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Canuckle 80 1/6

#lettingjoyin

Expectation or gratitude?

The past week has been brilliant for putting my sense of entitlement back into check.  I still get caught off guard at how deeply growing up in a white middle class family in America has imprinted me with an expectation for smooth living.  (Moreover, this expectation and sense of entitlement is a thief of joy - an inside-job robbery of my own doing.)  As much as I think of myself as an open-minded and easygoing character filled with more gratitude than expectation, the truth is this is a perspective I still have to check in with extreme regularity and adjust mechanically as needed.  

Beyond showing me that I will in fact survive if things aren’t always easy or smooth (and that this really, really is ok!), life in Latvia was a mirror on some hard truths about myself.  I suspect if it hadn’t been for fifteen years living outside the culture I was born into and grew up in, I might not have gotten such a good look at some deeply ingrained thought patterns, which it turns out I am still working on unraveling.  

Dainis has been on-again-off-again coughing since the start of April.  Our rapid tests keep confirming it is not covid and there have been zero symptoms to worry about beyond a cough.  He hasn’t had a fever, he is eating and drinking enough and his superhuman levels of energy continue to keep us all on our toes and wishing for someone to just hurry up already and invent that technology for transferring young children’s bottomless stamina into their caretakers.  But it has been nearly a month and the coughs have gotten juicier, so I decided last Friday we should have a medical professional listen to his lungs.  

I know that our family doctor is well-booked in advance, but there is a walk-in clinic at his practice, so we woke up early to get ourselves in line in a timely manner.  Turns out from that very day the walk-in service is no longer available on Fridays due to staffing shortages.  The receptionist kindly gives us two options of covid/cold/flu assessment centers which have recently opened in the area for just this type of situation.  Originally created as walk-in centers, both have since shifted to appointments only and I quickly learn that all appointments are filled for the foreseeable future.  With some more digging, I discover another local walk-in clinic which assures me that they will be able to see Dainis today if we do a rapid test in front of them upon arrival to prove that he is covid negative.  We drove home to pick up our rapid tests (Dainis was understandably not a happy camper as we’d just done a rapid test an hour earlier and why must he have a stick up his nose again) and arrived at the walk-in clinic only to discover a line out the door with 15+ people ahead of us.  Dainis has already cried and found his courage again three times….there is no way I’m going to be able to keep jollying him along for however many hours it would take to creep forward through this line (never mind that withstanding the chilly wait outdoors no matter how well-bundled he is did not seem like a wise choice for his cough).  

I was supremely annoyed at this point (even as Dainis is thrilled that indeed he won’t have to have the stick up the nose again) and needed a few minutes to breathe through this irritation before moving on with the rest of our day.  This was a glass half-filled/half-empty moment and it was in my power to decide.  The day was not unfolding in the way I had expected, but it was in my hands to decide how much that mattered.  My original expectation was that both boys would be back at school and I’d have the whole day to run my own errands and clean the house following a week of visitors and preceding a busy weekend that will conclude with a birthday party in which we were preparing to host ten children and twelve exotic animals in our living room.  The expectation which replaced this original intention was to carry out my responsibility as a conscientious parent and finally nip this cough in the bud before it morphed into something serious.  I started on the path of ‘Damn Covid!’ for butting into my life and my well-sculpted plans *yet again!*, but I realized if I check in with myself at this exact moment, everything is actually ok and indeed better than ok.  What was that I wrote once?  ‘Gratitude or expectation? The choice is ours.’  

Instead of allowing my thoughts to steam forward fueled by heavy irritation and scathing judgment, when I took my self-generated expectations out of the equation, here is the far more level-headed conversation I had with myself: Dainis is ok right now. I can still get to a pharmacy and speak with a pharmacist today about whether there’s anything more I can be doing for him. I am living in a country where the quality of health-care is high and it is absolutely free for my children. Even if things are currently sluggish, if this becomes more serious we will absolutely get the help we need. (Is there room for improvement on this - yes!; are we in immediate trouble right now because of it - absolutely not, that is my imagination getting away from itself creating ‘what if’ scenarios.)  We have a car to easily get ourselves where we need to be, I have a phone and internet to connect with potential resources, I am fluent in the language of this country so this is not a barrier.  And on and on, I understand that we are actually ok in the moment and most likely will be ok, because even if everything isn’t just the way I’d like it to be right now, our situation is good and we are blessed.

