I’m not an outdoor girl. I’ve said it before, but I could live happily in a bunker, as long as I had space to jump around. But after eight years in one of the most polluted cities in the world, I can’t get enough of our neighborhood because it’s just. so. beautiful. Here’s evidence:
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| See, this is a SWAMP and I’m excited |
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| Honestly I did not edit this |
One of the best coping skills Erik and I learned in the early days of expat living was a simple phrase, “lower your standards!” When you read that, you have to imagine it with your best game show host voice, like you’re inviting someone to an exciting opportunity behind door #1.
It was all about expectations. If you expect that the bathroom you’ve been led to out the back door of a restaurant and down a dark alley will be a picture of cleanliness, you will be sorely disappointed. However, if you imagine that it will be a sufficient hole in the ground, you’ll be satisfied. You get the idea.
It’s called expectation management. The problem with expectations is that we are so often unaware of them. It doesn’t occur to me that I would appreciate a toilet that flushes until I look up and see that the wall mounted reservoir in the back alley bathroom is partially missing and the frozen water within is still holding its shape. I can flush in springtime.
I’ve been reminded lately how important it is to talk about our expectations.This is especially true with our kids. When we began summer vacation this year, they had an unspoken expectation that it would be like their three previous summers, when they spent all day, every day, outside with friends. Last summer I even had to call one mom and ask her if her kids could maybe not schedule the summer project involving my children quite as often because they weren’t able to spend time with other kids. We were beating off the playdates with sticks.
This wasn’t the case in Orlando. The kids they’ve met from school mostly live about an hour away, and others were preparing for long trips away. Within a few days we were all scratching hash marks on the walls. I finally realized we needed to have a talk about expectations with them, and we basically had to say, “lower your standards.” It required a little more mourning of what they used to have, but within a day their “I’m bored” statements had reduced significantly. It’s a process of looking at reality and making adjustments.
So often when I am frustrated with life it is because I expected it to be a certain way and it isn’t. Many of my expectations are residual, left over from what I was accustomed to having in my “previous” life. It’s helpful for me to take a hard look at the expectations I have and ask myself if they are realistic in this new season of life. Some of them might not be, and that’s where I need to tell myself to “lower my standards.” It doesn’t mean I’m giving up hope. It means I’m choosing contentment.
It happened yesterday at the dentist. I was myself. I mean, really truly, like just how I would be if I were with someone I’d known forever. I was chatty. I made witty comments. They laughed. It felt comfortable, and normal, and I thought, “Hey, I’m being me! With people I just met!” This is progress.
You’d think I’d always be me – isn’t everyone? – but I’m still getting there. A friend of mine here reminded me lately that when someone has gone through a major transition, you should assume for the first year that you don’t really know the real them.
Ah, how true.
It was good to hear that again because I know that my traditional transition stress reaction is withdrawal. I usually don’t realize I’m doing it until people make comments like, “Gosh, I thought you were so reserved and quiet, but . . . ” (It’s ok, go ahead and finish that thought, “but you’re actually kind of goofy and don’t stop talking.”)
The first time I did it was when I got married, and everything in my world changed – new city, new job, new home, new roommate, new church, new friends. I met one of my good friends that year, and she thought I didn’t like her the whole year. Meanwhile I was saying to my husband, “I really like her! I hope she’ll be my friend!” Sigh. I had no idea.
Since then I’m at least aware of it (the first step is admitting you have a problem). I think I am doing better here, but I think it’s partly because there are people I am myself with because they already know me. Or people who are just so inviting they make me want to show up all at once. There are others though who still think I’m the quiet type. Just wait, I want to say. A person who has just gone through transition is a bit like a new house plant. You can give it the best environment, but it’s probably going to wilt a little at first. Give it time. It’ll perk up. Pretty soon the real Gina will show up and the “I just played Dizzy Lizzy* with my life and I can’t walk quite straight” Gina will fade away. I’m still just a little shell shocked and not so sure of myself here so I shut down the non-essentials and just focus on getting through. I’m triaging. But as we say in the middle kingdom, “yue lai yue” – it’s coming gradually.
