Sexyat40

 I’ve been visiting a family member who is completely unhappy with her life. At 40 years old, she is struggling financially, raising kids alone, and her life is not what she expected. And adding to her frustration, she has compartmentalized her life into pretty little boxes, all which tell her what life “should be like”.

Of course, life never neatly falls into the neat little boxes like on television. The box of “This is what makes a good mother” resides next to “This is how a good son or daughter should act”. In the real world, the boxes break or life spills over from one box to the next. Life is messy, and many times hard. To create a small box or vision of how aspects of your life “should be” can become very unrealistic. You have to pick and choose your battles. What’s important is the end result of winning the whole war not winning every small daily battle along the way.

Instead of appreciating the great qualities of her children and people around her, she has developed expectations of how they are supposed to be. She has created boxes for them, and attempts to force them into her vision since they are part of her life. Expectation very often leads to failure. She has become dependent on them to live up to her daily expectation, and quite often becomes dissapointed when they fail to meet that expectation.

 Thats not to say that expectation is bad. Just as equally frustrating would to create a situation where nothing is expected of each other. But there needs to be a balance. The expectation needs to be based on the limitations and goals of the people she is trying to define. And living within those limitations. To expect more will only dissapoint her.

 Even in her current relationship, a sort of “Stella Got Her Groove Back” situation, she finds herself frustrated. Her male friend is simply that, a male friend who she goes to dinner and movies with, and sometimes they share more intimate times, a friends with benefits type setup.

 But it doesn’t properly fit into the box of what a relationship “should be”, even though this is the type of situation she is currently looking for. Instead of putting it into the proper box, she is attempting to define the relationship by a different standard, because to her, this type of setup is immature and not her. In the process, she  frustrating herself as well as him.

 Defining aspects of our lives is important. But just as important is to define then realistic fashion, and not based off of how life is supposed to be.

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