I give Latvia kudos for giving me plenty of practice with stepping outside of judgmental mind spirals and reframing my instinctive perspective of entitlement.  When I comment on life in Latvia, I often feel like it comes across as a judgment toward Latvia and that’s certainly not the way it’s intended - in reality it is a judgment on me.  I have to tell the story from the perspective that I lived it and the things I experienced and comment on because they stand out most brightly in my mind were not within my norm. The truth is that even as they felt weird and different *to me* at the time, for someone else, that is just reality.  I appreciate having years of practice to redirect the aim of my knee-jerk judgmental reactions, by using them as a mirror to delve inward as opposed to lashing out externally.

The following two stories are my favorite snapshots of how I learned to harness that unattractive moment of entitled expectation and swing it around into a reality-check and gratitude:

Keeping other people’s perspectives in mind sure helped as I learned to navigate public transport, a ripe breeding ground for some of the more savage lessons that have come my way.  ‘Sometimes elbows are necessary’ or ‘sharpen your elbows - we’re going in!’ are our family metaphors for moments when you just have to ruthlessly stand up for yourself.

Upon arriving in Latvia one of the more startling differences was people’s sense of personal space in public places, particularly where moving forward in a line was involved (case in point again, my first post office experience).  It is absolutely something I can comprehend with my head, if not with my heart, understanding how pushing your way forward in a line during the Soviet times may have meant you got the last pair of shoes or bundle of sugar while others went home empty handed.  I now experience reverse culture shock when I’m in the US and someone says ‘excuse me’ for coming within a foot of my space without even having touched me.  

While I’d experienced the elbows here and there, that legendary train ride home from the beach on a hot summer day is how I first learned to use my own elbows.  I came to understand that like it or not, sometimes elbowing your way through can be a necessary part of survival.  

Trains run about every fifteen minutes through the beach stops in the summertime and we arrive to a platform pretty full of people.  The train pulls up and is already bursting at the seams with people from the previous beach stops heading back into the city.  It doesn’t even occur to us that more people could possibly get in, but astonishingly, everyone around us starts wriggling their way into the already full train cars.  Those comical tiny cars with endless streams of clowns pouring out of them have got nothing on Latvian trains in the summertime.  KB and I are the only ones who step back, politely making the decision to wait until the next train.  Somehow everyone else manages to find their nook or cranny on that train and everyone holds their collective breath as the doors close.

Fifteen minutes pass, and the platform is full of people again.  I am beginning to glimpse that although I consider myself quite open-minded and unbiased, I carry some pretty deep sense of entitlement involving my personal comfort and it’s not something I was particularly proud of.  I’m broadcasting my politeness and respect for others but peel back a layer to find the bubbling lava of my hot judgemental desire for my own comfort. I am looking down my nose at the situation and realize this is a perspective that will need adjusting.

This is not a threshold I am eager to cross.  I wish there were a more graceful way to step off my pedestal without involving my elbows, but when the next fully packed train shows up, we understand - when in Rome….  If we want to get home that night, we’re going to have to join the party.  

We look at each other hesitantly.  

Elbows up?  Elbows up….