Like at the dentist. The prospect of major dental work somehow drew me out. Who knew?
*Dizzy Lizzy, for the uninitiated, is a game in which you place your head on the top of a baseball bat, spin around several times while maintaining contact with the bat, and then attempt to walk toward a destination in the distance. It seems like it should be so easy but it is hard. Very, very hard. Like, “walk sideways until you fall down while your friends laugh hysterically” hard. But oh so fun.
One of my biggest fears in moving to Orlando was the gators. No, seriously. I pictured gators everywhere. In the lakes. Crawling out of drainage pipes. Eating my dog. We had friends who had a gator in their garage. They don’t even live near water. Basically I thought we were moving to an episode of Swamp People.
I was wary, the first few times I ran around our neighborhood. I tiptoed on the dock. I made wide berths around puddles and swampy looking water. I was suspicious of large bushes.
But six months passed and no sign of gators. I think I heard some in the reeds one night at the lake, if gators make a sound something like a pig. So either gators or water pigs was what I heard. But no sightings.
I started to get a little disappointed, nay, a lot disappointed. I was told there’d be gators. When I mentioned this gatorless existence on Facebook, people suggested I had not been leaving my house, and I simply needed to look harder.
So I’ve looked. I look at every body of water I pass. I squint into swampy places. It’s not that this area lacks wildlife. I’ve seen deer, armadillo, otters, sand cranes, and more vultures than I care to count. I had almost given up hope.
And then today, I’m pretty sure I saw one. It was on the left side of the road, probably 50 feet from the street, sunning itself on the side of a lake (I use the term lake generously). Finally! I think I was starting to get a complex, an “everyone’s seen a gator but me what am I doing wrong?” complex. No more! I now believe there are gators in Orlando.
How long will it be until I am no longer excited to see gators? Probably when I see one in my garage. Definitely if they eat my dog.
I went to an elementary school where we had a great deal of freedom in our desk space. I don’t know if this was true in other places, but we regularly moved our desks around and formed little groups of 3-4. It was fun, but a bit of a social nightmare. I mean, what better way to shun someone than to not invite them to be part of the new configuration? I remember my friend Jenny and I moving our two desks off by ourselves once. We felt conspiratorial. I can’t imagine how hard it would have been for a new kid to walk into that classroom.
Moving to a new place feels a little bit like that, minus the intentional shunning (which is a huge bonus). Every time I’ve moved somewhere, even when I moved back to China from Singapore, to relationships with people I already knew, there was the question, “Is there room for me?”
Because I get it – people are busy, relational energy is limited, the space I used to fill has been filled with other things. It can be hard to make room for someone new, no matter how much you enjoy them.
There’s an energy in me that gets stirred up, maybe more than in other people, by situations like this. I want to be picked. I want to be worth someone shifting their desks around to make space for me. And once I get there, that energy will push me to prove to you that you made a good choice.
I know that to develop friendships here I will most likely need to take the initiative. I don’t mind much – I am an initiative taker in general. Also, being an introvert, I’m not looking for a lot of people. But at times initiating wars with that energy in me. I know I could ask to be in your desk cluster. But it feels SO much better to be asked.
Last Friday I came home from my morning group feeling a little raw – a good kind of raw, because I was able to share with them some of the recent transition grief I’ve been feeling (ladies, you know who you are and you ROCK). I started contemplating the weekend, the long 3 day weekend with two kids and no daddy buffer, and I thought, “Lord Almighty, if I have to initiate to be with people this weekend I think it might just do me in. I mean, no seriously, God, I do not think I can do it.”
And lo and behold, when I got home there was an email inviting us to join many others at the beach on Saturday. God loves me.
