Expectations & Families
Hello beautiful one,
How are you? How is life where you are?
One lesson I felt I really learnt when my kids were little was the oppressive power of expectation.
When I was out of the house for the day, alone, and on my way home I’d start to feel this deep feeling of excitement to see my kids and my husband. I would start having these idyllic images in my head about when I got home.
Everyone would be so happy to see me, the family would be together again, we’d have just the best evening and a lovely home cooked meal which my husband would be pulling out of the oven as I walked in the door.
And so there I was, almost skipping in excited expectation, with these lovely images in my head of my beautiful family.
You can pretty much guess what would happen next, right?
I’d open the door to yells from the two siblings as they’d be upset with each other. The house would be a mess of toys and half eaten lunches.
My husband would probably arrive harassed from the kitchen, stressed and trying to make himself heard over the cacophony of sibling argument, saying how we had no food, everyone was starving out of their mind, and asking me – what are we going to do, Di???? In a despairing, frantic way.
And right there, that happy image of a loving, harmonious family would collapse in my mind and I would fall into an emotional pit of hopelessness, frustration and sadness before I’d even taken off my coat.
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As I’d let out an internal yell of my own, I’d collapse into the nearest chair, with my two kids now looking forward to another adult to report their list of injustices and irritations about the other to.
Expectation is such a tricky thing isn’t it?
It can almost feel like we can’t help but have it.
Sometimes just thinking about some members of our family can naturally fill us with feelings of love and joy, happiness and excitement.
With a yearning to just see these people and spend good quality, lovely time with them.
And then we can also think of them or see them, and be filled instead with burning resentment, terrifying levels of judgment, deep painful feelings of hopelessness and despair, searing shame.
The list of challenging emotions we experience around our family can go on, and on and on.
So what do we do? How do you navigate these tricky desires of expectation?
How do we navigate these big emotions that come up around our families?
How do we navigate the juxtaposition between fantasy family life and reality of family life?
Or even that we no longer wish to be around our extended family? That even seeing them can feel like too much?
This is the area I would love to explore with you this week, and to offer some tips, ideas and support.
To explore some of these themes so we can get to experience our families in a different way. So we can appreciate them as we find them.
And this first step comes for me in acknowledging the feelings we have around them.
Acknowledging how much we yearn to have a certain type of relationship with our kids, our partners, our parents, our siblings, our extended family – and how often reality can fall short.
Acknowledgement of what we are actually feeling is such a powerful tool in building awareness of what we are experiencing. Because we can’t change or work with what we aren’t acknowledging.
Feelings are natural. Feelings are normal. Wherever they show up.
(And let me just clarify, pouring our feelings onto others is not healthy. But acknowledging our feelings, feeling and hearing them, 100% is.)
And building this understanding that, just like me, my family are people with feelings too. And there is nothing wrong with feelings.
For me, understanding that I had a certain expectation of what I wanted my family to be like, versus what they were like (ie. people with lots of feelings) was the first step in creating a more harmonious, emotionally safe, understanding and connected family experience.
With both the family I live with and the family I don’t.
I’d love to hear if you resonate with the idea of expectation in this area of life. I’ll be sharing several ideas with you this week, so I’ll be back here tomorrow.
Much love to you and yours,
Diana