Life Minus Expectations = Happiness

Jun 30, 2009 by Peggy Nolan

An excerpt from my article, which appears in the July issue of the StepMom Magazine!  

 

Danger! Expectations

In my life outside of being a stepmom, I am a systems project manager for a major financial company.  As a PM, I understand all too well that poorly defined and / or ever changing requirements lead to miscommunication, misunderstanding, double the work in development, constant re-testing and all too often, the end result and the client’s expectations are farther apart than the next nearest galaxy.  The customer is disappointed (or has cancelled any remaining business with us) and the project team is in analysis paralysis trying to figure out what went wrong.

Sound familiar?  I bet you’ve seen this scenario or something similar play out in your work place.  If you think something like this only happens at work, you’re wrong.  It happens inside your home, too.  Yes, that’s right.  It happens right under your own roof.

In my line of work, a requirement is nothing more than a need or a problem that needs to be fixed or solved.  As women married to men with kids from a prior relationship, we stepmoms have needs, issues, and problems that need to be addressed.  Only they don’t get addressed for the very same reason that project requirements don’t get addressed. 

I’ve worked on projects where team members will discuss among themselves a poorly defined requirement.  They’ll come up with all kinds of ideas, prototypes, options, and sometimes they’ll just commiserate with each other because they need to let off steam because, gosh darn it, how are they supposed to solve a problem that they’re missing parts of the puzzle to?  Did it ever occur to someone on the project team to pick up the phone and call the client to get clarification?  That’s almost too easy.

Ladies – we do the same thing.  The most common problem I’ve experienced and see with my sister stepmoms is that we have poorly defined needs, issues and problems that we try to solve amongst ourselves and we wonder “why don’t our husbands just ‘get it?’”

Whether it’s in the workplace or your home, it boils down to expectations.  And as stepmoms we have some magical expectations…at least I know I started out with them!

For example, when I married my husband and his four kids, I had pie-in-the-sky expectations that everything was going to be wonderful.  I already got along with his ex-wife and her entire family. I loved his kids, I loved my kids, I loved him – life was good.

Until…

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