The Best Laid Plans

I learned a valuable lesson once. I don’t remember when exactly, but a long time ago.

 

I learned that even the best laid plans often don’t come to fruition.

 

I certainly didn’t absorb the lesson immediately. And I probably still haven’t: not so entirely as to be inoculated against making plans that fall apart – sometimes softly, sometimes with jarring abruptness – ever again. But each time I am confronted with a plan that doesn’t, well, go to plan I am less indignant than the last time.

 

The first shocking adult revelation that some plans go awry long before inception was when my Dad died at 47 putting paid to plans to combine my 21^st birthday party with his 50^th.

 

The second came soon afterwards: when my plan to marry a Dulwich-living Lloyds broker fell apart long after a deposit had been placed on a gown in Tatters on the Kings Road. Long after the church had been booked. Long after the fabric for the bridesmaids’ dresses had been purchased. But, blessedly, just before I trotted up the aisle to make what would, indubitably, have been the biggest mistake I ever made.

 

Lots of plans since have been derailed: by life, by circumstance, by something I hadn’t seen even though it was lying heavily in the plan’s path all along.

 

My plan to send our children to the prep school my brother went to? So that they might benefit from similar advantages: sport, chapel on Sunday evenings, tradition, convention, good manners, the doffing of school caps?

 

That plan went pear-shaped when Ben was bullied. We plucked him out and sent him to an international school where sport wasn’t as strong, where there was no chapel at all, not even on Sunday evenings (there were no Sunday evenings: it was a day school) and where the doffing of school caps was replaced by the thumbing of noses. At convention mainly. At conformity. As in: don’t try to make your children conform to what was the norm when you were young.

 

Our plan to make our millions when we invested our life savings in a farm we called home and grew to love began to fray at the edges quite soon after we’d signed the dotted line. By the time we realized we’d made a colossal error of judgment, the plan had disintegrated to nothingness.

 

And so another recent plan has evaporated to be replaced, as is sometimes the case but not always (I will never stop being sad Dad and I didn’t share a birthday party; we will probably never stop regretting that we invested in a farm that went bankrupt), by something much better (marrying a farmer in Africa was an infinitely happier plan than becoming the wife of a London broker).

 

My son was offered, on the condition he attained certain grades in recent IGCSE exams, an assisted place at an independent school in England.

 

He thought, ‘Oh goody: more cricket’.

 

I thought, ‘Oh goody: chapel on Sunday evenings, tradition, convention, good manners, the doffing of school caps …” (as I said, sometimes the first failed plan’s lesson takes a while to sink in).

 

But before the results were available I began to notice that my son’s enthusiasm for More Cricket had begun to wane.

 

And I also – uncharacteristically – began to notice the obstacle lying in our plan’s path before we all tripped over it.

 

One Saturday afternoon, post exams, pre results, I took a cold beer into the garden and joined my almost-seventeen-year-old who was hanging in the hammock.

 

I proffered the bottle for us to share.  ‘Spill the beans’, I said, ‘you don’t want to go, do you?’

 

He didn’t, he said, not anymore. He had once, he added hastily, and apologetically, so that I might know the effort had not all been in vain. But not now. ‘I am happy where I am, Mum, I like my friends’.

 

He was tired of change, he said. I empathized: it had been a year full of it.

 

‘So don’t go’, I said. Just like that. ‘Don’t go’.

 

It was easy. No angst. No sleepless nights. No deliberating. Not even, and this is the best bit, a twinge of indignation.

 

Just a change of plan. Another change of plan.

 

Friends, some friends who have their hearts set on schools like the one we have apparently just dismissed – chapel, tradition, convention, doffing of school caps – pretend they understand our choice. But they don’t. They think we have wasted an ‘opportunity’. I can hear it in the briefest of pauses after I have told them, ‘He’s not going, you know?’ and before they say, ‘Oh!’ I hear it then. In that tiny silence. Before they draw breath.

 

Have I? Squandered an opportunity? My son’s first Big Break?

 

I don’t think so. My friend E doesn’t think so either : “Good for you, boy”, she said, emphatically, because she meant it.

 

I think, instead, we have given him a different opportunity as the ManChild he is, teetering on the precipice of GrownUp: the opportunity to affect some influence on his own life. He has made his first big choice, by himself. Taken responsibility for himself. The gently stretching self-confidence is evident days after he returns to his old school – happy, smiling, buoyant, laughing with his mates: he calls me to tell me which subjects he plans to take and which exams he will retake. He does not ask my advice, my opinion. He simply delivers his decision as a fait accompli.

 

I say, ‘That’s great, well done. And if you decide to change tack, you know you can’.

 

Because, of course, he has had another opportunity – to learn that plans change.

 

And that sometimes that’s OK.

 

Sometimes it’s a bloody good thing they do.

 

 

 

 

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