EXPECT 0%, ACCEPT 100% (Part 4):

Responsibilities redistributed

After the big ‘cup’ talk the hedgehog enthusiastically took some of the fruit and nuts from his squirrel wife’s cup and vowed to help her with the load and remove some decision making from her cup.

This lasted 3 wholesome days precisely.

You see, in the end the hedgehog would come back to his wife to seek clarifications and counsel on the decisions that needed to be made. She would give him the guidelines and for whatever reason, the task would end up back in her cup.

Sometimes because a deadline was missed, other times because the hedgehog forgot, or because he prioritised something else, or sometimes because his wife was in fact wired to ensure efficiency and couldn’t help ‘checking in’, and then doing the task herself.

In the end the wife’s cup remained full, because both the hedgehog and the squirrel were wired to behave in their set ways.

Expectations and peacocks

The squirrel wanted to help, but in all honesty she didn’t quite trust her hedgehog to complete the chores at the level of efficiency and pace she had set. He was doomed to fail before he had even started. She had set the bar too high, and had an expectation for him to follow her path. This was akin to asking him to turn into a beautiful peacock, and then being disappointed when he couldn’t quite manage it.

The entire expectation was flawed from the start.

A cottonwool-wrapped life

The hedgehog wanted to help, but he had grown quite accustomed to having things done for him. Ever since he was a child hedgehog, his own Mother had taken care of everything and now his wife and cleaner managed his life and picked up his malting needles from the floor. It’s not that he was intentionally lazy, quite the contrary, he worked hard at the stalls and was focussed. He was simply living in a beautiful ignorant bliss.

I’m sure if you asked him, he wouldn’t even be aware that his own skin of needles did indeed malt everyday. It was simply not in his awareness to notice certain things. And reading the emotions of other animals……forget it. This hedgehog wasn’t even quite clear on his own emotions.

His emotional currency was money. That’s what he understood, and that’s what got his blood racing, and his furry cheeks to flush pink.

He had grown up in comfort, and not witnessed a particularly difficult life. He attended the best forest schools, played elite sports, lived in large plushy part of the forest where the affluent resided.

He had grown up with his mother and nanny catering to his needs. His high-flying father was frequently absent due to work. But certainly his father had imparted his hard-working ways onto his son.

1% of the population

His parents taught him ethics and demonstrated hard work. But their ethics were confined to the experiences of the top 1% of the global forest population. Hedgehog lived his privileged life holidaying on snowy ski-slopes and visiting far flung exotic forests, mixing with other hedgehogs who looked and sounded just like him.

He was quite unaware of the dark part of the woods.

The dark side

The darkest parts of the woods where his squirrel wife was raised, to him was akin to a folklore story. The struggles, trauma, stories and strife experienced in the dark part of the forest did not touch the hedgehog’s life in any way. Thus his awareness of others and the world outside of his 1% blinkered worldview was limited to say the least.

And over the years he had not embarked on much personal development to push the constricts of his mind beyond that of a rich privileged hedgehog’s mindset.

So one cannot blame him for not having the opportunity to practice building his sensitivity muscle around empathising with other’s situations.

Although one ‘could’ hope that life’s circumstances may give rise to the need to develop empathy where it is so obviously vacant.

Wealth conversations reigned supreme during his upbringing. For that is what had afforded him and his family the options and freedom they enjoyed. He was the product of his environment and upbringing. As are we all.

To the hedgehog, financial wealth was everything.

Stark contrast

By contrast his squirrel wife had been raised a minority in a dark part of the forest, where she witnessed her parents struggle and slave away just to keep a roof over their head.

This early childhood experience had shaped the squirrel’s tenacity and grit to grow and work hard to achieve. She was driven by the fear of not wanting to return to her childhood upbringing, and to be able to provide for her family.

To the squirrel, family love was everything.

Neither the squirrel nor the hedgehog had noticed their fundamental different value system, despite being married a number of years. This difference in values would later become a point of poignance in this love story.

The cup was still overflowing

Life plodded on, and the squirrel and the hedgehog moved houses. The squirrel’s cup was still overflowing, but she had figured out a nifty hack to manage. She worked out she could numb herself and ignore the feelings she had been having.

This was easier than asking her hedgie hub to help with the load. They had tried that numerous times before.

Her approach allowed her to live in an illusion that everything was fine, and she was fine, and her health was fine, and her babies were fine, and business was fine, and her marriage was blissfully fine, and even the throbbing pain on her big bushy tail was inherently fine.

