Not so Great Expectations?
When life throws you a curveball…
“I never expected to get made redundant,” said my friend Nigel, as he sipped at the pint I’d bought him in commiseration. “I was sure my job would stay.”
Nigel was 31 and had been a team leader in a mobile communications company. That week, he had to tell half his team that they were going to lose their jobs. Then, on the Friday, he was called into the boss’s office and told he was going too.
“I never expected not to be able to have kids,” another friend of mine, Cara, 29, said recently. She had experienced three miscarriages in just over a year and doctors had told her not to try again. “You think; I’ll meet a nice guy, and when we’re ready, we’ll start a family. Then suddenly, you can’t.”
36-year-old Stacey says she knew there was something wrong, but never expected it to be so severe. “I knew it was a lump. I thought they could just take it out. I didn’t think they’d take my whole breast.” She is now facing reconstructive surgery, which means more nights away from her two small children. “It’s ironic, because I always thought my breasts were my best feature,” she adds. “Why couldn’t they have taken a chunk off my thighs instead?"
Sometimes life throws us a curveball. And yet it’s only when that happens that we really understand what expectations we had. We expect to find a job we enjoy, or we can at least tolerate. We expect to one day buy a home, or travel the world. We expect to meet someone, settle down and raise a family. We expect one day to be older than 30, or 40, or 50. We expect too much, perhaps.
“My husband collapsed on the train to work, and I got a call from the hospital, saying he had been taken in” says Katy. “I rushed down there, but by the time I got there he had died. I left home a worried wife; I returned home a widow. I was 30 and alone.”
Katy eventually met a new partner, set up home and had two children. But not every story has a happy ending. Sometimes the things we don’t expect knock us so far out of alignment it takes a long time for things to steady.
Nigel spent two years unemployed (although he now has a cracking job caring for adults with learning disabilities). Cara is considering fostering children, but finds the paperwork daunting. She says she often cries when people have babies on TV shows. She’s stopped watching hospital dramas. Stacey is waiting for the doctors to say the chemo has worked before she can have the surgery.
“The waiting is the hardest part of recovery,” she says. “I want things to be instant. I want to be well again. I want it not to hurt when I pick up my baby boy.”
“But I also know that after this I’ll never take being able to pick up my babies for granted again. I didn’t expect to get cancer – no one does. But it has helped me to appreciate life more and see what’s more important. That sounds like a cliché. Believe me, it’s not. I know who my true friends are now. I know how I want my life to look.”
“And I’ve learned that the unexpected things are the things that change you most… for the better.”
Written by Jon Matthias. Posted on 30th March.
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