Fighting with My Expectations

I’d been increasingly dreading my husband’s week-long work trip for days before he left on a Sunday morning. (I mean, really. Do you need to take away a perfectly good SUNDAY too?) The baby isn’t a baby anymore and the big boy can actually be helpful in an almost-adult way now, so things are logistically easier. But somehow it always seems to be so hard.

I’m trying to work and perform at the same level as a “normal week” but with less time.

I have to do every drop-off and pickup.

There always seem to be extra meltdowns and drama.

I have to do all the bedtime routines.

And I miss my guy.

(Side note: I know…poor me, right? All the single moms and dads are rolling their eyes at my damned one-week sob story right now, but I promise I’m getting to a point, so stick with me.)

And so I dread those weeks, infrequent though they may be. Plus, now that my business is really getting busy and I’m already stretched too thin, all of the hard things have exclamation points at the end. And I feel the weight of the “sole responsibility-ness” of it from the moment my head pops off the pillow each morning. The unintentional mantra seems to be, “I’m never going to get it all done.” My mind goes immediately to scanning my brain for who I’m going to disappoint, inconvenience, annoy, or neglect. Including my children.

Before they even begin, these weeks never even had a chance.

So this time was no different. By night two, I’d reported to my husband that “the children are evil.” Which I swear less than one week later I have no recollection whatsoever of what prompted that comment. That’s how non-evil whatever they were doing was. But I’d decided this week would suck, and dammit, I was gonna make it happen!

The real fun started on Tuesday morning when I woke up with a terrible sore throat. It’s always my first symptom of having something serious. Things were about to get interesting. Over the next 24 hours, my condition worsened, and by Wednesday morning, I could barely get out of bed. Every little thing was 20 times harder to do than usual and in my moment of sickest-sickness, I finally realized it was time to address my expectations for this week.

I didn’t need to lower them, because they were already pretty much at rock bottom.

I definitely didn’t need to raise them, because that shit wasn’t happening.

No, I needed the change my relationship with my expectations.

YES, I’m trying to work and perform at the same level as a “normal week” but with less time.

YES, I have to do every drop-off and pickup.

YES, There always seem to be extra meltdowns and drama.

YES, I have to do all the bedtime routines.

YES, I miss my guy.

and YES, I’m sick as a dog.

But why am I fighting it so hard? What if I gave myself the gift of cancelling all of my meetings and sleeping as much as my body craved? What if I just let the kids watch as much TV as they wanted without stressing about being a bad mom? What if I got takeout every night this week? What if I accepted, in advance, that if I got nothing else done this week I probably WOULD NOT DIE?

What if I framed it as a week of rest?

I’m not going to lie - this reframe did not come easily. Yet I did cancel (almost all of) those meetings and I did sleep as much as my daughter allowed and I did let them watch soooooo much TV and I did order takeout 3 out of 5 nights he was gone. And after getting almost nothing done that week, I definitely did not die. In fact, the rest felt good and right. And I realized that i never needed my sickness to have taken that rest for myself. Goodness knows I had needed it.

The truth is, there are predictable challenges in our lives. Not being able to get the usual amount of work done when my husband out of town is definitely one of them. I have a choice: Make peace with that challenge and finding a way to work with it, or keep on behaving like it’s not true and then get pissed off when I can’t get that thing done on time.

For whatever reason, I tend to default to the latter. I think a lot of us do. The trick now, is to figure out how to take a different path forward.

There’s nothing wrong with expecting that something is going to be difficult. Optimism doesn’t always have to rule the day.

The challenge is when you go into that going-to-be-challenging situation still behaving as usual instead of planning for how you’ll dance with that challenge.