On Expectations

“To wish was to hope, and to hope was to expect” - Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility 

I have expectations of people, places, and things to a fault. By no means in a condescending or pretentious way, but in a way that sets me up for failure time and time again. It’s as if there’s a parallel world that I live in sometimes in my head, and when I crash land back to reality, it’s not nearly as pretty or perfect as I imagined it would be. Life, right? It’s something that I’ve been working on a lot, and I give myself credit for coming along as far as I think I have, but alas – there’s still work to be done.

For eight months, I’ve been living in this parallel universe imagining what my dad would be like in the first dream that I would remember about him. I’ve written about the struggle that I had for the first couple of months with retrieving memories in general, and I’ve been evermore hopeful that he would show up in a dream sooner rather than later. Well, my wish came true….and it wasn’t nearly as pretty as I expected it to be.

I was in high school and my dad was in his work outfit, sporting his large brown framed glasses. I was worried because it was already the second quarter of school and I had failed to enroll in AP Latin with Mr. Bigger (my actual high school Latin teacher, who was and still is a legend for many reasons at McLean HS). My dad confirmed my worry about not being enrolled and when I sheepishly said I guess it meant that I would have to do tutoring outside of school to catch up, my dad emphatically agreed and his disappointment was unmistakable. Well, flash forward to real time, and Sloan is licking my face to go outside. In a daze, I took her out, not even remembering my dream right away. Five minutes later when I did? Cue the sobbing.

I’m sure I could ship this very blog post off to a dream interpreter and they would come back with some elaborate and perhaps meaningful reply. For me, though, all I wanted was to see my dad the way that I expected to. Honestly, I can’t even tell you what that expectation was specifically, but gosh darn it, it was there and it set me up for failure in the worst possible way. Maybe I wanted my dad to help me out of a sticky situation or watch me achieve something wonderful – but disappointment on the first at-bat? That certainly wasn’t what I was expecting.

All this to say, while I think I’ve come a ways in regards to letting things run their course (knowing that expectations are not going to alter that course), I’ll take this as a reminder that there’s always more work to be done. More heartfelt slack to be given to those when it’s deserved, more guarding of the heart when it’s needed, and less attempting to grab life by the reigns and steer it toward hope and desire….which inevitably runs into doubt and fear.

I know that I’ll see my dad again in my dreams, and while I’d say that I hope it’s on better terms next time, we all know where expectations get me. And so, I’ll continue living the dictum that my dad so, so often reiterated to me and will forever be carved in my heart, “Be Nice, Work Hard”.

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