on not living up to family expectations

Sat, 20 Jun 2026 20:29:54 -0400

My parents recently moved (are in the process of moving? are only temporarily moving? it’s a bit complicated and in a way that connects to the title of this post, but I don’t feel like going into the details), and so I recently came into possession of a few boxes of scrapbooks from my childhood and adolescence. I understand that my siblings were all happy to have theirs thrown away, but I am a committed journal-er, and if my dumb Facebook and Twitter archives were worth importing into the Day One app I use, I figured I should put the effort into digitizing the good stuff out of these boxes before throwing out all of the physical artifacts. I’ve only put an hour or two of effort into this yet (and much of that into a Siri Shortcut workflow that I hope will make the process go more smoothly than previous digitization efforts), but it’s been worth the effort so far. It’s neat to have some documentation to go along with bits of personal and family history that I’m only vaguely aware of, like the year of German kindergarten (equivalent to U.S. preschool) that I attended.

One of the most interesting (and also most difficult) parts of journaling is seeing how much I’ve changed over the years. Before picking up these boxes, I had finally finished digitizing stuff from the two years I spent as a Mormon missionary, and reading my thoughts on religion from nearly 20 years ago was often enough to make my shoulders tense up while I was writing—suffice it to say that I’ve changed my mind on a lot of things since then. Looking over documents and artifacts from nearly 40 years ago, though, is a very different experience. As a Mormon missionary, I expected that my relationship with Mormonism would continue indefinitely, and that that didn’t happen is the source of a lot of tension when “sitting down with my past self.” In the early days and years of my life, though, I didn’t have any expectations for myself, and any expectations were set for me by my family.

Some of those expectations were of the same religious flavor that I set of myself when a teenager and young adult (and, frankly, into my early thirties if that goes beyond “young adult”). I know that I haven’t lived up to those expectations, and I know that that’s a source of tension with many family members. What really stood out to me, though, when going through the cards that my parents received in the days before and after I was born, is how many expectations there were that because I was to be a boy, there were going to be a lot of sports in my parents’ future. Now, I did as many sports as most American boys do, and even if I was bad at them, I won’t say that I regretted the experience, but the cards that put a football helmet on a baby boy or that mentioned baseball as though it were a given did not really track at all. I wonder if that was a disappointment for the family members who sent those cards, in the same way that other missed expectations were.

I’m going to stop short of drawing any kind of explicit analogy or comparison here—because I’m mostly just riffing on ideas—but I think there is something to explore in the relationship between those two sets of expectations. As I keep digitizing, I’ll continue to explore how much I’ve changed over time, and I’m (mostly) looking forward to it.

Spencer Greenhalgh likes RSS and thinks you're great for using it

on not living up to family expectations