Plan A, Plan B, or What’s Next?

“The world is filled with people living their backup plans.”

I don’t remember when or where I heard this line in the last year or so — but I remember feeling like it was meant to be both a judgment and a motivating call to action. I couldn’t help wondering — Am I? Am I living my backup plan?

My earliest “plan” — of memory — was “going to heaven.”

I have vague memories from early childhood, when arguing with my 7 siblings, of shouting, “You’re just mad because I have to go to heaven and you don’t.” And saying things like, “I wonder why I have to go to heaven?”

Then one day, in my tween years, when I wanted to write my autobiography (at 12 years old!), I approached my mom. “Can you tell me stuff from when I was really little?” I asked, trying to sound casual and without purpose, as I plopped on the couch next to Mom, who was sitting in her favorite spot, smoking her cigarette and drinking her tea.

“Well, there’s the time I took you for an ice cream cone; you were about two and a half. You were sitting at one of those outside umbrellas and you looked up into the sky and said, ‘I don’t know why I have to go to heaven. I guess Daddy’ll have to take me to heaven.’ I thought right then and there that I wouldn’t be around when you died. About a year later when I was giving you three girls a…