We are always taught to expect everything.
In the perfect archetypal Western life, we're born in nice, suburban neighbourhoods with ever-expanding basketball hoops, bases filled with sand, bicycles unlocked in the front for the easy get-away, play dates and day camps and babysitters on speed dial. We grow up in small orange brick elementary schools, evolve into larger and less colourful middle schools where we twirl our furry pens, discover our first "real" crushes and group dating, movies with a hidden chaperon and a regular pizza place. And then high school, with a light tapping of Converse rubber soles on cool linoleum flooring and a quick wink from the janitor. This is where new friendships cement a little quicker and rip off with little more than a bittersweet spot of gooey dark gray residue.
We are always taught to expect everything.
Graduation comes, cuing the cheesy music and the nights bent over beside a friend's used red Toyota (another hand-me-down), vomiting out the last remnants of a torrid but fleeting love affair with Bacardi Breezers. And then we ship out, hours away to university, where we finally feel like living out our free and youthful innocence, befriend strangers and spend hours discussing Neitzsche over cheap diner coffee. Suddenly everyone you meet is another one-night stand, a disposable best friend, used for good conversation and tossed away the next day after empty promises - however good it was while it lasted.
The rest, of course - graduation, the dawning of the proverbial REAL WORLD, full-time job in a field that no longer seems relevant to your degree. You travel quite a bit, discover the world while you're still young and spry. You go to Vienna and try to catch a wisp of the legacy of all your heroes, drive around the South of France with other twentysomething friends, teach English in Japan. All of this, before you finally meet a man (a MAN, with an ironed shirt and perfectly tousled brown hair, nothing but pens and promises in his pocket) and settle down and move into the nice suburban neighbourhood with the basketball net out front, with the unlocked bicycles. You introduce your children to this life, more play dates and daycare. All of this until the kids turn into grown-ups, with grown-up minds and Blackberries, with their own children in the daycares and an arm around their waist, chatting eagerly about the economy and cheese and asking you for recipes.
We always expect everything.
Is it time to consider a plan B?
