Here’s my plan. This is what I want to happen. Per my declaration last January, that winter is the last I ever spend alone. This winter is creeping up and I will meet my perfect mate at the first cold snap, so by deep winter I am past the introduction stage and I am not alone. I see no reason, once I’m in love and know that this is the man of my dreams, to date for years and be engaged for years after that. I am of an age where I know myself well enough, and what I want well enough, that a few months should do it before an engagement. I am attracting a man who knows what he wants as well as I know what I want. A man who is ready for marriage and a family now, as I am. So by next summer, I will be engaged. And by the end of 2009, I will be married. 2009 is my year. And by the following summer, two years from now, I will be pregnant. That is my plan.
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I was always as suspicious of life plans as I was irresistibly compelled to make them. I came to the conclusion that they never worked out. They always changed. And given what I always knew of the short-sighted frailty of humans, it didn’t seem so surprising. After all, human-made plans are like setting a path at night in a storm – you have no idea exactly where you’ll end up or what you’ll encounter along the way.
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So why do I so boldly make this plan now? What has changed my conviction so drastically that I give no thought to my plan going awry? Simply this. I want my husband and my children more than anything else in the world. I want them. I claim them, draw them straight out of the ether. With every day that passes, I feel myself more harmoniously aligned with “God” and “the universe,” humbled and malleable. It is by doing both of these things – aligning oneself with the universe, or God’s plan, and focusing all one’s energy on the desires of one’s heart – that one can attain that much-desired future. And I make this plan, singing it boldly out into the universe, because I now believe I can. That I have the right and the power. I want these things and I’m done waiting. That life is mine. It is mine now. On some parallel reality, I have already come into that future. I am there. Anything to do with teaching and schools and report cards is a memory. I am home with my family. I have someone else’s breathing in the house. My belly is swelling with my firstborn. I am full and loved and happy. I am surrounded by family and friends. I am beautiful and glowing with health and happiness. I am part of a unit, no longer floating alone. I am slender with beautiful skin that begs to be touched. This is my life. And it is being birthed into my current reality, slowly squeezing from that parallel reality into this one.
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And what is really intriguing is the timing. When I was going through my grief, my period of mourning all those years ago, I was so clouded over with my own misery and anguish that I missed a great deal of what was happening around me, but one thing that would occasionally poke me sharply enough that I would drag my drugged attention around to it was the timing. I broke truly on the 49th day of my grief, on the 7th 7th day. 7 is the number of completion, as 5 is the number of grace and 6 is the number for evil (catechism, Catholic or not, drifts back to you at the oddest times). And my grief ended up lasting 9 months, from August 2001 to May 2002. one day, it just broke like a fever. No more fanfare accompanying it than came with the onset of my grief. It was simply as if the hard, raking sobs of the last 9 months has ceased and I was now left to pick up the pieces of the destruction of my opiated happiness. I shifted by some power outside of my own, for I had none left, from a ripping agony, the constricted breathing of pain day in, day out, to a pervasive yet calmer sadness. The madness of my influx of sanity had eased and settled into the wet, clear vision one gets after a storm of tears. Seven sevens. 49th day. The worst of all those months, the day I cried out to God to show me a reason to stay on this earth so I wouldn’t take a razor to my wrists in a hot bath. And 9 months until the grief was over and I was on the path to being a recognizable human. And it occurred to me that May morning when I woke up and brushed my teeth and drifted to the kitchen table of my parents’ house, that it was as if these 9 months of grief was a gestation period, as if when the time had reached its fullness, the thing that had been growing and festering in my belly turned out to be a real life. I thought then, and think still, that it was significant: 9 months. It was truly like the verse in Isaiah that says does God bring you to the point of birth and not bring forth? It could have been 7 months, or 12, but it was 9.
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And it occurred to me yesterday as I determined that It’s Just Lunch was not out of the blue, that it has been another 9 months. It was the third week of January that I picked up the book of the Secret out of nothing more than resigned obligation to the promise. I’d made to my parents that I would read it. It is now starting the third week of October and things are changing, the force behind events shifting into a new, purposeful urgency. 9 months. It was as if that third week of January, the seed was planted within me and through all the doubts and discussion and truth-seeking of these months it grew, and now it is being brought to birth. It is time.
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