The Planner

In two days I will only have seven more weeks left in America. Pieter and I have made the decision for us to live in the Netherlands for the time he is unable to be in America. While we are still in the process of getting my visa paperwork done, finding an affordable apartment, and planning the nearby future, we are both excited to know we are going somewhere.

I have always been a planner and I like to feel in control of my life. If someone were to go through all the things in my room, they would find notebooks of plans and ideas of how I thought I could get from one point to another. In high school I made a plan of where I’d go to college, what summer job I would get, and how I might be able to get a boyfriend. In college I made countless plans of how I would pass my classes, make enough money to pay for tuition, and how many credits I would need to earn for my degree. When Pieter and I were dating I made all sorts of plans for nights out together, for our future (10, 20, even 30 years), I even typed up a three page plan just for our engagement and all the options we had. I always feel better about life when I have a plan. (Just for the record, none of these plans have ever gone according to plan, but I keep trying.)

Out of the hundreds of things that has bothered me about this time away from my husband, the uncertainty in not knowing where I want to go in the years ahead has been one of the biggest challenges. Determined to have a plan, I spend a lot of evenings that I have off work searching for apartments and making budget plans for the months of August to February.

I guess this tentative ‘plan’ makes it obvious that our goal is to have Pieter and I back in America by next February, but there is no guarantee. We continue to go through each day not really thinking about the process and trying not to let the past and present get in the way of making the best of our future together.