Life Happens When You're Busy Making Plans

Life is what happens when you’re busy making plans. I’ve heard that before and it was the case once again this weekend.

Real quick, just in case this is your first time here, I’m a father of three and a marathon runner. My middle child, 6 1/2-year-old Jack, is severely autistic. To try to make a difference in the autism world, I’m trying to run 61 marathons this year to raise money and awareness for a charity called Train 4 Autism. So far, so good, I guess. I’m raising money, reaching people, and I’m through 35 of the 61 marathons.

I’m used to life not going according to plan. Tiffany and I met when she was 18 and I was 19. We got married the spring after I graduated from college, bought our first home less than a year later and she gave birth to our first child two years and a month after we tied the knot. According to plan, we followed up with our second and third child and they were each a little more than two years apart. Three kids, two boys and a girl, 51 months between the oldest and youngest.

Perfect! Well, except while we were busy with our plan, Jack’s autism prevented him from bridging the gap between Benjamin and Ava. Life happens, huh? I think back to when Tiff and I were teenagers, living at home and dating. We had no idea life would be this way. Even in the first couple of years of our marriage, when we were saving money, moving into a bigger home, having kids and buying puppies, we would have never guessed things would have turned out like this.

Anyways, I guess our detour this weekend is extremely minor in comparison to the rest of everything going on in our world, but just because the impact on us is comparatively minor doesn’t mean I can’t be bummed about it. This was supposed to be our weekend, the weekend of the year. Not according to the plan, though, one of the big highlights was laughing about a $4.99 wiffle ball bat, but I guess that’s life.

We’d been looking forward to this weekend since I mapped out my Operation Jack schedule more than a year ago. The San Francisco Marathon! We made plans for her to come along, we extended it a half-day on the front end and back end, and this was going to be our big vacation of the year. Sure, we were only going to be gone for 36 hours, but that was a big deal for us. We got a killer deal at a Courtyard by Marriott ($39!) and we were going to have lunch at Fisherman’s Wharf. I texted her all week, joking, “Let’s run away to San Francisco this weekend!”

Everything changed on Friday night, though. Our child care options are extremely limited because of Jack — a combination of of the challenges of taking care of our “Wild Bunch” and the fact that we don’t trust hardly anybody to stay with the kids overnight. Tiff’s parents were watching the kids for the first part of the weekend and then my parents were taking over. Her parents were flying out to New York for a trip they had been looking forward to for a while.

However, her grandmother, whose health has been declining for a little while, took a turn for the worse on Friday. Her parents cancelled their trip to New York and were fairly distraught. It was a no-brainer for Tiff to cancel her trip, too. First of all, we couldn’t possibly have them babysit when they needed to be at the hospital. And there’s no way we could have possibly enjoyed any kind of vacation together with everything that was going on.

I was staring down the barrel of an extended stay in San Francisco, but I was able to switch my flights. Instead of leaving at 9 a.m. Saturday and returning at 9 p.m. Sunday night, I was able to leave at 12:35 p.m. Saturday and get back at 3:15 Sunday. The fun trip turned into another business-as-usual trip. Our lunch date at Fisherman’s Wharf Sunday turned into a breakfast date at Denny’s on Saturday.

We had nice time chatting at breakfast and I enjoyed my all-you-can-eat pancakes (seven!) and five cups of coffee. On the way out, we spotted the coloring pages they have for kids and grabbed one for Ava. We stopped off at the grocery store on the way home and picked up, amongst other things, rice cakes for Jack and a $4.99 wiffle ball kit for Benjamin.

I opened the car door for Tiff at the grocery store. I always hold the door for her going in and out of buildings, but I don’t typically get her car door — there’s always too much chaos with the kids. However, when we’re out on date night, I always get the door to the car for her and she smiles. So anyways, while I got the door for her at the grocery store and gave her the wiffle ball bat, I joked with her, “Hey Benjamin, we brought you a souvenir from our trip!” We both laughed over the irony of what the weekend had become, and really, how different our life is turning out from what we had planned. She responded that we brought home the coloring-book page for Ava and the rice cakes for Jack.

We have a roof over our heads and three children, so we have everything we need and we know that. But things certainly aren’t what we had expected. This weekend was another reminder that we have a whole lot less control than we think we do.

As for her grandmother, it’s still status quo. It would be great for her to somehow come out of this and make it to the Easter dinner she loves so much, but that doesn’t seem likely. Our vanishing vacation is certainly meaningless in comparison, but it’s still a component of our world that was kind of a bummer. I got to meet some people I had never met before up in San Francisco, but aside from that, I really didn’t want to be up there. I just went through the motions and looked forward to coming home.

On the bright side, though, since I got home early, I had time to go to the park with the kids yesterday afternoon. I spent a while pitching and hitting with Benjamin and his new wiffle ball set, then played with Ava and watched as Ben ran around playing with other kids with the bat and the ball.

So, not exactly as planned, but I was where I was supposed to be and I guess I shouldn’t complain, because it wasn’t a bad place.