***

I’d already done a notable share of heavy learning on the precociousness of the big stuff in life - relationships and marriages - before arriving in Latvia. However there was still quite a bit more expectation and entitlement that needed unravelling.  One moment it’s here and the next it’s not is not something a middle class citizen in the US often has to consider when it comes to the minutiae of life, and Latvia had some crisp lessons in store for me on the impermanence of it all.  I attribute my false presumptions of anything otherwise to my privileged upbringing.  Not that I came from a family in which my every whim and desire was instantly pacified.  There was plenty that we wanted but never got or had to work for diligently to get if we wanted it badly enough.  But every need was met without question and moreover I grew up in a time and place where if I prioritized something highly enough, I could make it happen.  The American Dream.  Proof of this was quite simply evident in weekly trips to the grocery store.  Want fresh tropical fruits in the dead of a Wisconsin winter?  No problem, if you’re willing to pay for it.  In the mood for breakfast cereal?  There’s an entire aisle of options for you, go nuts and get exactly what your heart desires.  Orange juice?  Your options are also endless.  With pulp or without?  Organic or frozen?  Mixed with other flavors or pure?  Which kind of oranges, exactly, will you drink - navel, valencia, blood oranges, or tangerine?  And always, always, in the unusual event that your exact preference is not immediately available, the store will express their remorse at this unexpected hardship, finding a way to make it up to you.  (In our family, this was dubbed the ‘Free Butterick Pattern’ phenomenon, born of the time when my mother expressed a complaint at her favorite fabric store and she was appeased with the offer of a free pattern, despite the fact that this didn’t actually resolve the issue.)  

Like it or not, growing up like this cultivates an awesome sense of entitlement and embarrassingly unrealistic expectations.  Latvia’s grocery stores certainly helped me revise my expectation that everything I desired would be readily available.  Here I am not talking about the typical American standards of chocolate chips, spicy salsa that actually has a kick or Ben and Jerry’s ice cream, which I knew I was trading in when opting to live in Latvia, but I am talking about super basic things which are truly grocery store standards.  It’s not that they aren’t ever available, they just might not be available on the day when you’ve planned to buy them, and no one will offer you free coupons or apologies for not having it in stock that day. 

In my first weeks living in Latvia, trips to the grocery store were always a true adventure. (Mistaking spam for a nice Italian sausage was a true story, made more horrific by the fact that I discovered this as I was making my infamous gourmet lasagna for a friend...which ended up turning into a spam lasagna!  Hilarious lessons of lightness for learning to just let go and live in the moment were aplenty as a fresh arrival to life abroad.) I easily spent triple the time grocery shopping, taking my sweet time in finding what I actually needed and always scoping out what else was available in planning for future shopping trips.  So within a month of arriving in Latvia I was quite certain and optimistic that I’d be able to make tacos when I had it planned, because taco spices and tortillas had recently become available on regular rotation in large Latvian grocery stores. Everything on the menu was now standard ingredients that showed up at the store week upon week. 

Except when I finally planned to make tacos, there was no lettuce at the store.  Not the kind that comes in a pot with roots still attached, and not any other kind…  Seriously?  How can there be no LETTUCE?  I was beginning to glimpse that although I considered myself quite open-minded and unbiased, I carried some pretty deep sense of entitlement around things like the availability of lettuce in grocery stores and it wasn’t something I was particularly proud of.  Brush it off.  No lettuce is a bit disappointing, but tacos without lettuce it would have to be!  

Until I got to the meat counter and there was no ground meat.  Of any kind.  So that was that - no tacos for dinner.  For a super crazy planner like me, I felt like a ship lost at sea trying to navigate the store with my useless grocery list.  For others, it may be totally standard practice to wander through the aisles and put together a meal based on what looks good (and years later I pride myself on not only having developed this skill but also not breaking into an instant full-body sweat if I have to use it!) but that day I truly felt like a fish out of water.  Nowadays my grocery lists are much looser and I always have plans B, C and D in the back of my mind.  This skill probably also reaches beyond the aisles of the grocery store. 

Beyond this forced flexibility in the life of a super planner, the important lesson I’ve learned through grocery shopping in Latvia is to walk into most situations with gratitude instead of expectation.  Whether you realize you’re harboring the sense of entitlement or not, if you’re expecting your every desire at your fingertips, it can only lead to disappointment and grumpiness when things are not just so.  If you walk in with gratitude for what is available - the ability not only to work with but also appreciate what is instead of what you’d like - the world starts looking a hell of a lot different.  

Things have changed a lot in fifteen years, with all kinds of things readily available in shops that weren’t here when I first arrived.  There is still an unmistakable burst of excitement when something old and familiar suddenly shows up on the shelves - Doritos and Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups are two recent newcomers.  I always do my fair share to help boost sales - sometimes they stay, sometimes they disappear again after a matter of weeks.

