First day of work – orientation – is tomorrow. I am nervous, but not freaking-out nervous. I have my clothes layed out, new shampoo and soap ready for an early-morning shower, my paperwork in a folder beside my purse. I’m ready to go. I just keep telling myself it’ll be like a fun class – I get to learn something new. And they pay me for it.

This is also the start of my 3-month countdown. One foot in front of the other.

The hardest part about this week is that I have NO idea what my schedule is looking like. My orientation is the “figure out what days I’ll be coming in for training” day, so until tomorrow I’m completely clueless as to what they need/expect. It has made it very difficult to make any kind of appointments or plans for work or shopping or anything at all really. And that is hard on me, mentally. I hate not knowing. I hate leaving things to chance. But so far I’ve been okay with just letting go and waiting until tomorrow. It’s an accomplishment for me.

One of the appointments I made was for a therapist. The woman at social services had given me a name and I left my contact info after being told the therapist was on vacation. I didn’t expect to hear back from her in a while, much less on a sunday. She’s booked for a few weeks, but given the work scheduling uncertainty that’s just fine with me. I have an appointment for September 8 or 9… I forget which. She sounded nice. I’m still just very pessimistic about how someone is going to be able to help me at all. I’m an introspective person, I examine and work through my thoughts right here. I can certainly see how a therapist would be helpful for someone who didn’t already do that… but me? Regardless, I’ll go and see what will come of it. Maybe I’ll be pleasantly surprized.

Den was talking to me yesterday about planting a maple tree in our yard. I think we’ve come to an unspoken compromise on the tree issue… Den really wants a fruit tree out front, not too big and bearing fruit. I really want something long-living, green, and bigger. So we’re going to do both. If the cherry dies (my opinion is still out on that one) we’ll replace it. I do like the idea of a cherry tree, I like what it symbolises… and it really was so pretty in bloom. A maple tree isn’t nearly so showy. And, damnit, I got used to the idea of a cherry tree and I want a cherry tree, damnit. So we’re going to choose somewhere in our backyard for a maple. We always planned on planting more trees out back – nice ones, planted with concious thought instead of the forest of ugly pine trees we have right now. So this will be the first step.

I’m pleased with this compromise, but it has been rough emotionally in accepting it. One of the lessons that has gotten hammered into my head over and over again this year is that you can’t plan things. Or, rather, that you HAVE to be able to adapt. It’s never going to work out exactly how you sketched it out in your mind. I had this picture in my head of our yard with the cherry, and my scrapbook with the yearly updates. Not getting pregnant when I planned to was another hard zig-zag in my life plan. Obviously losing Devin was the biggest, most devastating. But all of them required me to re-adjust myself, required a period of adaptation before I realized that life was going to be okay in the end. My scrapbook is not ruined because the tree won’t be the same. I will still be a mother, even if it wasn’t at 24, or 25, or 26. And my life is not completely worthless without my first son present. This is not an easy lesson for me to learn.

As I drove to the grocery store today I noticed a large tree in someone’s yard. It was dead. This huge 50-60 ft tree, magestic limbs… all completely devoid of foliage. All trees die. Even the huge ones, even the strong ones. I thought about our choice to memorialize Devin in a tree rather than something permanent. We could have chosen a more lasting memorial. But then it wouldn’t have been living, breathing, growing. I would not have been able to watch it bloom and grow taller every year; I would not have been able to watch it branch out unexpectedly in ways that only living things do. In exchange for all of that we get a finite life span, a risk. It could live 30 years, it could die tomorrow. But to me the risk is worth it, it is befitting of my son. And if it dies we will replant and try again.