Wrestling with Expectations
In recent years I have come to realize that I have great expectations for dinner time. When we were in Grand Rapids and I was working I would look forward to coming home and having dinner with my family so if it didn't go the way I wanted it to I would be very disappointed. Most days I would come home to everyone yelling and/or in very bad moods. Now that I'm not working outside the home I find I still have pretty high expectations for how dinner time should go. We have four kids. The older two are 11 and 8 and sometimes they don't like what I make so they end up making top ramen or a hot dog for themselves. The next one is 3 and she tends to snack a lot during the day so when she sits down to eat, she's not sitting for long. She will take a bite, yell about how hot it is, demand you blow on it, get down and run laps for a while and then maybe take another bite. The youngest is just coming up on two months and around dinner time she is usually hungry or just generally unhappy so we take turns eating and holding her.
I would love it if we could all sit at the dinner table, share a meal and share our days with one another but I've come to accept that that is an unrealistic expectation. Over the last week I've been analyzing why my expectations for dinner time are so high and I think it's because of how dinner was when I was a kid. My parents were divorced and what I remember most is sitting with a TV tray and vegging out in front of a show while we ate dinner. I'm sure there were many nights we ate dinner at the table, they just don't stand out in my memory. Another thing that drives me nuts is when people stare at their phones during mealtimes, whether it's at home or in a restaurant and I think the reason for that is how I grew up. I really believe that sharing a meal is more than just food, it's a time to share life as well and how can we do that if we're distracted with screens? So there are some things I will make a big deal about like sitting at the table, turning off the TV and no phones...but things like not liking what I make, getting up and down from the table or well, crying (because you're a baby)...I can get over that.
Something else I struggle with is mess and clutter. Even my friends in high school called me "Monica" (if you've seen Friends you know what I'm talking about). Yesterday I was reading in my Ann Voskamp One Thousand Gifts devotional and she talked about finding beauty in the messiness of daily life. "Bed sheets painted with highlighter?...children live here! Great-grandma's wicker laundry basket overflowing in the mudroom?...we had a full, rich weekend!" This is a HUGE struggle for me. When toys are laying around, when I have to throw in yet another load of laundry, when random things don't get put away...I get anxious, frustrated and even angry. Not that we should swing in the total opposite direction and just let our kids be slobs...but I think there's some real truth in what Ann is saying. Rather than getting upset constantly and always harping on my kids to put their things away, maybe I should take a breath and look for the beauty there before I gently remind them to take care of their belongings?
We often expect life to be a perfect Disney fairy tale and the reality is it just isn't. However there is a lot of beauty to be found in the daily mess if we look hard enough. There is beauty in brokenness and there is beauty in the way that God makes broken things whole again.
I would love it if we could all sit at the dinner table, share a meal and share our days with one another but I've come to accept that that is an unrealistic expectation. Over the last week I've been analyzing why my expectations for dinner time are so high and I think it's because of how dinner was when I was a kid. My parents were divorced and what I remember most is sitting with a TV tray and vegging out in front of a show while we ate dinner. I'm sure there were many nights we ate dinner at the table, they just don't stand out in my memory. Another thing that drives me nuts is when people stare at their phones during mealtimes, whether it's at home or in a restaurant and I think the reason for that is how I grew up. I really believe that sharing a meal is more than just food, it's a time to share life as well and how can we do that if we're distracted with screens? So there are some things I will make a big deal about like sitting at the table, turning off the TV and no phones...but things like not liking what I make, getting up and down from the table or well, crying (because you're a baby)...I can get over that.
Something else I struggle with is mess and clutter. Even my friends in high school called me "Monica" (if you've seen Friends you know what I'm talking about). Yesterday I was reading in my Ann Voskamp One Thousand Gifts devotional and she talked about finding beauty in the messiness of daily life. "Bed sheets painted with highlighter?...children live here! Great-grandma's wicker laundry basket overflowing in the mudroom?...we had a full, rich weekend!" This is a HUGE struggle for me. When toys are laying around, when I have to throw in yet another load of laundry, when random things don't get put away...I get anxious, frustrated and even angry. Not that we should swing in the total opposite direction and just let our kids be slobs...but I think there's some real truth in what Ann is saying. Rather than getting upset constantly and always harping on my kids to put their things away, maybe I should take a breath and look for the beauty there before I gently remind them to take care of their belongings?
We often expect life to be a perfect Disney fairy tale and the reality is it just isn't. However there is a lot of beauty to be found in the daily mess if we look hard enough. There is beauty in brokenness and there is beauty in the way that God makes broken things whole again.
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