“Don’t wait to be whole. Go limping. Go with questions. Go while the pieces are still coming together.

Just go.”

I took the Plan B.

And I got pregnant anyway.

Which, if nothing else, is a very effective way to learn that control is largely an illusion.

I spent a good amount of my pregnancy trying to reconcile the person I had always been with the person I was set to become.

There was fear, obviously.

Fear is easy to find when your entire life is about to change.

There was the practical stuff: money and work and childcare and where we would live and how I would do it and whether I could do it.

There was the existential stuff, too.

Could I still have the life I wanted?

What would I have to compromise?

Would being a mom become the sum of what I am, rather than one of the things I am?

And somewhere beneath all of those questions was the one I kept coming back to: What if this changes everything?

It did.

Of course it did.

But not necessarily in the ways I feared.

I used to think of change as subtraction.

You lose your freedom.

You lose your sleep.

You lose spontaneity.

You lose the ability to leave the house without packing half the house with you.

You lose the version of yourself who could spend an entire Sunday doing absolutely nothing and call it restorative.

And, yes.

The subtraction has been substantial.

A good day these days isn’t necessarily a productive one. Sometimes it’s just one where the people I love are fed, and safe, and happy.

I have never been more intimately acquainted with exhaustion.

I have never been so acutely aware of the passage of time.

I have never understood quite so viscerally that there are some needs in this world that cannot wait five minutes.

But there is also the part everyone tries to describe to you.

The part you think you understand because you’ve heard about it a thousand times.

You don’t.

Not until you’re in it.

How the smallest things become enormous.

Her tiny hand around your finger.

That wristy little wave.

The way her lip curls when she’s dreaming.

How she meets each day as though it has been waiting just for her.

And then come the new questions.

What matters now?

What are you willing to sacrifice?

What are you willing to fight for?

What kind of person do you want to be when someone is watching everything you do?

There was a time when I thought the greatest risk was becoming a single parent.

Now, when I look at her, I know the greater risk would’ve been letting fear convince me that a life I wasn’t fully prepared for was a life I shouldn’t choose.

We spend so much of our lives trying to make the math work.

We calculate the timing.

The odds.

The consequences.

The likelihood that something will turn out the way we want it to.

We wait until we’re ready.

Or until the circumstances are right.

Or until the plan makes sense.

But I’m starting to think that the best things in life won’t survive that kind of scrutiny.

Sometimes they call you to step forward without knowing exactly where you’ll land.

A year ago, I was staring down a life I wasn’t sure I was ready for.

Today, I can’t imagine why I ever thought readiness was the point.

Maybe readiness isn’t a prerequisite for the life we’re meant to live.

Maybe we only become ready by living it.

And I think that’s what this past year has been: Not the life I planned for.

Just the life that happened.

The rounding error.

And somehow, the best part of the equation.