Expressed Expectations Are A Gift 🎁—#SOL22, Day 15

     

With live music drifting in the air, a full moon shimmering in the night sky, and a bubbly hot-tub all to ourselves, my hubby and I spent the evening engaged in deep conversation about how to nourish and maintain connectedness as our adult children build their own families. He and I have wildly different amounts of familial wealth, and I've come to understand the desire to stay close to the people we love is a seed best planted when your kids are young. Hunter's bride hails from a large Catholic family, and a glaring juxtaposition between both the Shade and Chapman families was evident during the wedding experience. 

Ultimately, if we want to remain close to our kids, we will need to be intentional about carving out time and space to be together. Geography and distance will make this challenging, so in order to mitigate these hurdles, we decided it will be important to chat with both the Hunter & Chandler about making a commitment to spend quality time together a minimum of four times a year. Two quarters out of the year, we'd like to travel with the children. One of those trips, we will plan and fund, and the other trip the kids can organize. The other two quarters can be reserved for a trip out to Lubbock and a visit to our home in the metroplex. Certain quarters of the year will be dictated by holidays and birthdays. The kids have the challenge of balancing time with us and their mother, so it could be tricky, but I think we can find a way forward. 

In her latest book, Atlas of the Heart, Dr. Brené Brown writes about stealth expectations."Every day, sometimes every hour, we are consciously and unconsciously setting expectations of ourselves and the people in our lives—especially those closest to us." Often these pictures we paint in our heads of how things will go are left unspoken, causing those around us to have to guess and wonder if they are living up to an unexpressed standard. To avoid needless heartache, I want to teach Hunter, Serena, and Chandler how to reality-check, communicate, and dig into the intentions driving their expectations. Asking for what we need and talking openly about our expectations is vulnerable. It's also not something we've had modeled for us by previous generations, so I imagine there will be some missteps and bruised egos as we practice and try to do better. In the end, my deepest desire is to remain inextricably connected to our children and the families they will create.