The Future

Today at quilting the ladies had this really interesting discussion about, "HOW did I get here????"

One of them was talking about the disastrous weekend of her daughter. The things that I remember were that their hot water heater blew out, one of their kids poured an entire thing of syrup on the floor, the daughter accidentally ran her car into her dad's car in the driveway causing so much damage that they have to submit a claim, and to top it off, this poor lady is pregnant.

And then, all these awesome middle aged women started talking about how some days they would (or still do) just wake up and look around and say, "What? HOW did I get here? HOW did I suddenly have all these kids and all these huge, major, difficult problems to deal with????? I can remember being a teenager! Oh man, the problems I thought I had back then were so not even problems at all!"

Then they started talking about how when they look at young, newly married couples who are so deeply in love and act as if the entire world is just shiny and perfect, they just kind of shake their heads and think, "Oh man, just wait."

They talked about how it's not necessarily that they will experience marital problems, or whatever (although this was strongly implied), but they definitely all agreed that life will come with some huge unexpected problems. Like children with disabilities, or a husband who is out of a job for a year and suddenly your entire savings-for-going-on-a-mission is poof gone, to name a few.

This conversation was so interesting to me, because I would definitely classify myself in the "shiny newlywed" category. I mean, I guess we've got two kids so we're not exactly newlyweds. But we've only been married two years, and I feel very much the same way about Danny as the day we got married (which is that he's the most dreamy guy in the entire universe and I don't really see how I can possibly deserve him, but somehow I convinced him to marry me anyway!). Our life is pretty much idyllic...I mean...there are problems sure, but big ones? No. We live a happy, mundane life.

So this conversation made me wonder what is in store for us. I wonder if it is a good thing to expect problems? Will this help us deal with them when they come? Is it better to hope for the best but expect the worst? I think that's basically Danny's philosophy, or maybe I'm getting it all wrong. But that seems to make sense, a kind of realistic optimism.

What do you think is in store for us? What's in store for you?