Life is Choices

I’ve told this to almost every child I’ve ever met. You didn’t get the cookie and the cake? Life is choices, you chose the cake. You spent your time playing on the swings and didn’t have enough time for the slide? Life is choices, you chose the swings.

It’s as an adult that I’m learning how the choices we make affect the choices we have down the road. For example:

I chose to start dating Brian. Maybe it was less of a choice than a natural progression of our friendship and the result of PRESSURE from our friends (you were all right all along!)

We chose to get married. In fact, we chose my grandparents’ wedding anniversary as our own. In planning the big day, we chose to focus on the Mass, the actual joining and the sacrament, and let the party be a party. Everyone had a blast at the party, and most made a point to tell us how moving the Mass was.

We chose to buy a co-op apartment after a couple years of being married. Mostly it was a sense that we needed to be “grown-up” and buying a house (even if it was an apartment) seemed like a good way to do that.

Next, we chose to pursue parenthood. And when it didn’t come easily, we chose to invest our time, health and money in IVF. We tapped the Parental Bank and Trust, taking loans from our parents, and almost maxing out our credit. We chose to stop after two unsuccessful cycles.

After a lot of prayer and one APC meeting, we chose to pursue adoption. And we brought home our baby girl after 6 ½ years of marriage. I’ve chosen a new job, we’ve chosen the cutest outfits and we’ve chosen to make education a priority for Abby.

When we chose to sell the co-op, we also chose not to buy something else right away, but pay back some of the funds we’d borrowed and fix up our credit after 2 rounds of IVF and a domestic adoption.

Now we’ve chosen to stop looking for a house to buy. We could technically afford one of the billion, trillion little dumpy houses that look like HGTV “Before” special. But our edge between have and have-not would be thin. There’d be no roof fund, no college fund, not even a “let’s go to the movies” fund. So we’re choosing to rent for a while longer. To scrimp and save and take advantage of automatic savings transfers so we can afford a bigger down payment next time.

Any one of those choices, made differently, would have drastically changed the outcome of where I sit now. If we’d decided to hold off on having kids, we might have a really nice house right now (or at least a really nice down payment), but we wouldn’t have our Abby. If I’d decided to ignore my friends and just think Brian was cute from afar, there’s no telling where I’d be right now.

I love the choices we’ve made. Every one of them has brought me to this place and this time, which is pretty darn good. I don’t think I would have chosen differently. (Now I sound like a Hallmark card. Sorry.)

Which brings me to today, and my favorite choices I make every day. These include getting up and choosing to be the best mom I can be each day (a standard that shifts from day to day and week to week). I choose to be my best self, or at least I choose to think about choosing to be my best self. And wherever my choices lead me, I choose to be with Brian for the rest of our lives. It’s not a given, and that makes the choosing of it so much sweeter. It’s a choice I’ve been making for 9 years today and one I hope to make very day for years to come.