Today is our wedding anniversary, four years ago today I married my best friend. A moment I had planned for as long as I remember. Yet life doesn’t always go the way you plan.
Yesterday resulted in a mad dash round the shops to buy a last minute anniversary gift that we then exchanged before heading to bed seeing as mornings start early round here. I even failed to get an anniversary card, instead I managed to buy him a birthday card. Something I swore I would never do, I planned to keep up with the traditional gifts, as I have for the past three years, instead this year the romantic in me bought him new pants.
Still the thought was there, even when things don’t follow the plans you set.
I always find myself reflecting on life during big occasions, birthdays, anniversaries and the like. Today, on my fourth wedding anniversary, was no different. And it struck me, once again, that life never turns out the way you plan it.
Five and a half years ago my husband proposed, in the middle of a beautiful hotel room on the eve of my birthday at Iguazu Falls. It was magical, breathtaking and beautiful, when I finally realised what was happening.
That night (we think) our eldest son was conceived. The next day we decided to put our plans for a baby on hold until after the wedding.
Life definitely doesn’t always go the way you plan. Especially when your baby has other ideas…
Heading home to London after an epic trip to South America, shiny engagement ring in place needing to be resized, we found out we had brought home a little surprise due in October. Two days after that my dad died.
And with him, the dreams I had about him walking me down the aisle also died. Alongside the chance to tell him he was going to be a Granddad.
Definitely not in our plans. And a very sad fact of life. If, alongside taxes, it is the one thing we can guarantee.
Four and a half years ago my eldest son arrived in dramatic fashion. Like his mum before him, he decided that he wanted to enter the world with a bang. It seems we have a penchant for drama.
Everything I had ever read, watched, studied or learned about birth pointed me to being desperate for a vaginal delivery, preferably in the water, dimmed lights and music playing. Instead I was hooked up to machines before being rushed off for a caesarean leaving me with a scar I never wanted and a feeling that somehow I was less of a mother.
Definitely a case of life doesn’t always go the way you plan, yet it was life saving for my baby.
Shortly after that, I was walking to baby yoga, being the trendy yummy mummy about Clapham that I was at the time, when another change in plans landed in my lap. Where I received a phone call that was going to change our life. Still engaged at this point, the wedding planned to an inch of it’s life and draining us of the little money we did have at the time, my (now) husband delivered a line that threw me for six.
I got the job, we’re moving to Dubai
I didn’t want to be an expat. Which is now kind of ironic because as it stands right now I don’t want to move home.
Life doesn’t always go the way you plan though.
A month before our wedding we went to visit my husband in Dubai. After our honeymoon we moved over and set up our life there.
Just the three of us.
Where I came to terms with the fact that our life wasn’t going in any way shape or form that I had planned. That my eldest son was not having the same kind of childhood I had enjoyed. That life was in every which way different than I had ever planned.
Not necessarily better, not necessarily worse. But different.
Then the big changes started rolling in, the changes that only living in Dubai with financial stability gave us. The chance to have our youngest son, for him to arrive in a second dramatic fashion. The decision that he was our last baby.
Time moving at a pace only those with children understand, where the days are long but the years are short.
Rapid changes in quick succession.
Redundancy in Dubai, where will we go? What will we do? Plans to be made. Then, life doesn’t turn out the way you plan after all our repatriation plans were swiftly wiped out in one fell swoop with a job offer from Qatar.
A second emigration, back to the sandpit of the Middle East.
Doha.
A new country, a new city, new friends. A place four years ago I hadn’t really heard of. A place that never featured in my plans. A place that is now my life.
Life doesn’t always go the way you plan.
Each and every day from the day my husband proposed until today has gone differently to how I ever imagined. Every day has been different to what I had planned. And I’m sure going forward each day will be different again.
What I do know though is that ever day has been an adventure. Every day has been spent with my best friend, and there has been more laughter than tears.
Life may not have turned out the way we planned, but now I realise, plans don’t matter. Life does. Family does. You do. I do.
With you, life is always an adventure.
Happy fourth wedding anniversary.
Life sure does not turn out the way you planned, especially the whole unexpected expat thing! Totally with you there, as now we live in Luxembourg, when a year ago all the madness of your first year as an expat was about to begin. Don’t regret it tho and no idea when I will go home!