It may seem like a small thing, but for those of us who are new in town, it’s big. I know that over time, we will find our desk space. Thank you to those who are making room for us!
One of the most frequent questions I get here is, “So do you feel settled?” Honestly, I’m not sure what being settled means. Does it mean we aren’t eating off lawn furniture anymore? That everything’s up on the walls? That it feels like home?
When people see our house, they are usually a little amazed that it does look settled. In fact, we usually get comments about how quickly we’ve done it, how they haven’t finished painting the house they’ve been living in for 10 years, etc.
It never occurred to us not to do it this way, so we started talking about why. When Erik and I move into a new place, we unpack and settle in like we’re gunning for a new HGTV show called “Instant House.” When people share that they still have boxes unpacked after years of living somewhere, I am baffled. Don’t you need that stuff? Usually within a week we’ve unpacked 90% of our boxes or more. That’s just how we roll.
But we do it because we know that feeling settled in our hearts is connected to where we live. When you’ve moved as many times as we have (seven so far in 16 years), your sense of home gets fuzzy. It’s become important to us to create the space around us that says, “You’re welcome here. This is known.”
Many of my expat friends embrace an opposite view – why bother settling in when you’re likely to have to move in 2 years? (FYI we are not planning on moving in 2 years). It does feel like a lot of unnecessary work. But if we had lived by that mentality, we would have spent the last 13 years without ever feeling like our house was our home. No thank you.
I find it spills over into relationships as well. It’s SO easy, when you’ve lived the transient lifestyle of an expat, to learn to guard your heart in relationships. Our kids learned it quickly. After just two years in Singapore, where life was a revolving door, I introduced Ethan to a new boy. His question to me was, “How long is he going to be here?” It can begin to feel safer, better, to choose not to settle in to relationships when the end point seems so close.
Home. Relationships. These are places where we need to settle our hearts, even if it means that just around the corner the roots will be pulled and the emotional dirt will fly. We’re learning to be all in, to dive in deep, to make the most of whatever time we get wherever, with whomever.
Are we settled? We’re trying to be, just as fast as we can.
“It was practically perfect!” he sobbed.
The “it” to which Ethan was referring was life in Asia. Yes, life in the country where pollution levels make LA look clean, where people stared and laughed and spoke at him in a language he could barely understand, where we lived in concrete high rises and fought to stay alive on the lawless roads, where we were thousands of miles from family, was practically perfect. That place, in his mind, was about as good as it gets.
In many ways, it truly was. Those last few years we had about 60 school age kids, mostly homeschooled, living within about a 2 mile radius of each other. They played together or had activities together nearly every day. Many of them were kids he’d known most of his life. China might not have been the most beautiful, convenient, easy place, but it was his place. It was his home.
The grief comes at unexpected moments, like a few nights ago, when he cried himself to sleep remembering this practically perfect place. It’s not that he doesn’t enjoy life here; he does, but it is a harder season. We all have them. As I look back on our life in Asia, I can mark the seasons like a roller coaster of ups and downs, “loving life” chapters, and “God please help us” years.
I told Ethan that this is part of his story. It’s a tougher part – maybe a part he wouldn’t have written. A story can’t be all perfect; it has to have conflict, struggle, even tragedy, for it to be a really good story. And God’s writing a really story for him. For us.
In my continuing 2013 quest for contentment, one thought seems to be becoming central, and it is this, “This is all temporal.”
I think it when I see commercials where women talk about wanting to always be bikini ready, or try to sell me age defying make up, or the perfect lawn which everyone needs, or, and I still can’t even believe I saw this, Tuscan style flavored dog food.
It would be so easy to see these things and think, “Yes, I need these too!” (except the Tuscan style dog food. I’m sorry, there’s just no way) and then begin to shape my life around obtaining these things. I know the inevitable stress that follows, not only from the futility of obtaining what they’re telling me I need, but also from the way that those pursuits crowd out other, probably more important, things.
