Great Expectations

I suppose that one’s expectations around moving to a foreign country are not so different than one’s expectations about having children.

You go and visit a few times; it looks exciting. You know that if you go to live there, there will be difficult moments, but you think you can probably anticipate and overcome them relatively easily, because after all, you’ve been there.

Kind of like babysitting someone else’s kids for a couple of weekends, and then thinking you know what parenthood will be like. “Yeah, I know having kids can be a lot of work,” you tell yourself. “I’ve done it.”

And then you arrive – in that foreign country or parenthood - and it’s not what you expected. Or it is what you expected, intensified a thousandfold, and complicated by a million things you didn’t expect.

And the most unexpected parts are your own reactions to things, your own feelings, your own struggles to reconcile expectations and reality. And you seek others like yourself who “get” what you're going through, and if you’re lucky, you find a few, and you feel a little less alone and crazy.

And like parenting, life in a new place is punctuated by moments of pure unadulterated joy and discovery, of occasional mind-blowing epiphanies. These moments come unpredictably, which make them all the more rewarding. And in between all those brief endorphin tsunamis, there are long periods of struggle and sweat and confusion and disorientation. 

Sometimes you wonder, “What was I thinking?”

And other times you think, “I’m the luckiest person in the world.” 

And sometimes you don’t think much at all, you just do what needs to be done, whatever you believe that to be.