Head Colds and Expectations

I admit it. I’m writing this while curled up in my bed. It’s only Tuesday, but I’m using the excuse of a mild head cold to put my sweats on and shove the dog out of her rightful place and snuggle up with my computer. I slept badly last night and woke up to whatever crud goes around at this time of year and to be honest, I’m giving in for today.

I’ve just finished reading a beautiful blog about the concept of community hospitality, of how important it is to welcome the stranger in real and concrete ways and I feel so much like I should hop right up and cook a meal for someone going through a hard time but here I am. In bed. Sniffling and typing and listening to instrumental covers of pop songs.

My brain feels foggy today, the way it is when you’ve been going full tilt for week after week and then all of a sudden you hit the brakes (or hit a wall) and I’m looking around like, “Was there something I was supposed to be doing today?” and the answer is, “Yes, probably, but it’s not to do with the kids and no one is calling to find out why it wasn’t done and so maybe it can wait.”

That attitude doesn’t come naturally to me. I’ve had to work at it. I know I’m not the only one.

My eldest daughter is constantly indignant at the number of rules, regulations, and lectures that happen in middle school. She spends her life worried that she’s not working hard enough, not practicing her flute or exercising or studying or being kind or any of the other thousand things that she’s been told to do. A lot of my parenting lately is helping her to understand that the blanket statements she gets on, say, handing homework in on time, are meant for students who are less than reliable about homework, and that while her brain interprets the repeated reminders as set-in-stone-requirements, other kids need to be told again and again just to hear it once.

Mostly, I repeat, over and over, “They’re not talking to you, kid. Chill out a little and try to have some fun.” And then I walk to the other end of the house where the twins are and I repeat, yet again, “Look at me when I am talking to you. YOU ARE NOT ALLOWED TO PAINT THE DOG. And certainly not with acrylic paint. For God’s sake go get the non-toxic tempura if you must.”

I love how I’m literally lying in bed, still writing, still answering emails, still making sure that all the things are going to get done and wondering if maybe some things can wait. I promise you, the items on my task list have deadlines in 2 weeks. They can wait. You can probably guess which of my children take after me and which take after Forrest.

There are so many one-size-fits-all pronouncements in society. It’s not only middle school rules, it’s the general religiosity and moral pronouncements that are made by people from all sides, all walks of life. “If you don’t recycle, if you don’t exercise, if you don’t donate or talk about or have the right opinion, or basically live your life in the way I have deemed right, you are beyond redemption.” And for someone like me, that’s hard. I want to do the right thing. I want to be a good neighbor and a good mother and a good friend. But the expectations are so unrealistic that there are days I just want to give up and be an unwelcoming neighbor and an adequate mother and a reasonably reliable friend.

Because these pronouncements were never meant for me. They’re for the people who maybe need to be reminded again and again and again that we live in a society and that means something and it’s important to leave this world a little better than we found it. But like those middle schoolers with the homework reminders, the people hearing the rules aren’t necessarily the people who need to be told.

And if you came here for any answers, well, first of all, welcome, you must be new, and second, I don’t have any. But I do know that raising expectations on each other to unsustainable levels in order to rebuild our society through shame and perfectionism isn’t doing what we think it is. This isn’t Victorian-era London. We’re not going to paper over our societal ills with increasingly complex behavior requirements.

I think somewhere along the line, we all decided that we were done with all that good and evil business, and instead, we hid it behind words like “useful” or “healthy”. Then we let the people who still did use those words tell us that evil was out there and it looked like gay people or drug addicts or people without homes. When in reality, evil has always been with us. And it looks like indifference to humanity. Indifference to the humanity of each other. And indifference to our own humanity.

Some days, remembering that humanity means that it’s ok to be simply adequate. To snuggle up in bed and eat chicken soup and drink tea. To give ourselves and others permission to rest in our human imperfections. Even when the stuffy nose isn’t really that bad.