Greetings from beautiful Eden, Utah, where I have earned a week doing my very favorite thing, sitting around, the very hardest way, by falling down a mountain.
Again.
You may recall I did this in September in Austria and wound up with a broken wrist. This time, while the fall was just as excruciating—the result of increasingly decrepit joints bending in creative ways—the damage was surprisingly non-catastrophic, just a sprained MCL and a removable knee brace for a few weeks.
Also, I don’t type with my knees. So, all good. No big deal.
Before I further unspool this story and its potential life lessons, a disclaimer: MY HUSBAND BEARS NO FAULT OR RESPONSIBILITY. Seriously. He is blaming himself, when the truth is, it is not his fault that I have the coordination of a drunk panda bear. In my defense, I am also adorable.
In the beginning, Kevin had a dream. That one day he would have a family that would swoosh across glistening alpine landscapes together wearing matching ski suits and perfect smiles like some ad for hot chocolate or orthodontia.
Because that is what his family did. Well, the ski suits weren’t quite that fashionable. But they went skiing together, successfully and happily, and he loved it. He also loved their family road trips through all the National Parks. He says these times are his happiest childhood memories, and when he dreamed of having his own family, he envisioned replicating this magic.
But then he married me.
And also the internet and video games were invented, that’s basically wrecked the entire concept of childhood.
And while I do love the outdoors and do my best to stay fit, I have no real athletic abilities, of any kind, nor even the basic coordination needed for regularly flossing my teeth. I once injured myself eating a dinner roll. I am not joking.
I’m also not good at any kind of logistics. I manage fine when it’s me and some other decently competent adults. But being a mother has pretty much broken my brain. All of this has added up to a family that 1) Doesn’t do athletic things 2) Struggles to leave the house 3) Complains a lot when we do.
In other words, skiing—which combines athleticism with some pretty intense logistics—was always going to be something akin to learning how to do brain surgery by watching a YouTube video in Hungarian. Ambitious if not outright deadly.
But Kevin had a dream. As we all do when we envision what our lives will be and how the people in them will cooperate with that. Kevin is not unusual. We all have dreams. I had dreams, too. I dreamt my entire family would fall in love with my beloved Kenya. Which they mostly have done, otherwise I would have divorced everyone. I will come back to this point, but throwing people out of your life is in fact one of your options when they don’t meet your expectations.
I cooperated with Kevin’s dream initially, when I was young and had more energy. I went skiing with his family over Christmas 2004. We were newlyweds and I still wanted to make all his dreams come true and my hips were not yet riddled with arthritis. And I did OK, other than being terrified of dying the entire day. And in defense of my later phobia, his mother was actually injured that day, which is why I only went skiing the one time. Guys, I maintain that skiing is just not a rational thing to do. I don’t know who decided it was a fun idea to put slide-y things on one’s feet and go hurtling down the side of a mountain. Perhaps the same people who are considering reelecting Donald Trump. What part of that doesn't sound completely fatal.
We were all supposed to go skiing together last year, but then my beloved dog Chilo gave me one final gift by becoming terminally ill days before that trip. So I stayed home with him, while Kevin took the kids skiing. And they did OK. As OK as kids who would rather be indoors at all times could be. My son has the additional aversions to physical movement and new things and cold things and changing clothes and wearing coats and discomfort of any kind and hard things and boring/non-video game things. And. But Kevin came home reasonably satisfied with himself as a dad. Except that I wasn’t there, and therefore it wasn’t an “official” Family Vacation (TM).
This year, there was no escape for me. Our current dog is a very spry 2-year-old, a vacation from whom is always welcome. I decided that I was going to do this for Kevin and I was going to have a good attitude about it even, which is very hard for me (this is where my son gets…well, all his character flaws). So off we went to Utah.
Mishap #1: Our daughter, the second-most enthusiastic person on the trip, started running a fever. So Kevin decided he would drop me and my son off in the care of our ski instructor and return to monitor the sick child. No whole-family slopes-swooshing.
Mishap #2: Child #2. Just being himself. We love him very much, but we often don’t know what to do with him. He was actually doing great skiing, having a great attitude, enjoying watching his mom look like a total idiot. But then he fell on a wrist that he swears was amputated a week ago when he fell off a swing, despite it since being selectively usable depending on the appeal of any given activity. He had no trouble gaming for hours at a time, for instance, but sitting through a church service was just excruciating, because, as everyone knows, singing requires some pretty intense wrist flexibility. And falling off skis was obviously a dire emergency for the wrist. And to be fair, maybe his wrist is actually hurt, badly even. With him, you have no idea, because the drama level is at an 11 whether someone has been run over by the garbage truck or the Kraft Easy Mac boiled over in the microwave.
