CWC Prompt 1: Future Plans

 I’m here in Creative Writing Club, a small club I sponsor where 12-15 teenagers sit in a circle and write about whatever prompt we vote on that day. This week’s special is “What does your future look like?”

So blog world, meet creative writing club. In the future I picture having a bit of a limp, possibly from that 13.1-mile marathon when I barely trained because I had signed up for it two years prior when I was in tip top shape - the shape of my life - only to have two Covid-postponed setbacks that found me in 2022, with one month left in my first year of teaching and more bound to pounds than I had ever been before. It was the year I tried to go on walks after school but also comfort-ate frozen pizzas by the triple stack and sat on the couch from dinner to dusk. We tried the Whole30 but didn’t make it nearly long enough to see measurable differences or really feel fit, plus I was more angry and more than ever, aware of my dependence on food for joy.

So anyway, there’s the limp. It’s not too major but I notice it, my husband notices it and mom probably would too, if she were still around. My mom is around, but we’re supposed to write about our future, and I think I feel too uneasy about my upcoming future to write about the fast-approaching next five years, but writing about 50 years down the road feels like more guarantees. God only knows, of course, if I’ll even make it that long, but at 50 years, there are more things that you can count on. With high and probable likelihood, I would expect to experience some joint pain. White hair. Loss of loved ones. The ambivalent balance of Biblical retirement - Sabbath rest mixed with always on mission. And of course, the limp.

It would be more fun, of course, to predict a future that is within reach and full of potential excitement: a growing family, the birth and cuddles of newborns, navy-clad family pictures on some October-painted trail. A house with black shutters and a porch swing…the American dream. Maybe even driving a child to soccer.

But then I check social media and see friends that had yet another miscarriage. Another fertility treatment only to see single lines and empty cradles. And I remember that kids aren’t guaranteed. The burden of potential barrenness is certainly palpable in my future dreams, scarring hopes like ice cream stains on baby bibs. I can cover them in prayer and wash them with whispers of “God’s plan is perfect,” but there will be the faint and fading distant fear that whispers “What if.” It might not happen to me. 

We’ll be okay. We’ll adopt, Joe says. And who knows, I could be far more fertile than I ever dreamed -- we haven’t really started trying. Adoption would be fun and wonderful - so necessary and such a picture of heavenly grace. But there would be the heartache of unmet expectations, most certainly. Comparison, a cradleless pink room. No biological children. There would be a limp. 

Less scary but still scarring is the potential for a housing-market that never improves. “It’ll correct,” they keep saying, as if I’m not a teacher married to a teacher who would find us quite unlikely to be anywhere measurably close to this ever-expansive and ever-expensive homeland Hamilton County. So the next what if: we’re in Carmel Landing forever - miserable and magical - a haven where we can’t remodel or play in the yard but when the batteries in the smoke detector run out, Kevin comes to fix them and it doesn’t cost a thing. I like it there, but I don’t want to watch every sunset descend over the pick-up lot behind Walmart. I’d love a small garden, a porch, some curtain rods draped with curtains on a wall that I won’t have to patch up. Stairs that I wouldn’t have to walk up, especially with that impending limp.

So how to picture my future home when it feels so uncertain, when all that does seem certain is arthritis and decay, the death of my parents and the eventual death of me? I’ve never considered myself to be a doom and gloomer; I’m actually a big proponent of optimism and glass-half-fullness. And I’m sitting in the creative writing club I sponsor at the high school where I work, surrounded by bright-eyed ninth graders who are writing about their future as if it is a blank canvas where they can fill every corner with every color and pattern they want. They are ambitious, dreamers. And I want to be like them and I believe I once was, but there’s a catch in my spirit about such confident predictions.

Maybe it’s fear, maybe it’s cynicism. Perhaps it’s the hard-won experience, even at 23 years, that we cannot know our path; our lack of omniscience stops us from running full-fledged to future dreams and we stumble over past experiences where our plans were rerouted, redirected, rearranged. Call it wisdom or call it weariness, I think this prompt has taught me about the futility of being so rooted in a future that might look nothing like what God has in store. It's the fact that even a year ago, I never dreamed my life would look anything like it does now, and it was despairingly hard, but it's better by far.

So for now, I’ll kick back and read the tales of the fourteen-year-old visionaries who paint their canvas boldly, and I’ll pray for everything God has in store for them. I'll hold onto hope but hold off on being certain about my future, which is, much like everything, subject to change. I'll laugh with the legends of Lucy and Luna and celebrate the stories of Sadie and Sage. None of us really know what the future holds, but cliché as it may be, we know who holds the future. So we'll celebrate that. And we'll anticipate the limp.