Expectations

When I was younger I had a lot of ideas about what it would be like to be a grown up. I imagined what marriage would be like, what my dream career would be, and what it would be like to be a mom. Thanks to a very active imagination, these dreams were pretty vividly detailed. I imagined what attributes my husband would have, what my babies would look like, and what it would be like to be a psychologist. I imagined snuggling children, going on family walks, and driving a minivan.

There are some pieces of those dreams that were amazingly accurate. I have a child with big blue eyes and blond curls, and sometimes it startles me how much she looks like the child I dreamed about. I have the very job that I imagined. I drive a minivan, go to soccer games, cook dinner, and have a garden. There are lots of snuggles. Even those somewhat mundane pieces are how I imagined them.

Except.

Except that in my dreams, the blue-eyed, blond-haired toddler was never laying on the floor screaming about the direction I cut her sandwich. The minivan was not filled with crumbs and random socks. I was never shouting about where the missing shin guard was, and people didn’t whine about everything I cooked.

My dreams were lovely, but they weren’t real. They felt full and three-dimensional, but real life is so much more. Real life includes all the messy, the joy and the pain, the laughter and the tears, the light and the heavy.

My expectations tend to be neat and tidy. I expect us to get places on time, for our house to be clean, for my family (myself and husband included) to behave well. I expect my plans to work out. My dreams and expectations tend to only include the good parts and hinge on things working as I think they should.

And that’s normal. It’s how dreams and expectations work. But it can trip us up. When reality doesn’t match the dream, when real life gets hard and messy and complicated, when we are late and grumpy and the house is a disaster, we can get so upset. And part of the upset is about whatever is going wrong, but part of the upset is that it is different from how we imagined it.

Real life is hard. It doesn’t feel hard because we are doing it wrong, it feels hard because it is hard. There will be disruptions, frustrations, roadblocks. The house will get messy. Toddlers will throw fits over ridiculous things. Our spouses will be imperfect. We will make mistakes.

These are realities of life. And with the hard and the heavy and the frustrating come so much depth and beauty and meaning. Relationships go deeper, character develops, and we grow. We would never get to be strong, wise, mature humans without the hard stuff.

But instead of expecting things to be good and easy and according to plan, and freaking out when those expectations don’t get met, I want to hold those expectations loosely. I want to hold on to the awareness that things will go wrong. Relationships will get messy. Plans will be thwarted. And those things don’t have to tarnish the dream. They can deepen it.

Life is hard and complicated and messy in ways that I never dreamed it would be. Being an adult is hard. But, it is also indescribably good. There is a richness and beauty to life and work and relationships that goes far beyond what my younger self imagined. And I don’t want my expectations to keep me from entering fully into the messy, glorious reality.

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