It's Not the Destination, But the Journey That's Important

Just about everyone I know has had their life planned out from a young age. Number of kids identified, names of children all picked out, and what kind of house they wanted to live in pictured, complete with the white picket fence.

For example, when I was in college, I worked with a girl who had recently graduated with her undergrad degree, and she said she 'had very little time' to find her Mr. Right, because she had to be married by the time she was 22, to have her first kid at 24. She seemed very unwilling to budge with her time line, and to this day, I wonder if she ever really kept to it.

If you would have asked me when I was 17 how my life would go, I would have told you that I would get married as soon as I graduated from college, with my first child at 24 or so. And if the same question was asked when I was 22, I would have said, married by 26, first kid by 28...and so on.

My point is, it doesn't matter how much you try to put your type A spin on your life, because it will never turn out exactly (or even close to) how you planned. And that's not all bad.

I have a record number of friends that will have their first babies in 2011, and I'm so excited for them. I'll be turning 33 this year, and the more time goes by, the more I wonder when that will happen for me. The more years that go by, the more anal my husband becomes, and I'm not trailing that far behind, to the point where I wonder how much a baby would disrupt our lives and could we even handle it? I saw this after my husband blew a gasket over the recent realization that our dogs were scratching up the hardwood floors. I mean, don't kids draw on walls with crayons (and with worse things? ick). I wonder how my husband would react to that.

I used to be frustrated with waiting it out for the right time to start a family. We have been waiting for the right time...and sometimes I wonder if the right time will actually come. So I have re-focused my energies thinking about when we would not only have the family we want, but the house we want, that in my dreams seems to be getting bigger, and bigger, and bigger.

To put some perspective on things, as I've said before, I was very close with my father, and I feel like I've been passed some of his traits. He always aspired for more, and he worked and he worked and he worked to get it. He always had this restlessness of not being 'quite content' with what he had. I remember going to open house after open house with him saying 'which room would you pick if I had this house?'. And they were always the most beautiful houses. And huge. With wine cellars and big backyards, and built in hot tubs, and stables nearby where I could keep my horse. If I had one, that is.

Well guess what? I'm the exact same way. Every new neighborhood I drive through that I like has me pulling up Zillow on my iPhone, dreaming about how long it would take to make enough money to live in THAT neighborhood. And the silly thing is, I've gone from a 500 square foot condo in the DC area to a nice, new sizable townhouse. But has that been enough for me? Well...let's just say I'm always thinking about what's next. And I'm still dreaming of that perfect house.

My father was the same way. And then one day he had enough money and decided to build his dream house. All 16,000 square feet of it. And boy was it gorgeous. People would stop in front of it in Oakton, Virginia, when they were driving by because of its sheer mass and beauty, white limestone imported from Italy. I got married in that house.

But here's what I learned from all of that. Unless you have $2,000 every month to spend on utility bills alone, without blinking an eye, don't dream of that 16,000 square foot house.

But what does this all mean? I mean, seriously, what is the point? The point, my friends, is that it's good to dream, but if you are only living in your dreams of 'what you may have some day', you will never be enjoying the present, because the present moment will never be quite good enough, and your house won't ever be big enough, and you'll always be trying to get there, not ever really knowing where 'there' is. That's where I've lived for the past several years.

A friend said to me this week that things happen when they are supposed to, and to stop worrying about things, because you tend to realize later that things always work themselves out for the best, although you may not think so at the time, because we want things to happen when it's convenient for us. Because we always seem to think we know best, but in reality, we really don't know at all.

So, maybe I'll be the 36 year old 'new' mom, because that's when it will happen for me. And maybe I'll live in my modest townhouse until I'm 70. And I do think that would be okay, if that's what is supposed to happen. I'm ready to start focusing my energy on what I have now in my life, rather than what I want to have at some point in my life. I'll still dream big, but I won't let my dreams overtake me and bankrupt me. Because in the end, it's all just stuff, right?

And really, living in a townhouse in Charleston is 'living the dream' as my husband likes to say. So I'm gonna enjoy it. And I will wait patiently for my train to come.