Great Expectations-an Introduction

As a recovering teacher, I feel it necessary to preface the next few entries with a word of explanation.  My mind has swirled as I've imagined what this year will look like.  Expectations are changed entirely.  That is not a complaint.  At the moment, it's a status.

I thought YoYo was on a steady path, and once we figured out his kidney infections, we could set his development to "cruise."  Instead, we're investigating a heart murmur and anticipating summer hospitalization while shifting his diet to combat bacterial overgrowth.  Wow-that's an altered expectation.

We knew FuXia would have an external fixator.  We didn't know it would mean this much travel or losing control of much that he worked for--and he has at least 2 surgeries before this phase is complete.  Waaay different expectation.

While our adoption rebate was sufficient on paper to rid us of nearly all non-mortgage debt, the time that lapsed before we received it saw us amass over $ 4,000 in medical expenses (unrelated to FuXia), and we lived on credit cards we'd held in case of emergency.  In the end, even with added interest and enough financial gifts from friends and family to cover nearly all our medical bills, we are clear of half the level of debt we originally expected to put behind us.

2010's changed expectation was the all-time winner--we didn't expect to repair a rotten foundation 5 days before leaving for China to adopt FuXia!

I'm dealing with flux.  It messes with my head.  I don't know anyone else as divided between right and left brain as I am.  The artist in me feels the pulse of a child-centric home, values the unstructured side of my husband and how it allows him to father so well, and doesn't care if I go to bed with dishes in the sink.  The list-maker in me wants to reduce the number of things to maintain, is obsessed with organizing medical supplies/schedules/insurance, and resents the recent intrusions of field mice.  

When I was teaching, I once took a personality test.  The high schoolers took it, and it was neat to see them react to the results.  Our learning services teacher, who orchestrated the whole thing, shook his head when he gave me my results.  "I don't get it.  Usually, it's not a big deal to see a kid so evenly spread out across the spectrum, but as you get older and mature more, certain tendencies and pathways are naturally supposed to become more dominant.  You don't really have a dominant pattern."  I actually teared up.  I had hated taking the test; I couldn't stand the "either-or" situations it presented, because all I could think of was how things don't fit into boxes like that or how nobody responds in the same manner every single time or how everything represented such a Western mindset.  UGH.  I kept answering, "It depends," in my head, and those words were never an answer options.

So I'm fighting myself, with a needle and thread in one hand and a label maker in the other.  I'm looking at my house, my artspace, and the way our boys are evolving, and I'm finding changed expectations.  I'm going to do in writing what I do with sewing or knitting.  I'm going to spread the words all out on the table, like so many charm squares and yarn, and I'm going to look at every single thing and touch it and turn it over.  And when I stack it all back up and shove it onto its shelf, I'm hopeful that even if it doesn't make any more sense than before, at least I'll have looked at it and named it.  Naming every living animal was, in the Biblical telling of creation, one of the first tasks given to the people made in God's own Image.  I wonder if that was to make Adam feel safer, like a stakeholder or someone of worth within his environ--if part of his identity, or his conceptualizing of his identity, was bound up in naming the identities of and caring for other living things.

Expectations are legion, and I'm going to name names.  I'm actually looking forward to the idea--much more than I would anticipate making resolutions.