life plans and life lessons

there comes a time in one's life where making plans and looking into the future become inevitable.  it's a sign of growing up -- a point in time where one realizes he or she must stop playing games and start getting serious about life.  it's only natural.

but then what happens when those plans don't work out the way you want them to?  what happens when you try to do things right, so that everything you had planned for yourself happens just the way you had envisioned it?  you start to second-guess yourself and begin to wonder whether or not you're on the right path, because it's turning out that this isn't really the path you had planned for to begin with.  if you live your life as a good person and try to always do the right thing, why doesn't the right thing work out for you?

it has taken me awhile (a very long while) to begin to come to terms with my present situation in life, but i am getting there.  see, i always thought that there was an order to things when one became an adult: college, job, marriage, children.  as vain as this may sound, i always figured all these things would come easy to me.  so when the children part proved to be much harder than i thought it would be, i felt like a failure -- like all my previous successes meant nothing, because i could not succeed at this.  one miscarriage...okay, that was a fluke.  two miscarriages...it's probably coincidence.  three miscarriages...what did i do to deserve this?

i won't go into the details of what each tragedy, each loss did to my life.  i've moved forward, and i am continuing to heal.  but in all of the suffering, i have learned a very valuable lesson.  i am loved.  for this lesson, i will always be grateful.