For the past few weeks, I’ve been able to live out my dream of being a writer. But the dream and its reality always have their differences, don’t they? The first one, in this case, being that mine came true only after I lost my job for daring to get pregnant. Cut to The Husband and I (and by that, I mean The Husband) frantically re-budgeting and paying attention to coupons and conditioning ourselves not to cringe when the credit card bill shows a balance each month. The Sis and I were talking the other day about what a Perfect Job is, and concluded that it doesn’t exist. Because as much as I’ve dreamed about being a writer, my dreams included being paid for it (still waiting on that). I also didn’t factor in the solitude that comes with keeping a writer’s schedule; the self-doubt that must be beaten back on a daily basis; the exhausting inner dialogue, made up of pep talks and mantras, that has to happen some days just to move my fingers to the keyboard. I’m counting my productivity in terms of words rather than teeth, but it turns out that work is still work.

I’m not complaining, well aware of the fact that I have no right to. I’m currently sitting on my couch next to a cup of coffee and my greatest concern is the tree being cut down in the yard next to me, the sound of chainsaws intermingled with rapid-fire Spanish, the hope that lumber doesn’t land in my laundry room. I’m just saying that life has a way of looking different from what we expected, even when our hopes are fulfilled, and that’s not a bad thing. Not to mention that the whole hope-fulfillment, dreams-coming-true scenario? Sometimes it involves a fair share of loss and disappointment on its way to becoming reality. And all of this is necessary; nothing is lost on the journey.

A few years ago, during my desert-wandering period, I was spending time in one of my favorite places–the Birmingham Botanical Gardens. I was walking through the trees, looking for a piece of inspiration to cling to. I looked down and picked up an acorn. I remember staring at it, wondering whether it had any potential to turn into a tree, considering tossing it into my pocket as a symbol of the truth that everything starts somewhere, usually somewhere small. Then I threw the seed back on the ground and bitterly dared God to prove himself in the moment and turn the acorn into a tree before my eyes. He didn’t. Ha! Miracles, I scoffed in my petulance, leaving the garden behind–and having no idea what I was walking toward. It all just looked like a mess to me.

It turned out that change was happening, just not on my terms or according to my timeline. For so long, I was looking for a deus ex machina moment–for Something to reach down and pluck me out of the rubble of my life and fix everything, order it neatly according to the blueprint I had helpfully drawn up. I thought that rescue was the only valid miracle for my situation. I was wrong. I wasn’t being lifted out; I was being walked through.

And now, when I head to Barnes and Noble and listen to the guy take a conference call nearby, hear the two men with their incessant cell-phone ringing and loud, competitive conversation, I look at my screen and wonder if I’m working on the next great American novel or a pile of crap. I think of the life growing inside me and consider all the ways we will disappoint and uplift each other over the years. And I realize that the only thing that makes it all worthwhile, the only thing that keeps putting hands to keyboard and sweat into nurseries and rings on fingers and words into prayer, is faith. The belief that the direction in which I’m headed is not off a cliff, but is being fashioned such that the Now and the Not Yet are essential components of the Next, that sometimes what I cling to must be released in faith and left behind in the soil from which I plucked it, the dirt for which it was designed, so that some matter of time later I can look around and see all that has grown since.