As we talked, I was laying in my bed with my favorite fur-baby, Puppy Cat, who was trying to find the perfect position from which he could drift into his kitty slumber. (dirty little online radio show secret: most of the shows we do feature me wearing my pj's while I walk around the upstairs of my house trying to fit in some excercise) So here I am, laying in bed all alone in my big empty house talking about expectations. My own personal thought bubble eclipsed any real philosophical thoughts I had on the matter although I did have something to say about external expectations.
Anywho....
My personal expectations, when I was growing up, included getting married and having kids. I dreamed that I might have a loving husband who would give me back rubs every night along with a glass of wine and a bubble bath while also helping the kids with their homework.
If you're a stepmom, you know how rest of the story turns out...blah blah blah, I'm with my guy but I also have non-biological kid(s) in my life, too. The baths were only a means to get me to fall in love with him and I'm the one that yells at the kids to do their homework while they roll their eyes at me and mumble under their breath. The only time my husband gets me a glass of wine now is to ply me with alcohol before he tells me what his ex thinks of my latest involvement in the kids' lives.
I bring up the dream versus the reality because I believe it's worth illustrating how even competent, capable, strong-minded women can fall into this trap of "this isn't what I expected my stepfamily life to be like."
Raise your hand if this sounds like you at all.
Susan -- along with nearly every stepfamily expert I've talked to -- had the same advice: readjust your expectations.
I have extremely high expectations for myself. Ask my Karate instructors how high my expectations are. When I can't master a kata in a day, I apparently get this look on my face that cries out: "I'm hopeless!" Yeah, that's just Karate. For things like marriage and parenting, I've always felt like if I can't make everyone love me to pieces then I've done something horribly wrong.
I have such high expectations that it's almost like a disease and frankly I don't want my drive for perfection to land me in heart-attacksville. So I've been ever-so-slowly releasing my grip on my high expectations.
The first person(s) to see my lower expectations: my stepkids.
I used to drive myself mad trying to make sure they liked me and loved me and wanted to share their secrets with me. I'd be the best friend, the personal shopper and the cooler-than-cool Lady McSteppington but then I'd feel sad or disappointed in myself when I'd hear through the grapevine something going on in their lives. I took it personally that I had done something wrong.
Once I learned to lower my expectations -- to simply love them without the razzle dazzle -- I realized they did love me and that I wasn't ever going to be the secret keeper or sharer. That's their mom and she does a great job at it. She knows when to reveal and how; whereas if I learned something, I always felt like I was stepping on people's toes.
I'll write soon about other people's expectations of me and how I'm working on that in an upcoming post.
Now I'm curious about you: How have you successfully readjusted your expectations and how do you feel now?
2 comments:
I've had a talk about expectations before and DH said "instead of lowering your expectations, just don't have any". None, zip, zero, nada. That is hard for a control freak like me...but in a way, he's right. I have to learn to go with the flow when it comes to how my own life turns out (cause I've been thrown quite a few curves balls in the last 5 years) and I have to let go of the expectations I have of others in my life (because I can't control what they do, only my reaction to it). I've been working on it for the last few years and honestly, there's a bit of a freedom that comes with having no expectations at all: you're not as disappointed when things don't turn out the way you wanted them to and you're pleasantly surprised when things go really, really well.
Next thing to work on is ignoring the expectations that others have of you in your role as a stepmother. We talked a little bit about this last night in the Stepmoms Roundtable on Coparenting Matters.
Navigating the personal boundaries issue has always been a challenge for me. I swing back and forth across the give-too-much/give-too-little division as I try to be honest with myself about what my needs are in the situation. To be quite frank, being a stepparent has taught me that even in the context of family, you must be personally responsible for your own happiness and well-being. No one else is going to look out for you the way you can, and there is no one to blame (except yourself, of course, which stinks) when you have given so much of yourself that there is nothing left for you. I've worked hard at disengaging and not taking things personally, but it does still sting. BM is definitely the confidant, even though I do all the day-to-day parenting work. That aggravates me, but I try to find ways to feel better about it - I am offering a more stable view of what a home should be like, giving SD time to be a kid before she has to be the grown-up, and asking for help in return from her - babysitting assistance, chores, etc. There has been a lot of adjustment in my expectations, I guess, and a lot of learning about myself and what I can and can't do.
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