- r.m. allen
- 2 days ago
- 4 min read
A bucket list seemed both too macabre and too mainstream; I made a “30 Things to Do Before I’m 30” list instead. I was fourteen, caught up in the quirky girl zeitgeist of 2011, scribbling my dreams in convoluted columns of black ink. Though I have not set eye on that list in years, I know I have in so many ways failed that idealistic and idiotic version of myself. I did not marathon all 3 extended editions of Lord of the Rings. I did not publish a novel or even complete one. While I did get married, I did not have a baby, although my birthday marks 26 weeks of pregnancy with my first (I’m not sure whether she would have counted that). I did not go to London or to a live performance on Broadway to see any of the shows whose songs I had memorized by virtue of my obsessive listening (and still, I’m afraid, know by heart). I did not care to haul that notebook out of its box in the basement and revisit the other unchecked items on the list, many of which stopped mattering to me long ago, some of which will have to become bucket list items. I am not sure I need any more reminders of the things I should have done by now.
I did not have a formal five-year plan, but when my twenties began I had a general idea of what I would be doing and the timeline for it to unfold. Getting married, launching my career, pursuing a master’s degree, purchasing a home, growing our family—these were the milestones of independent adulthood, and I intended to reach each one in a timely and straightforward process. And indeed, I checked off some of those items right on schedule (some even a little earlier than anticipated) but none in quite the same way I had imagined. Like the cheeky carousel posts I saw on Instagram, there were my expectations, and then there was reality. They did not match. Some of those incongruences were far superior to my imaginings. Most, to my point of view, were worse. I did not get the perfect-on-paper teaching positions I applied for (one at the school where I student taught, one at the school where my husband started and ended his own teaching career). I did not enroll in the great books grad program I dreamed about. I did not move away from small-town Wisconsin, just to a different small town. And (as you know if you read my essay “For This Child I Have Prayed”) I did not get pregnant. It became increasingly clear that realizing my expectations did not solely depend on my own merit or will and that some things would happen to me that I would never have anticipated or desired. The future was unpredictable, I knew, but by my late twenties I realized it was completely unknown and largely uncontrollable. The path ahead seemed to me shrouded in darkness. What was going to happen to me? What was I going to do when it did?
I eventually recognized what I was thinking and how mentally destructive it was for me—if you read my essay “On Turning 28,” you’ll see how I was processing it at the time. I realized I couldn’t live like this, not just because it was deeply depressing but also because it defied the theology I purportedly believed. As I wrote at the time, “Surely goodness. Surely mercy. It is not death and disaster that follow me as a child of God, but God's grace and kindness. Though in this life we suffer as we anticipate the glories of the life to come, that does not mean that nothing good awaits us between now and then.” I knew it; I just needed to apply it, particularly to my grief surrounding the childlessness that for all I knew would be the permanent state of our family. And I have spent the next two years endeavoring to do exactly that: to embrace God’s goodness in my life in the forms it has taken rather than resenting the gifts He had not granted.
Slowly, I have been learning the difference between expectations and expectancy, as beautifully articulated by Ruth Chou Simons in her Advent devotional Emmanuel.
“Expectations leave us weary and discontent, believing we deserve more or better. They always leave us unfulfilled and doubtful about whether God is for our good. But expectancy is anticipation mingled with joy. It’s believing God is who He says He is while waiting patiently for His good to be revealed, however He chooses to reveal it. . . . Expectancy sets our sights on God’s promises rather than the empty pursuit of all that cannot truly satisfy . . . When we turn from expectations to being expectant, we will never be disappointed because God never disappoints.”
Once my own arbitrary timeline fell apart (I was not pregnant by December and therefore would not have a baby by 30), it became strangely easier to release my expectations and adopt a posture of expectancy—not entitlement, discouragement, or anxiety, but patient trust that God is not absent, not passive, but present and working in my life in whatever ways He saw fit. I still didn’t know what the future would be. Maybe I would have biological children; maybe I wouldn’t. If I didn’t enjoy the gift of motherhood, there would be what Karen Swallow Prior calls “other gifts to open.” I didn’t and couldn’t know how God would work in my life, but I could expect that He would indeed work.
Here at the end of my twenties and now quite literally expectant, I can look back on this last decade with at least an idea of what God may have been doing in my difficulties and disappointments. I can see the truths I internalized and the ways they shaped me. I can trace the narrative arc of my story and see my character developing. And I can expect that the future, though unknown to me, lies open before God, who knows the end from the beginning and exactly the middle that ought to connect the two. I do not need to fear the ways I might suffer; I know any pain I feel will be tempered with joy.
Now I am thirty, entering the middle third of a lifespan with this new decade. How strange that the year I thought everything would feel like it was ending is, in reality, the year it all begins anew.
