How unfulfilled expectations helped find my way to my child and made me happier

People tend to live by expectations. We expect bright impressions from a date and a vacation. We expect from others certain actions, actions, words. We expect results and success from ourselves. Just as a child hopes to find a “ordered” gift under the tree, adults want the future to live up to their expectations, and other people live up to their hopes.

Psychologists call this the “standard of expectation.” And there's nothing good about him, actually.

Expressing our expectations, we make claims to the world, we want to control the situation, to model it only according to our drawings. Anything that does not fit into our ideas, we reject. But by rejecting diversity of choice, we deprive ourselves of something new, unfamiliar and interesting.

Agree, it is stupid to try to dictate your life conditions.

I understand that now. But I have often been trapped in my own expectations.





One of the greatest expectations in a person’s life, especially a woman’s, is the birth of a child. I remember my very first expectation, the sex of the baby. Everyone around me told me what a wonderful son I would have, what he would be the crown prince, the bearer of the surname, the continuation of the family. I have two brothers, so it was not difficult to believe that I would have a son. With a happy smile, going through the boys' names in my head, I went for an ultrasound. The nurse, chirping, stunned: “A wonderful girl, with big cheeks, just like my mother...” I remember my shock. I left the clinic, stopped by the fence and literally burst into tears. Passersby looked at a pregnant woman crying at the gates of the hospital, and probably presented scary pictures. Someone even stopped and asked what happened. Imagine if I answered that my biggest expectation had just crashed into an ultrasound screen, and instead of having a son, I would have to give birth to a daughter.

However, I got used to this idea very quickly and it started to make me very happy. I waited for my girl. Imagine what her eyes will be, what dimples on her cheeks, what a temper. Expectations... I imagined how sweet I would rock her in the crib, how sweet she would sleep, how I would feed her. I imagined childbirth and prepared very carefully for it. I took all possible courses, I had a personal midwife and a doctor, everything was thought out to the smallest detail.

Birth... 27 hours was clearly not part of my plan. It didn’t turn out exactly as I expected... Both emotionally and physically. On the fifth day of being in the ward together with the child, I did not have milk. Needless to say, the picture of happy motherhood, which I painted for myself, all this did not match.

The nights began without sleep. Every waking up of the baby meant I had to run to the kitchen, make the mix. How lucky she was to fall asleep under that bottle! And if not, expectations of a few hours of sleep faded literally and figuratively. The bottle with the mixture is not the mother’s breast, the child can not “hang” on the bottle for an hour and a half until he calms down and falls asleep. When the mixture in the bottle ended, I had to take my daughter in my arms and carry her in the dark until she fell asleep. This can be repeated up to 5-6 times per night.

Extreme fatigue, inability to breastfeed gave rise to many doubts. It seemed to me that my daughter would not love me, that I would not be able to become a real mother for her, since I did not feel this first affection. By the third month of my baby’s life, I realized that my expectations of motherhood had nothing to do with reality.

The daughter grew up... We started walking with her to the playground. I expected my child, like the other kids, to be serenely digging in the sandbox with the neighborhood kids. At this time, I will rest on the bench, making up for the lack of communication with other mothers. But it wasn't. I was facing a new challenge. Sitting her lion cub in a stroller, her daughter passed the playground without even looking at the sandbox and children! Any attempts to lure her there were thwarted. So my expectations were blown up again.

We walked in the area all the streets and alleys along and across... We were seen as a very strange couple. The mothers said with a clever look, "Why don't you come to the playground?" The child needs communication.

At 2.9 my daughter went to kindergarten. We were lucky with caregivers and I was full of hopes that my child was about to flourish. However, he had other plans in this regard. All the first year in the garden, the daughter did not participate in mornings, just sat on a chair and watched performances. She did not play with children, preferring to interact with adults. After a while, all the kindergarten teachers knew her by name and told me how wonderful she was. She wasn't interested in the kids at all. I tried to talk to her about the kids in the group, trying to find out who she wanted to be friends with, who she liked. It was to no avail.

