Vachon Imagined

When I was planning the delivery of my son, there were two things I was absolutely adamant about.

Number one: do not let me poop on myself.

Number two (not necessarily in that order): do not let them cut me open like a pig being gutted.

Simple enough, right?

My plan was solid. No public humiliation. No being filleted open like a specimen in a medical classroom while students stand around in fascination, awe, and mild nausea. (Though, to be fair, if you faint at the sight of a body, medical school may not be your calling.)

Everything was neat. Organized. Accounted for.

And then life showed up.

First, I had so many drugs in me I couldn’t feel a thing. You could have parked an entire vehicle in my sasquatch and I would have shrugged and asked if lunch was coming soon. So whether I had pooped on myself was no longer information available to me.

This did not stop me from repeatedly asking my husband.

“Hey… I haven’t pooped on myself, have I?”

And there he stood, a man who had already been drafted into the delivery room against his will, staring heroically somewhere above my head and nowhere near my sasquatch.

“No,” he’d say through clenched teeth. “You haven’t.”

What a guy.

But then came the more serious part.

My son’s heart rate wasn’t doing what it was supposed to do.

Twice, people dressed in what looked suspiciously like HAZMAT suits came rushing into the room, and I knew exactly what that meant.

Ah.

Filet time.

I begged for one more chance.

The doctor agreed, though let’s be honest: my preferences were not the priority. The life inside me was.

So we continued.

I pushed until I was convinced an eyeball might launch across the room. I pushed until every plan, every expectation, every illusion of control was burned away.

And that’s the strange thing.

I was at peace only with my plan.

The plan made me feel safe.

The plan made me feel in control.

The plan made me feel certain.

But life had other plans.

Life needed to do what life does.

A heart needed to beat.

A child needed to be born.

A body needed to labor.

A moment needed to unfold exactly as it unfolded.

Life is not concerned with our preferences. It is not negotiating with our demands. It does not stop and ask permission before changing the script.

It simply expresses itself.

And perhaps that is why so much suffering comes from insisting, “I can love anything but not that.”

Not that outcome.

Not that person.

Not that loss.

Not that fear.

Not that change.

Yet over and over again, life brings us face-to-face with the very thing we swore we’d never accept.

And somehow, after the fighting ends, after the bargaining fails, after the plan falls apart, we discover something surprising:

The thing we thought would break us became part of us.

The thing we resisted became something we could hold.

The thing we hated became something we understood.

Not because it changed.

Because we did.

Because beneath all our preferences, beneath all our plans, there is something deeper that recognizes itself in every experience.

Life meeting life.

And when you finally know yourself as that life—not the plan, not the fear, not the resistance—you cannot help but love even the things you once swore you never would.