By Molly Flinkman
@molly_flinkman

The year is 2004. Winter is just about to turn over into spring, and you’ll walk into those warmer days in a pair of flip-flop kitten heels. Your car radio plays “Yeah” by Usher every time you drive anywhere, and you squeal each time you hear it. Best song ever! you say, even though we both know your favorite song is actually “Cinderella” by The Cheetah Girls. In a few weeks, you’ll wear a black gown with silver rhinestones to your senior prom and a few months after that, you’ll drive into a new state and a new chapter: college. 

You’re on the cusp of the future, so it makes sense that most of your idle time is spent dreaming. You lie in bed at night and wonder, Where will I live someday? Who will I marry? Will my first kiss be as surprising and romantic as when Gordo kissed Lizzie McGuire in Rome?

It’s in the midst of all of this that you pull out a journal with a group of your friends. There is a way to attempt to predict the future. It’s easy. It’s MASH. You haven’t played since the fifth grade when Zach B. was your top choice for a future husband, but the rules come back to you instantly.

1. Choose Your Categories

At the top of a blank page, you write four letters: MASH. Mansion, Apartment, Shack, House. These are the four places you could live someday. 

Then, you choose four names for a potential husband and write them down. Then, you keep the categories going: four jobs, four places to live, four possible pet options, four vehicles, four girls’ names for your future daughter, and the same for a future son. You throw in a few silly answers to keep things interesting. A Nissan Stanza is, apparently, the funniest car you can think of driving into your future life. 

2. Pick a Magic Number

Now it starts to get fun. One of your friends will draw tally marks at the top of the page. You’ll tell her when to stop, and that’s your magic number: three. Now you’ll watch her eliminate every third option. Right away, you know you won’t live in a shack with Ean. This is a good start.

3. See Your Future Life

By the end, you have one option left in each category—a potential future life laid out before your eyes. 

According to this incredibly official elimination strategy, your future husband will be Tim, but what you can’t possibly know or imagine is the very real existence of a college boy named Jake who is probably at a spring football practice or an afternoon science lab right about now. He has curly blonde hair, kept in place with a bandana and a mischievous twinkle in his eye. You’ll meet him next fall. You’ll be friends for a while and then, one night, he’ll tell you he loves you underneath a street light in your dorm’s parking lot. It won’t be a rooftop in Rome, but it will be a million times better than the ending of The Lizzie McGuire Movie.

A few years after that, he’ll make you homemade donuts while recovering from the stomach flu, in between shifts at the hospital. In the scope of your lives, this will be a tiny moment, but you will call it to mind often alongside all the other tiny moments. Jake will teach you what love looks like on ordinary days, which is to say he’ll teach you what love looks like.

You listed four potential jobs: secretary, mom, counselor, and lunch lady. What if I told you you’ll work all four? Five years into your life with Jake, you’ll have your first baby. Three more will follow in fairly rapid succession and eventually you’ll stay home with all of them. You’ll be their mom. And their secretary. And their counselor. And even though you wrote down “lunch lady” as a joke, you’ll be that too. Every single day.

You can’t possibly know how important these jobs will be someday. You won’t have kids named Tracey or Toby, but you will have a Lily and a Norah and a Sawyer and a Jude—each wildly different in his or her own way. Twenty years from now, you’ll spend much of your time just trying to figure each kid out. You’ll watch the ways they interact with one another and how each responds to correction. You’ll pay attention to their fears and tendencies. You’ll marvel at how much you can learn about a person simply by watching and listening. You’ll catalog it all. 

Then one day, you’ll notice one of the kids is upset. A fun evening of board games got slightly derailed and you will find her in the kitchen, eyes brimming with tears.

“I know you’re feeling frustrated about how this night turned out,” you’ll say to this child who feels big feelings but can’t always put them into words. “I feel frustrated too,” you’ll add because this child also tends to feel isolated in her big feelings. Then you’ll hug her. Then you’ll feed her. You can’t know right now how much these roles will matter, but they will. They really will. The game can’t tell you all this just now. These are the things you can’t possibly anticipate living someday.

And what about your home—where you’ll live? MASH lays out one possible option—an apartment in California—but what you can’t see is that the trajectory of your life will sprawl across multiple cities and states. You’ll live in an apartment in Iowa, then someone’s pool house (this will be a weird year; enjoy it), then another apartment before moving into one side of a duplex. After the duplex, you’ll buy your first house six hundred miles away in Ohio. You’ll spend four years there before you come back to Iowa and settle into another house.

You will move seven times in your first twelve years of marriage. Mostly, you’ll learn the meaning of home. You’ll find and cultivate it in each place. You’ll weep when you turn the key in your Ohio house for the last time. That’s a good thing. 

You’ll drive back to Iowa in a minivan, not a Honda Accord and you won’t ever have a gerbil though you will have two guinea pigs who, in an incredibly surprising turn of events,  you will love. 

There it is—the future laid out before your eyes.

The only possible options for you right now are the people you know and the things you can visualize. A son with beautiful long eyelashes and a daughter with freckles all across her nose and cheekbones will one day be written into your story, but how could you even begin to dream that specifically? There is no way for you to predict that a black, spray-painted Barbie Jeep will one day drive into the scene or that your kids will continually teach you the meaning of forgiveness. You can’t possibly know now how many times you’ll clean the kitchen, kiss a forehead, or cry on your threadbare couch. 

How could you think to wish for such a beautiful and challenging life? How could you even begin to categorize all the heartache and wonder and sleeplessness and joy and worry and hope that comes with living?

You can’t. 

So, for now, you make choices in the present tense and you sing “This Is What Dreams Are Made Of” into spoons with your girlfriends. You’ll forget all the words eventually, but it won’t matter because reality will be better and harder and more full of unexpected gifts than any dream you could try to put words to.

Those are the rules.

Molly Flinkman is a freelance writer from central Iowa where she lives with her husband, Jake, and their four kids. A lover of houseplants, neutral colors, and good books, she loves to write about how her faith intersects the very ordinary aspects of her life and hopes her words will encourage and support other women along the way. You can connect with Molly on Instagram or through her monthly newsletter, Twenty Somethings.

Photo by Jennifer Floyd.