This week hasn’t gone as expected, but I feel like that concept more or less applies to my entire life as it’s unfolded. You learn to roll with it, I guess.

We spent the earlier part of the week getting ready for the start of school with fresh haircuts and new shoes and unopened boxes of shiny new pencils. Jude’s orientation was Tuesday, and we met his teacher and a few classmates and even indulged in some shaved ice. (Starting school in early August as we do down south, we need it!)

Then after all of our preparation and excitement and best laid plans, Jude came down with some mystery virus the day before school began. I pulled out all the usuals with rest and water and smoothies and Thieves oil, but it was no good. He missed the first two days of school, which is probably not such a big deal when you are six, but it feels that way to your mom. Yesterday was such a shuffle: sick Jude missing his first day, Norah’s orientation scheduled that night, and nobody nearby to help easily. My mom dropped by to sit with Jude just in time for me to race to Norah’s orientation, and we walked in the door just 6 minutes before it ended.

It sometimes feels like I run circles around us like a loose chicken to put together all the moving pieces, and my kids are completely oblivious about what it takes to get us from A to B. That’s the way of childhood though, and I hope they don’t realize how precariously our house and schedules and weekday moments were strung together until they are old enough to understand all of it. Family is work. So much work. The weekends and holidays can feel sweet, but the minutes it takes to get you from one weekend to the next? So carefully orchestrated and planned so that we all arrive in the right place.

I’m getting better at accepting that things do not always unfold the way I expect them to. It’s pretty unbelievable to me to take a look at the countless ways that life is teaching me this lesson in the last year. Over and over again – the delivery is different, but the message the same. It’s that constant reminder that things change. People don’t stay and circumstances are not predictable. But I have everything I need in that tiny, still space inside if I can quiet the outside noise and less important stuff. Strength and stability mean something very different to me now than they did years ago. I know I am the only one who can create it.

I tried to make the most of Jude’s extra two days of summer with couch cuddles and reading another installment of The Magic Treehouse. It’s hard to turn off the worry and the picture of what you expected and be in the present instead. But we tried.

I’m reading Krista Tippet’s Becoming Wise right now, and though I just started it, there is so much it has to offer. She insists “that we are made by what would break us. Birth itself is a triumph through a bloody, treacherous process. We only learn to walk when we risk falling down, and this equation holds — with commensurately more complex dynamics — our whole lives long … You have your own stories, the dramatic and more ordinary moments where what has gone wrong becomes an opening to more of yourself and part of your gift to the world. This is the beginning of wisdom.” 

Dramatic and ordinary moments alike, they can all teach us wisdom if we are paying attention. I know with certainty that what has gone wrong opened my gift to the world in a way I didn’t expect. And I guess that’s the good thing about the unexpected is that it works both ways. The heartache and trials can surprise you, but the rewards can, too.