Life is full of surprises. Some are the best things you could have never imagined like a vivacious daughter named Haven-Kate and eighteen years of partnership and love with a small town boy from Northern Alberta. Things like how much you ended up loving being a mother and how you finally came to peace with needing to write. Things like a small handful of women friends who you love like your very own sister and who love you back better than you ever knew women could.
Some surprises are different, like waking up from an emergency appendectomy to hear they found a tumor and also some things on your ovary. Then over the next while learning that there is a seemingly massive grey area between outright benign and outright malignant. That 'precancer' is a very real thing and who actually knew?
So many are bittersweet. Like learning to trust just the tiniest amount and how to wait well as medical people sort out their opinion of what is happening. Like how to find hope. Surprises like learning your body is a vital part of you and not just a tool. I could write much more on that. Surprises like taking help and telling your real life people what a mess you are.
These are surprises that serve well and you wish you didn't need a crisis to learn them better.
Then there are the just plain ugly surprises, like how badly you want to be well, because there is real shit to do in this world and so things like cancer and surgeries should fuck off so you can get on with it. And also you don't want to worry so, so much about not being here to see your babies grow all the way up.
Some are perhaps predictable like how even though the world seems to be such a mess you still see God's beloved everywhere getting on with doing the next right thing and loving their people so, so well.
Predictable like how even if you aren't sure how this (or anything) will specifically turn out you can still believe - God is good, God is good, All the time God is good.