transport.
I remember what I was wearing that day: a long-sleeved black shirt with a collared shirt underneath, black snow boots, my hair in a ponytail, and no eyeliner under my eyes. I sat rocking my sweet boy trying not to cry. The big, scary things happened so fast and progress was slow. The nurse handed me some tissues and remarked several times how impressed she was that I was handling it so well.
I didn’t feel like I was.
But I realized that I was learning to go with the flow more and more. There are things I have little control over. Detours that will takes days and weeks and months. Probably even years.
My baby didn’t get transferred that day. We did end up at the children’s hospital a few weeks later though, and I cried a lot that day. And then I looked for the positive and dealt with it.
I’m still learning to accept the detours in my life. I’m still learning not to panic when things don’t go my way. I still get frustrated, angry, and sad at my circumstances. But I try to remember how comfortable I am driving my van when I don’t know where I’m going. Life is just like that….just on a much bigger scale.
