A lesson in life.

Before Halloween, I took my Girl Scouts to a corn maze. It was one of those warm, windy days the end of October. We arrived before it got too busy, got our maps and turned the girls loose. I went into the maze with another adult and we walked around, checking our map now and again, confident that we could find our way out. We did, but we somehow got into a totally different maze than the one we had started in, coming out at the entrance of the neighboring maze. So we decided to start again, this time paying careful attention to the map, and with renewed determination to find all of the checkpoints. We still had difficulty finding our way.

As I was walking, I was thinking about how life is like a maze. We try our best to map out life. I thought my life would be totally different. I always wanted to be a marine biologist and study whales and dolphins. I still do. I was going to have four kids and live on the coast of Maine. But things didn’t work out that way.

I got on a different path, not because I wasn’t following the map; I was. Not because I wasn’t paying attention; I was. Not because my goals changed;they didn’t. But apparently my map was not the right one.

So here I am, married to a gentle, kind man, living in Colorado, with one adopted child, and I’m a social worker with a private practice, not a marine biologist studying whales.

Do I have any regrets? I think the only one might be that I miscarried the only time I got pregnant, but I was 38 at the time. I don’t regret getting married at 36; it took a while to find the right person. I don’t regret adopting a child; she is challenging but she is teaching me more than I will ever teach her.

“Life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re going to get”. But whatever you get, be thankful for it and understand that sometimes life is a corn maze. And even if the map doesn’t get you where you expect to be, life still works out.