When plans change

My daughter woke up in the morning perfectly fine .... until it was time to go to school. All of a sudden, she had a tummy ache.

And just like that, my plans for the morning changed.

Work meetings had to be rescheduled. Things I had planned to do had to wait. The morning I had carefully mapped out was no longer the morning I was going to have.

I’ll be honest: I was frustrated. Very frustrated.

I’m grateful that I have the flexibility to change my plans when my children need me. I don't take that for granted. But sometimes I get tired of being the one who has to change the plans.

There’s a particular kind of frustration that comes from having your carefully arranged day rearranged by someone else’s needs; especially when it feels like you’re always the one doing the rearranging.

And yet, as I sat in the doctor's office with my daughter, I thought about how temporary this all is.

There will come a day when she won’t need me to stay home.

She’ll be old enough to manage a tummy ache herself. She’ll have her own plans, her own responsibilities, her own life.

One day, I’ll probably look back and wonder how I ever wished these interruptions away.

So I’m learning that gratitude and frustration can coexist.

I can wish my plans hadn’t changed and still be grateful that I was able to change them.

I can feel inconvenienced and still recognise that being needed is a privilege.

And perhaps this is part of motherhood: learning to hold my plans loosely because the people I love matter more than the plans themselves.

They will only need me like this for a few more years. I think I’ll treasure the interruptions while they last.