I'm currently engaged in a discussion with another woman regarding life plans. Specifically, plans for motherhood and how stringently one should adhere to such plans.

My friend is of the opinion that babies can't be planned for. She believes that when the time is right, you know it; any plans will, for the most part, change nothing.

I've always been a big planner, and I'm exceptionally good at it. Now that I think of it, there have been very few things in my life that have not gone according to plan. Does that surprise you? Everyone always talks about how nothing ever goes the way you think it will, and yet most of my life has done just that.

When I was a kid, I knew that I didn't want to stay in my hometown. The majority of the people seemed close-minded and backwards. When I told a neighbor of my plans to leave, he chuckled and said, "You'll come back and live here. You just don't know it yet." At that moment, I honestly believe my path was set into stone. I had to leave. The only way I knew to leave was to get an education, and, as my family was relatively poor, I knew the only way to get that education was by earning scholarship money. So I did.

I won't go into detail about the hours I pored over books and subjects I didn't give a damn about. I studied my brains out, did the extracurricular activities, did everything I could to be the "model student," the one the colleges wanted. All towards the end of getting out. It seemed all the students around me had the same goal; my senior class racked up hundreds of thousands of dollars in scholarship money and never looked back.

In college I studied music. This, too, was according to plan. I knew what I wanted to do, and I didn't see any point to pussy-footing around with liberal arts degrees and undecided majors. According to plan, I finished in four years. No summers. No student loans. I never considered anything else.

I met my husband when I was seventeen and in my first semester of college. We dated for four years before we married, and had a "safe" engagement length of a eighteen months. By the time we got around to church premarital counseling, we were almost able to answer the priest's questions in sync. All the major issues had been talked about in great length, many on our first dates; while we didn't immediately agree on everything, we had talked through the issues enough to appreciate the positions upon which each of us stood.

I remember one "girls" evening at my apartment during my third year of college. It was late, and I was up chatting with one of my roommates and another close friend. I was mentioning Eric's and my plan to wait three years after marriage before having children, when Jenny, the roommate, burst into angry tears.

"You can't plan everything!" she said. She was furious with me for having the audacity to have faith in my plans. As she began to confess her own past, I could see why; an unplanned teenage pregnancy, a forced adoption to a neighbor, and a lifetime of having her daughter regard her as "the babysitter": all these things can erode one's faith in "plans." Jenny was upset with me because I seemed naive to her. And lucky, whereas she was neither.

I wonder what she would say to me now; our third anniversary is approaching, and we are preparing for our children. Lucky, indeed.

I've thought about it, though, and I've come to the conclusion that the plans themselves are not the issue. What's important is the goal. I knew I wanted to leave my hometown; the goal was simply to get away. Had I failed to get the scholarship money for college, I would not have fallen apart; because of my focus on the end goal, I could have worked out another way to reach it. The goal with Eric was simply a happy, loving marriage, which might as easily have happened a mere year after we met. Our current goal is to conceive by early next year. We will, however, embrace any children who come later or earlier, from our bodies or through adoption. Our focus on the end goal will keep us from falling apart should the "plans" fail. Should the goal go unmet, we have a strong enough foundation to weather the storm.