Constantly thinking about why my expectations are not met and always turn into disappointment, led me to think that it is very difficult for me to accept my child as he is. In my head was an ingrained image of a sociable, cheerful girl who had nothing to do with the real child who came into my husband's family. I constantly noticed traits in my daughter’s character that I wanted to correct.

As a four-year-old, I tried to lecture about the importance of being sociable, courageous. I scolded her for painting all day in the garden instead of playing with the girls. I noticed traits in other children that I liked, and I really wanted my child to have them.

Fortunately, at some point something clicked in my head and I realized it was time to give up on expectations. It is difficult to say what this was related to. The time has come, or the books on education that I read one by one have helped.





My previous experience has repeatedly shown me thatempty expectations are a way to nowhere, they tend not to come true.

As a rule, our expectations are related to what we do not have, but want to have. Expecting something from my daughter, I focused on the traits and abilities she didn’t have, but I wanted her to have.

Instead, I tried to see in her the abilities she possessed. And try to focus on them, develop them.

I have noticed that she is extraordinarily persevering for her age, can do one thing for a long time, is prone to logical conclusions. Every day, in addition to the question “Why?”, she asked five hundred thousand questions “What if?”.

After consulting, my husband and I decided to give her to chess. No mistake. Two years in a row, her daughter became the champion of her chess school. He wants to win a cup for the third time next year!





School champion 2015



The next thing I discovered was my daughter's ability to create with her hands. Any kind of activity that requires sleight of hand, she is just fantastic. We began to support her in this direction. Now we always have stationery in the house, various paints, pencils, clay, plasticine, mastic, even a pottery wheel! I regularly replenish my daughter’s collection with fabrics, buttons, sequins, because she loves to sew clothes for her dolls and toys. The last hobby was rubber bands, from which she weaves incredible figures, invents them herself and records mini-lessons on video.

The third revelation was that she is a very kind, compassionate girl and has a great desire to do good deeds. At the age of four, she could cry over a touching moment during a cartoon or story. This prompted us to talk about different topics in the family, to talk about how people and especially children live in different countries. Now, at age 6, she has a conscious desire to make the world a better place. She notices imperfections and wants to correct them. Today, she dreams of becoming an architect of the city of Moscow, and she has a project on how to make the city comfortable, beautiful and clean.

That’s how, not without mistakes, I came to realize that my child is absolutely special, like him, in the world no longer exists. And if I want my daughter to be happy, I need to give up my expectations, which are related to my own unfulfilled life plans.

I took the same approach to other areas of my life.

  • I stopped expecting anything from other people.- that I will be appreciated, loved, will treat me attentively. I stopped expecting my husband and family to do what I wanted them to do.
  • I stopped waiting for tomorrow to bring good things. I realized that calmness and clear weather were inside me, independent of the number of challenges I faced. To be afraid of problems is to not trust myself, to be afraid that I will cope with them.
  • I allowed myself to act spontaneously, intuitively. Although I used to carefully prepare for everything from a family dinner to a presentation. I needed to know in advance how it would be so I could control the process and not make mistakes. It was exhausting. I felt exhausted during the preparation stage.
  • I stopped thinking about the future. That doesn’t mean I don’t make any plans anymore. I know what I want and I’m moving towards my goals. But I now know that my ideas about the outcomes I want are nothing compared to the possibilities that life offers. Stop imposing your expectations on her, open your eyes and ears, and everything will happen a thousand times better, though in a completely different way than you imagined. “Everything will work out in the best way for me” is now my constant companion.


Also interesting: Personal experience: My daughter and I got better and became wiser.

Where to expect or try to survive from lemon tomato juice



I learned that there are no good and bad choices. All options should be accepted with gratitude. Then you start to get completely unexpected surprises from fate. published



Author: Gulnaz Sagitdinova



P.S. And remember, just by changing your consciousness – together we change the world!

Source: interesno.co/myself/32503281d94a