Kevin drove back to the slope and collected Child #2. And deposited another small piece of his heart.
Now, to my enormous, gargantuan credit, I could have used this mishap as my out, but I did not. It would have been perfectly reasonable for me to go home with my dreadfully (or not) injured child. But I knew Kevin wanted me to ski on. So I bravely stayed behind, like the men on the Titanic. And like those men, it was only a matter of time before I went down. Because, physics. And unlike Celine Dion, Kevin’s heart probably won’t go on.
Because when my skis went in two different directions and I fell in a position in which a yoga instructor sits to read a book but in which a middle-aged woman with a family history of arthritis feels like she is being drawn and quartered—on a slope sadistically named “Confidence” no less—not only did I sprain my knee, I set fire to the remainder of Kevin’s dream.
It is now officially dead. There will be no whole-family swooshing. Unless we all wear Nikes together or something.
I will say, the sled ride down with the ski rescue guys was very fun.
As we drove back from the ER in a blizzard that definitely qualified as Mishap #4, Kevin bemoaned not the gracelessness and freakishness of his family, but the expectations with which he had saddled us. Which he really didn’t, he’s not one of those 1950’s dads browbeating their sons to take over the family business. He’s actually brought very few expectations into this whole thing, and he’s accepted each of us for who we are and empowered us to be the best version of ourselves. He’s an absolutely heroic father and husband in my book.
But he did have a very few, very meager, modest expectations. Nothing too important, nothing too essential, nothing too onerous. Totally reasonable ones. And still they cost him some joy.
And that’s what the expectations we bring into our relationships do most every time. Of course, some expectations are vital and should not be let go—the expectation of being treated with respect and kindness, the expectation of loved ones meeting certain of our needs.
But every expectation we present to other people contains the seeds of disappointment. And at the end of the day, even getting our most basic expectations of others met are our own responsibility. You can only communicate what you need and what is important to you and how another person’s actions make you feel. But then it’s on you to decide if their response to that is something you can live with. Sometimes if someone is not treating us well, the best thing we can do is accept that they can’t meet our expectations and to move on with our lives. You absolutely cannot change or control people. That is one of my most important discoveries in life.
When you give a gift, for instance, you do so freely, without control of how the other person receives it. They may thank you or not. You can then decide if you want to keep giving them gifts.
When you invite someone over for dinner, they may or may not reciprocate. You can then choose whether or not to keep pursuing them in friendship, given that information, or find friends who are willing to put in more work.
If your spouse is chronically late, you can have the same argument over and over and over again, or you can just make allowances for that, including driving separately, if being on time is that important to you.
When your children don’t like an activity that you love, you can decide whether or not it’s worth it to keep forcing them to do it. As a parent, unlike in all other relationships, you do have power, it’s not an equal relationship. You still have to choose how you want to wield that power.
And when your wife is a muscular-skeletal disaster, you can choose whether you want to keep taking her to ERs. Of course, I enthusiastically continue to do things that risk that anyway. Did I tell you I’m climbing Mt. Kenya in July? Fun!
People are who they are. They give what they want to give and do what they want to do. They may or may not consider your needs and wants and adjust their behavior accordingly. That goes for kids, spouses, friends, parents, everyone. You can’t control that.
You can accept them as they are and for what they offer, or you can keep forcing round pegs into the square holes of your expectations. By doing that, you might even get more of what you technically want.
But you will miss out on a lot of the joy of being in relationship with another person, who is a surprise party and an adventure and a boot camp and a graduate seminar and a puzzle and a gift all in one.
Come to think of it, loving others is kind of like putting slide-y things on your feet and going hurtling down a mountain. Maybe I like skiing after all.
What a wonderful essay! And, Holly, your ability to hurt yourself has some serious competition coming from me, a person who once cut her tongue on a potato chip. When I told my dentist about this shortly after it happened, he thoughtfully said, “That’s a new one on me.”
Wow! I loved this. Here I am, reading and laughing, and suddenly I’m reading the best advice about relationships that I’ve seen in a long, long time. Thank you, Holly.