Letting go…of anticipated expectations

Our home was a happier place before Molly the doll entered it. Bedtime was so much easier before the tale of Molly the doll’s story haunted the imagination of our eight-year-old.

Each of us has that one friend with the arsenal of scary stories. My daughter has that friend too and a sleepover later, sleepless nights ensued in our household.

If that has got you curious, here’s the story. Molly is a doll who holds up two fingers and is not to be played with past midnight. The poor girl does and is spooked at night, with “Molly on the staircase…. Molly is in the room…Molly has a knife…” gulp…gulp…I was just as scared! The girl in the story is not to be found the next day and Molly now holds up three fingers (gulp again…). “Mom, that means Molly killed the girl,” my daughter tried to explain with eyes as wide as could be.

“It’s just a story”, “see how safe your room is”, “we’re only a shout away”, “let’s think of a different ending”. Many attempts at rationalizing failed. More nightmares later, we realized that drastic measures were required.

The next day, I had my daughter recount how she felt when she thought of the Molly story. We went through the hallway and the staircase, and the knife and the fingers…Since she refused to write, I did. We put on paper all that was scary and unsettling about Molly and the story.

And since we do things with a theatrical flair, we took the papers outside and burnt them. No such thing as too much drama in our household. As we watched the flames crackle, I gently reminded my child that all that was scary was burning away and nothing but ash remained. Ash that would fly away and turn into nothingness. We went back into the house assured that all traces of Molly had blown away.

It was a proud parenting moment. Till night fell on our household and a small-faced child sat on the stairs stating she was too scared to sleep.

But I had handled it all so well. All that drama for nothing? This was not what I was expecting…was my instant reaction. “We watched it all burn into ashes, remember?” I asked my daughter. “Maybe it didn’t all burn, Mom. Can we burn more stuff tomorrow?” she asked with what I thought was a twinkle in the eye. Wait a minute. My sly little fox was enjoying the little bonfire in the yard.

Sigh… so much for successful parenting. I had thought this one through. We were supposed to burn the stuff and be done with it forever. This was not how things were supposed to turn out. But again, it was not unusual for things to not turn out as expected. Murphy’s law likes to follow me around, after all.

And like many other life expectations that didn’t turn out as expected, I let this one go too.

I gave my eight-year-old the benefit of doubt. The next day, we wrote some more and burned some more. We did it again the following day too. And there is the chance that we may do some more burning again…  And each time, I let go of the anticipated expectation a little more.