But when I look at them and think, “This world, this life, is a blip on a line. It’s temporal. It’s fleeting. And in the end it SO won’t matter if I had a beach ready body or looked 30 when I was 50, or if my lawn looked good. My dog certainly doesn’t give a rip what she eats.”
And when I start to dwell on that, I find contentment creeping in. I find I can look at something and think, “Yeah, that would be nice. But it’s really ok if I don’t get there, because in the grand scheme of things, it falls in the ‘less than important’ category.”
So I’m trying to keep that thought in my mind. As our pastor said on Sunday, in his sermon about idols, “Don’t live for this day, live for that day.”
I had to explain juice from concentrate to our kids today. I guess it just wasn’t high on my priority list, while we lived overseas, to introduce frozen juice to them. Actually, it probably just wasn’t available. It’s one of many gaps they have in their “American education.” I knew they’d be there; I just didn’t know where. They’re learning about frozen juice and soccer games and commercials and all sorts of things they didn’t have in Asia. If only that were enough.
If only it were enough to “Americanize” them. Someone honestly asked me that question the other night, “You got that kid Americanized yet?” My response was, “He will never be American.”
No, I realize our kids DO have American passports. Yes, they are American. But please understand that our kids, and any kids who have spent significant parts of their childhood outside of the U.S. will never see it the way we do, and it does a disservice to them not to recognize it.
Imagine if your parents were German, but you were born here in the U.S. Then one day, your parents pick you up and take you to Germany and say, “You’re home.” Would you feel at home? Even if you knew the language and looked German, you wouldn’t feel it the same way.
Over time, our kids will learn how to “be” American, but keep in mind that kids who have had the blessing and the challenge of spending formative years in another culture are forever changed by that experience. They see things differently.
I guess what I’m hoping for is that people don’t expect that our kids basically “get over it.” That they leave behind their expat upbringing and become like everyone else. That won’t happen, and I don’t want it to happen. After all, aren’t we who are Christians citizens of another kingdom? This world is not our home. Why try hard to make it feel that way?
So I’m in this women’s group about shame. Yep, shame. Sounds fun right? And not at all awkward.
We’re talking about it because it’s the topic of a book we’re reading by Brené Brown, and if you don’t know who she is you should go find out. Wow. Just wow.
The book we’re reading is called I Thought it was Just Me (But it Isn’t). It’s about recognizing shame and building shame resilience.
Shame is the fear of disconnection. It is the feeling that there is something about us that is wrong, and that wrongness separates us from others. It sends us into hiding.
What I keep coming back to as we talk about this topic is that so much shame comes from the fact that we all have a hard time just being human. Shame outright sucker punches us when we buy into the messages all around us about what we should be, what we should do, what we should have.
The expectations are huge and conflicting and impossible, but we try with everything we have to meet them so that we don’t have to feel like we’re the ones left out. Shame tells us that it’s not ok to just be who we are, to be human.
I have a friend who says we all vacillate between believing that we are superhuman or subhuman. When we’re superhuman, we think we can do it all, that if we try just a little harder we can achieve that ideal. We refuse to accept that we have needs or limits.
Or we decide we can’t do it, we’re not good enough, we’re less than, and we put ourselves in the subhuman category. We vote ourselves off the island. Either way it’s shame at work.
I’m realizing through this group that shame doesn’t have to win.
We can all just be our imperfect, struggling, up and down, awesome and less than awesome selves. But to do that, we have to take a hard look at those expectations. We have to stop listening to them. But more than that – we need to talk about what they do to us.
We’ve been doing that in this group, because the cure for shame is empathy. We share our stories and we listen and try to enter in and say “you’re not alone.” At times it feels awkward and uncomfortable, because we want so much to do it well, but more and more it brings the greatest sense of relief and acceptance. It’s a joy to be able to say, “This is me being human” and to have others say, “Yeah, I’m human too.”
Why can’t we all just be human?