Fine.

A certain kind of blindness

The hedgehog continued with his blinkered world view, living a catered life where all he had to do was ‘turn up’. He could just turn up to work, to his home, to see the children, to all his holidays, to catch transport, board planes, to sit at the dinner table, to attend restaurants, and parties etc, and everything was magically arranged and catered for him.

I guess he had mastered the wonders of outsourcing early in life.

He could even bathe in the glory of appreciation and compliments whenever any of his family member’s celebrated birthdays, Christmases, Mother’s days, random days etc….since all their gifts would also just ‘turn up’, with his name scrawled upon them. Wizardry at work.

A masculine spiky incarnation of cinderella showing up at the ball, if you would.

As long as all he had to do was turn up, life was comfortable.

Cracks

After their house relocation, the squirrel became quite unbalanced. Her squirehog baby and toddler were both demanding. Understandably so. They were at such a tender age and needed their parents time, love and affection.

So the squirrel would over-compensate and focus more on her children, catching up with her business needs late into the night.

Her bushy tail throbbed with pain, she ignored it.

However, she had noticed that whilst she was focusing on her squirehog babies, she was not as productive for her business. Indeed she started to notice a decline in her business sales and profit figures.

She had taken her ‘eye off the nut’

So she swung back to focussing on the business, and physically attending the stalls again and being present for her buggy team. This worked for a while, however she felt incredible guilt for not being present for her young squirehog.

A tug at her tail, a pull on her left arm, a squeeze on her right, she was pulled in all directions.

The squirehog kids became clingy and would experience separation anxiety and cry uncontrollably every time she left home to attend to the stalls.

All parents experience this rite of passage with the tug of war between attending work and being present for children.

What is one to do when your head tells you to get to work and earn more nuts, but your heart demands you to remain with your children? Who should you listen to?

Nursery naughtiness

One day the squirrel received a phone call from Principle Sparrow the headmistress of her child’s treehouse nursery. Principle Sparrow explained that the squirrel’s eldest child was displaying aggressive behaviour and constantly biting, hitting and throwing nuts at forest classmates.

These behavioural outbursts continued over a period of time, and the calls from the headmistress came all too frequently.

The squirrel’s guilt shot through the roof, as she penned yet another apology note to the child and parent who had been the victim of her squirehog’s tiny teeth.

In the end the squirrel decided she needed to be more present for her squirehogs, so she swung back to working from home again, so she could eat and play with her children. She would continue her work during the gaps when they napped and late at night.

It was juggle struggle HELL.

It was a guilt whirlpool

It was a shame-laden existence

And it wasn’t very productive at all

Turn up Hedgie

Meanwhile the hedgehog did what the hedgehog had always done. Just turned up dutifully to work everyday. Leaving the rest of the mechanics and logistics of life to his ‘fairy wifey squirrely’ godmother to procure and conjure.

To him, his wife was now ‘working’ from home so things were fine. Plus he had heard from his friend that both their wives were meeting for a coffee playdate every week, so he assumed his wife was relaxing at home, tending to the kids, doing a ‘bit’ of work here and there……and clearly getting time to do coffee with her friends, so things were all good in the hood.

A clash of values

What neither the squirrel nor the hedgehog realised, was that they were both running their lives according to their own values. He went to the stalls to earn nuts for the family and she worked from home to looked after the babies …….and also earn nuts for the family.

They also didn’t realise that they were inadvertently imposing their own values on one another, without prior discussion nor agreement.

They also didn’t quite understand one another’s value system, and thus didn’t respect (nor accept) how each of them arrived at decisions.

So with both the squirrel and hedgehog living life according to different value systems, find out what happened to them in PART 5 of ‘EXPECT 0%, ACCEPT 100%’.

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Written by Dee Allan-The Gritty Girl, International Speaker, Writer and Entrepreneur. Dee runs an employment agency, blogs on the Medium platform, and lives in Singapore with her husband and two cheeky kids.

This tale follows part 1. If you missed that article you can access it here:

https://medium.com/@thegrittygirl/expect-0-accept-100-part-1-a4b239b21d4b

Part 2 is here:

https://medium.com/@thegrittygirl/expect-0-accept-100-part-2-96cd17fbbea2

Part 3 is here:

https://medium.com/@thegrittygirl/expect-0-accept-100-part-3-24ba01b66669