 

It’s my constant reminder to keep expectations in check and pour out loads of appreciation for everything that is.  In this moment.  Here and now.  

There is a great comedy sketch available on youtube by Louis CK called ‘Everything is Amazing and No One is Happy’.  He describes perfectly how as humans we are far too quick in getting used to absolute marvels and miracles.  The idea that we are painfully annoyed at a ten minute delay on a flight even as we are sitting in what is essentially a bus with wings that is going to fly us around the world.  Or how crazily impatient we become if our internet connections are a bit slow, when these signals actually need to travel all the way up to space to bounce off satellites and make their way back to us.  Or how wildly beautiful the full moon is, but no one bothers to notice it anymore because it will be back again next month.  Gratitude or expectation?  The choice is ours.

So here is how the story of getting Dainis to the doctor concluded.  During the weekend we focused intently on comfort, rest, nutritious food and plenty of fluid intake, as we do when we are unwell, while I diligently popped into the cold/flu clinic sites regularly until an appointment became available for Monday afternoon.  We made it to Monday just fine and arrived punctually ten minutes ahead of our scheduled time to an unexpected lineup of five people at the receptionist’s desk with another ten people already seated in the waiting room.  I understood we would not be seeing a doctor in ten minutes, but I also understood we definitely would be seeing a doctor that afternoon.  I spent the next hour in the waiting room seated comfortably enough with Dainis on my lap as we paged through the thick storybooks we’d brought to help us wait more patiently.  I marveled at the loads of mumbling, grumbling and outright complaining filling our collective space (including from people who hadn’t scheduled appointments but made the decision to wait and see if they could get squeezed in and then subsequently rolled their eyes dramatically and grumbled some more at every scheduled appointment holder who arrived).  I didn’t judge the situation and I sure didn’t judge the people (after all, just Friday I’d mumbled and grumbled myself, despite the insights life has offered me and lessons I’ve already ‘learned’), but I did observe and marvel. 

I marveled at how living in the North American bubble leads us to expect our bumpy paths to be smoothed over so quickly.  Does it suck that you don’t feel good and can’t get to the doctor straight away?  Of course.  Does it suck that what is advertised as a walk-in clinic doesn’t function in that way right now? Yes. Are you actually going to die if you wait until tomorrow when the receptionist is offering you an appointment?  Probably not. And if it gets to the point that it feels like you will, you have the amazing opportunity to call an ambulance that will pick you up quickly and transport you to the ER for free and your health care at the ER will be for free (yes, USA, I’m looking at you here - and that *is* me passing judgment).  Is the situation ideal?  Of course not. Is it hard when you aren’t feeling well and are worried for yourself or your child?  Absolutely!  However….let’s keep it in perspective: here and now, we are better off than a very large part of the world’s population.

I double checked with KB to make sure my memory wasn’t blocking something out, but we both agreed - no matter how long the lines were for health care in Latvia, we don’t ever recall seeing someone complain or even express annoyance about the wait.  If you couldn’t wait that long, you made the choice to leave and would sort it out in some other way; if you needed to wait, you waited.  The expectation was never there that this needs to happen straight away and on my terms.  For better or worse, our thought patterns really are incredibly ingrained by our surrounding culture and it can be pretty hard (and uncomfortable) to see outside of that.    

So… expectation or gratitude? The choice is always ours.  

TBR!

 TBR! Gearing up for another Readathon tomorrow! Flipping pancakes and simmering soup, so I don't have to worry about food! Books and cozy clothes ready to go! #lettingjoyin #deweys24hourreadathon

Dancing rainbows!

 Dancing rainbows! My mom gifted Austris and Dainis each a Swarovski crystal to hang in our windows. She loves walking into a room full of dancing rainbows on sunny days and wanted us to enjoy the same magic. It really is spectacular! #lettingjoyin

Less is more!

 Less is more! A box of wood cut-offs and a pen brought out a juicy burst of imagination and creation of an entire town filled with detailed scenarios. #lettingjoyin (Holding space for their boredom to cross over into creativity isn't always easy but definitely worth it!)

