I used to be a decisive long-range planner. In college I had a beautiful color-coded calendar. At the beginning of each semester I would spend a whole afternoon dutifully transferring my syllabi to this master calendar. This same detailed planning seeped into the early days of my teaching career. I had binders and page protectors and labels and desk calendars with everything predictably planned out. I lived on routines. I tried desperately to execute life devoid of human error or miscalculation. I wanted to be prepared for all eventualities. I could control certain variables and minimize trouble through careful reflection and preparedness. I was rewarded professionally for this mindset. As a first year teacher I was given the lofty “Above Standard” mark for organization and planning. I was meticulous.

I lugged this heavy weight into mothering. I sat hours at the computer and devoured parenting books in my first pregnancy researching how to provide near-perfect care for my coming offspring. It was an equation with inputs and outputs. If I took into consideration the right calculations I could stick the landing, achieve perfect execution, score a 10 out of 10. I had control. This worked well for a time.

When my second child was born premature, the magical mystical illusion of control was dented. I was living in a rural remote Iñupiaq Eskimo village on a sliver of land in northwest Alaska. I woke Paul up before 5 am to alert him that I was afraid I was going into labor. Our son was not set to arrive for another five weeks. I drove myself on a four-wheeler to the clinic where I sat recounting for the itinerate health aid the basic details of my pregnancy when she could not find my chart. At 11:19 am, shortly after a med-evac plane arrived with a midwife, my son Silas was born. We were swiftly loaded into a makeshift ambulance and taken to a primitively equipped medical transport plane with my baby son under hot towels naked on my chest. Silas was in the NICU for two weeks. The inability to see this coming or prevent it entirely made me feel vulnerable in a way I had never known before.

Despite this momentary absence of control, I could not quite let go of my masterminded planning. Our lives revolved around air travel and I was consumed with having the right carry-on bags and stroller to schlep me and my crew through long days in and out of airports. Whenever things fell short of perfection I doggedly chided myself for not taking into account the chances for snafus — extra clothes, snacks, entertainment, etc. Having perfect (or near perfect) outcomes meant that I was doing the hard and meaningful work of planning well. I demonstrated my deep investment through preparedness.

It was in the fall of 2014 that my penchant for control began to wobble. I got pregnant with my last baby two weeks after taking a new job. I woke up early on a Saturday morning. Something was amiss in my body. To be completely honest, I woke up in a good mood and that was the problem. It occurred to me that I might be pregnant because I anticipated being surly with PMS. I could not go back to sleep after the inception of the pregnancy flitted through my mind. Before my whole house stirred to life I took three pregnancy tests. Each one was positive. I drifted out to the couch, staring into the middle distance, contemplating this change in plans. I had “planned” to wait for another year before trying for what I prearranged would be my fourth and final baby.

By the spring of 2015, it was like we had been flushed at high speed through a flume with neither a foothold or means of escape. We had stepped wrong and the floor opened. It swallowed us and sent us sailing into dark unpredictable terrain. We left what was supposed to be a forever-home and landed back in the bosom of our extended family in Eastern Washington. Within the year, Addy was diagnosed with Leukemia. Those two years of her treatment laid waste to my ability to plan anything. All my plans — big and small — were devastated from beginning to end. We were at the mercy of an intensive treatment regimen with wildly chaotic side effects. I threw my hands up trying to predict what was coming and how to best negotiate the next steps. Not being in control was the cradle that held so many others losses.

In the years since, I have become the Queen of Maybe and Perhaps. “That’s possible,” is my constant refrain. It is a hard lesson to learn that life has creases and craters you can neither plan nor prepare for. I often find myself saying in my head, “If God wills it.” even when I pencil something in the calendar.

For me, it was through the blunt force trauma of suffering that I invited the open-ended elements of existence into my consciousness. Uncertainty and suffering are a part of the human narrative. Admitting that no matter how much I am committed to the seamless unfolding of life, I cannot erase the potential for imperfection or suffering through an algorithm or calculation of variables. I am learning that extricating all the possibility of human error in pursuit of a perfect outcome is a dead end filled with bitterness and regret. I can’t script joy and happiness. It has to grow organically where life buckles and bows. I plan these days, but with open hands and I show my love and commitment in other ways to the people I love.