GREAT EXPECTATIONS?
Emma Forrest on the gift of quiet acceptance
This summer, I took my six-year-old daughter, Carolina, with me to a friend’s 70th birthday party. The Tuscan farm where my friend lives is one her happiest places – with sheep, courtyard kittens, a parade of grandchildren and hot-air balloons that rise at dawn over the valley, why wouldn’t it be? Carolina was buzzing around everyone from the moment we arrived, and it escalated once the party began. In a room packed with grown-ups in beautiful dresses and farm-hardy shoes, she spent the whole party tracking the progress of the birthday cake, a huge chocolate cake that looked like the one she’d seen Bruce Bogtrotter consume, to jubilant applause, in Matilda. She was so well-behaved, entirely focused on waiting for the cake’s arrival, following it like how, at a busy intersection, we follow an Uber’s arrival on our phones. She declined all other food because she was saving herself for the cake. We tend to think of young children existing either in the states of elation or tantrum, but we consider less how much anxiety small people can hold.
When the cake finally reached the living room, the candles were blown out and the first piece was cut but Carolina somehow sensed the cake was the wrong density. She was right; it was a Sachertorte, a grown-up cake for a grown-up party, not especially sweet, no buttercream inside, just bitter marmalade. And when, hackles raised, she tasted it, she burst into tears. Spitting it out on to the plate, she had a small emotional breakdown and had to be carted off to bed to sob herself to sleep.
End of the party for me. But I wasn’t angry because I didn’t think it was a case of her behaving like a spoilt child (she can be, but that wasn’t it). I understood, right away, that she had sabotaged herself by setting her heart so intently on one thing. Anything can be talismanic. But if you choose just one thing – one cake, dress, career or man
– and it isn’t ultimately as
you expected it to be, it can throw you. This runs counter to how we’re raised. The British education system trains us to narrow our focus as soon as we can: to have chosen only three A-level subjects by 16, not to mention the one thing we’ll specialise in at university. I think it’s why I opted out of higher education completely. All you have to do is read children’s books to know that to be determined, to be relentless, is to be every heroine of classic literature aimed at girls, from Little Women’s Jo March to Alice in Wonderland.
As my daughter hiccupped herself into a tear-stained slumber, I thought of all the times I’ve ever pinned my hopes and expectations on a thing – new boots, a red lipstick, a fresh haircut, a lover – and how they’ve never fulfilled the fantasy of what I needed them to be. I genuinely felt crushed each time. There is no new red lipstick to be invented, all the reds that exist already exist, yet we still make it our quest: find that magical one that will flatter our complexion and unlock our face’s true potential. I thought about how hard I pursued almost every guy I landed, and how weeks after getting them, I knew I’d made a mistake. Splayed like a starfish in her unicorn jammies, I nudged my daughter on to her side and remembered climbing into bed with a man I’d worked so hard to woo and, as he kissed me, feeling like I’d chosen incorrectly in an identity line-up.
And I just kept going and going, leaving a trail of destruction behind me: in love, in work, in my bank balance. I never stopped to wonder if maybe I didn’t need anything at all. That nothing could make my life all that much better. When you accept that, the great thing is, nothing can make your life all that much worse. There’s the power of accepting reality. Real life, honestly lived, starts to shimmer with beauty. Real life has the tones to flatter your complexion.
It took me decades to reach this understanding. My first memory is asking my dad to get me a sweatshirt with polka dots for my birthday, and then crying because the polka dots weren’t the size I’d wanted them to be. It sounds depressing, but it’s actually not. To finally develop diminished expectations in all areas of my life has been a huge gift.
It isn’t that you should accept a sweatshirt with the wrong size polka dots. It’s that the ‘right’ size polka dots do not exist.
I have to hand it to Carolina: from afar, the Sachertorte looked like Bruce Bogtrotter’s cake. I mean, from afar, I look like Winona Ryder. To live a truly adult life, one in which we feel incarnated rather than as if we are constantly reincarnating, we have to grapple with what things are in actuality, in texture, in scent, in mottled detail.
If we can understand that Lauren Hutton is Lauren Hutton because of, and not in spite of, the gap between her teeth, why can’t we extend the same flexibility to ourselves?
I don’t think diminished expectations applies to love, not in the way you might imagine: I would never advocate for settling. I’d say it’s better to be alone; it’s certainly no lonelier to be alone (than to settle for less). I got divorced, left a decade in sunny California and came back to London to start again, and you want to know one of the very first things I realised? No Beverly Hills flower shop has anything as good as a bunch of roses from Marks & Spencer. You know why flowers are better and cheaper in the UK? Because there’s a lot more rain.
At the end of most 12-Step meetings, they say: ‘Let us be grateful for what has been given, what has been taken from us and what has been left behind.’ So I’ll end this by asking: what can you live with if things don’t go the way you thought they were supposed to? I can live with a small place as long as it has a big view. My heart, here, in a two-bed attic flat, feels the same as when I was married and had a big place with a big view. I do need a cat. I don’t have my favourite cat, my soul cat, who went missing and was found six weeks later, dead in a water outlet. That wasn’t at all how that was supposed to go.
But now, I do have a sweet cat.
Your life, most likely, isn’t going to be as you thought and yearned for as a kid: to be perfect, to be like others’. It won’t always be worse… it may just be different. You’re a grown-up. Savour an unexpected flavour. My point is: it isn’t the end of the world if it wasn’t what you expected it to be. Carolina was too young to overcome her cake-rage in time to see the sun set and the hot-air balloons take off above the valley. You’re not.