Wild love and disappointment
When our hopes make us miss out on our present
There is a huge range of struggles experienced by people who find themselves performing care work. One of them is the feeling that life has failed us by dumping caregiving on us.
We grew up in a world where we’re told that if we carefully plan our lives, work hard, and have a positive attitude, we can manifest abundance and success. And then instead of living the life we planned, here we are facing disability and roadblocks and some deeply unglamorous realities.
I see people stall out at this point. It’s easy to decide that this new life is not our life. Our life is on hold. This is just a detour. The months and years tick by, where life is all a series of things that need to be done before we can get back on track with our real life. The one without caregiving, or disability, or challenges that can’t get wrapped up neatly before the end of a sitcom episode.
But this is our life. Our lives are never on hold. Instead of living, we’re opting out.
Someone wrote to Heather Havrilesky asking for advice because she was being pushed into a life she did not choose, who told her “saying goodbye to this delusional dream feels like destroying myself”, who worried about what would happen if she exposed her kids to the world.
Havrilesky offered her this reminder:
“you were put on this Earth to experience a wide range of mad and horrifying and romantic events. You are here to witness wild love and disappointment and unexpected sickness and hideous death. You are here to prepare your kids to bear witness to these forces without shying away, without expecting to be in control, without feeling that it’s all too much for them, without believing that the ideal for every human is to be safe and secure and whisked away from ugliness, inconveniences, from threats, from awkwardness, from irritations. Your job is to prep your children from untold calamities and difficulties and also the intense frustrations, fears, and disappointments of random human beings. Your job is to make your kids more curious in the face of their fears.
More curious. More engaged. More joyful. More accepting. More compassionate. More helpful. More loving. More expressive.”
We can build ourselves a terrarium of carefully curated experiences, of perfect safety. Few of us can stay there long, because of the realities of health, family, and finances. Fewer still would want to stay very long in a perfectly optimized bubble without challenges. People are willing to work hard and make great sacrifices for things that feel meaningful. We like doing stuff and being helpful.
Sometimes, though, we get stuck in a liminal place. Often this is what happens when we’re assigned a life instead of allowed to choose one. We’ve accepted the responsibilities, but don’t accept that this is part of our story now. We act as if it’s temporary as the time accumulates.
We do all the work and miss out on the meaning. We forget how to be curious, joyful, accepting, and engaged. We go through the motions and forget to be loving. We’re biding our time.
This life is real life. It’s our life, even if we didn’t choose it. We have to embrace it and make it ours.
