Great Expectations

No, keep your shirt on--I'm not pregnant, nor am I trying to get pregnant (just wanted to get that out of the way, in case you were mislead by the title of the post).

No, today I was thinking about how things so often turn out differently than we planned.

For example, after all those years of scraping through math, and trying to find a decent paying job with my English background, I do math for a living. (Take that, Mrs. Bond--you know who you are!)

Similarly, I always thought I'd be one of those parents who played Mozart cds to my unborn child, and would use sign language to my infant, who would grow up to be tri-lingual. Actually, none of those things happened as expected, unless you consider ebonics and Lincoln-county-ese to be additional languages. Still, I continue to be amazed at how many different ways I can be humbled by the fruit of my own freaking loins.

For example, Ginny was a sweet toddler, very well-mannered and compliant (notice I said TODDLER--she's not that compliant anymore). But we were on her like white on rice, always correcting, always redirecting. Dan appears to be part human, part chimpanzee, with a penchant for pulling hair and flinging food. I guess this shouldn't come as any surprise, since his rearing versus Ginny's has been so different: like a Pollock versus a Vermeer. Or if we're being literary, like Dickens versus Austen.

Ginny's teacher told me this week that she alone of all the kids at school knew that the Israelites were fed manna and quail in the wilderness. (Actually, to quote Ginny, they got little pancakes and birds--but that counts, right?) However, from Dan's teacher, I got the note in the photo above, which says "Dan has had a pretty good day. I am having a problem with him tackling the kids and sitting on them."

I think the note speaks for itself. Although I'm not sure I want to know what he's doing on the not-so-good days.

Of course, sometimes things are exactly what we'd expect: for example, the first time my mom read my blog, the first thing she pointed out was a pronoun/antecedent disagreement.

Overall, life doesn't have many surprises, on the macro level. We get born, we live, we reproduce, we die. That's pretty much the way it goes for all of us. But it's the little twists that give us pause and make us reflect--it's the little things that make us realize how far we fall short of our own ideals, and by how much we are capable of surpassing them, without even trying.