Kindness

Dainis was awake two hours before his alarm this morning. (I love that he still asks permission about whether he's slept enough and if he may get dressed on the odd morning when this happens - if I say no, he will crawl back into bed and wait, but this morning he was so bright-eyed and cheerful upon waking, he was clearly ready to take on the day!) He then spent an hour sweetly trying to coax Austris out of bed, culminating in selecting an outfit for him and laying it at the foot of his bed as I do most mornings. They really do watch and repeat everything we do, and it sure feels lovely when our little mirrors reflect kindness (and organization skills!

) back at us. #lettingjoyin

'Is it cotton candy, mammīte?'

 'Is it cotton candy, mammīte?' asked Dainis about a jar full of cotton in the doctor's office. 

 #lettingjoyin He had cotton candy twice last week, so it's very much on his mind! And while this question gave me a good chuckle, it also gave me a good think. Something along the lines of thinking or not thinking about pink elephants and how we can let our thoughts be influenced by experience but we also have the ability to influence our experience by thought patterns we choose.

We had a zoo in our living room!

 We had a zoo in our living room! Rabbits and tortoises, snakes and lizards, ferrets and frogs, a sugar glider, a hedgehog and even a tarantula!! More amazing photos to follow but this was a special moment for the birthday boy - a chinchilla on his head! Pure joy!

#lettingsomuchjoyin

The things we do for the people we love!

 The things we do for the people we love! There are certain foods my people love so much, I make them often enough that the recipes are etched in my brain. Chocolate chip cookies, my grandmother's breakfast porridge and buttermilk pancakes have held this place of honor for many years, and as of today I can add fudge brownies to the list because Dainis is a true chocolate lover. This is the one and only 'cake' he will consider when we celebrate him and tomorrow is his fifth birthday party, which is really more of a first birthday party since all the birthdays he can remember have been spent in lockdown. We're going big because he deserves it, so stay tuned to what else is in store for tomorrow... lots left to do to prepare the house and I don't mind one bit, because my people's joy is my joy too! #lettingjoyin

Brotherly love!

 Brotherly love! These two sure do walk the tightrope of sibling love and rivalry as masterfully as the best of them, so those genuinely thoughtful and caring moments fill me up with enormous warmth and hope. Dainis was at the shops today choosing how to spend his birthday money and his most important criteria was finding something his brother could play with too. #lettingjoyin

Lingering leftovers!

Lingering leftovers! The week melted away far quicker than any of us would have liked, as it always does, but there are always pockets of joy left after Omīte and Vectēvs visit. Still enjoying Latvian cheese and rye bread courtesy of my mom's kitchen and basking in the 'chicken soup for the soul' that is time well spent with grandparents. #lettingjoyin

 

Simply stunning!

 Simply stunning! A bright sunny day spent in the urban jungle and enjoying the beauty of life underwater. #lettingjoyin

Inukshuk!

Yes, it is snowing! (Again?! Still?!) Love showing Omīte and Vectēvs all about life in Canada! #lettingjoyin 

Long awaited!

 Long awaited! Ready for our first swimming lessons in Canada! 

 #lettingjoyin

'I declare war on your egg!'

 'I declare war on your egg!' Dainis has had us in stitches today with his passion toward the yearly 'egg battles'. We've never had such thoroughly cracked shells on every single egg from every possible angle. 

 #lettingjoyin Happy Easter, dear family and friends!

Sugar!

 Sugar! #lettingjoyin

'The young generation versus the old generation!'

 'The young generation versus the old generation!' (Captioned by Austris) Insert classical music in the background for the full effect. #lettingjoyin 'I don't even care who wins, this is really fun, right, Vectēv?!'

We all just may explode with joy!

 Today we all just may explode with joy! 

 #lettingjoyin (It's been nearly three years!!!)

Coversations with Austris!

 Coversations with Austris! The last few days feel especially saturated with his zingers. 

 #lettingjoyin

This is happening!

 This is happening! 'No winter lasts forever, no spring skips its turn.' #lettingjoyin Not pictured but equally joyous: air that smells like dirt, a choir of birdsong and such bold warmth from the sun that I'm certain this afternoon I'll be leaving my jacket at home.