So misappointed....

Or--naked in my orange shoes

“I’m wearing my orange shoes and nothing else,” I texted my friend Greg while my husband was deployed. The fifteen-month separation dragged me down, tossing me in the gritty spin cycle of single parenting five emotionally-charged kids. I felt fragile.  

But I can explain.

Words, as we know, matter. Eugene Peterson’s translation of James warns: A careless or wrongly placed word out of your mouth can [destroy]. By our speech we can ruin the world, turn harmony to chaos, throw mud on a reputation, send the whole world up in smoke and go up in smoke with it. (The Message)

I argue further that sometimes, every letter matters. Tiny single characters, when misplaced, can be disastrous.

My suggestive text message to my friend was a continuation of a conversation the night before on Greg and Abby’s front porch. We’d gathered with our ‘military kin,’ families we’d done life with for over a decade at various duty stations. Kids armed with squirt guns ran around the yard while adults sipped lemonade and beer on the front porch, swapping stories. Greg had a sense of style and panache well known among us. Though an Air Force pilot, he was a true craftsman, an artist, and like a brother. So when he complimented me on my new orange sneakers, it felt natural to press him for an honest critique: “Really?,” I pined, “Is the orange scarf too much with them?” I’d wondered if my whimsical bandana was too extra. 

Greg’s sudden scrutiny evoked a playful scowl: “Yep, it’s too much orange. I’d stick with just the orange shoes.” 

I thanked him with a grateful laugh. The evening wound down, and we all corralled kids and clambored to cars with hugs and warm See you soon!’s. 

The next morning, kids off and dog fed, I dressed for the day in my new shoes. Remembering Greg’s ‘outfit check,’ I shot him a breezy text congratulating him on his influence: 

“Hey, Greg, today I’m wearing my orange shoes, and nothing else orange.” Smiley face. It was a digital high-five. I didn’t think anything else about it.

Except the year was 2011, and my flip phone’s medieval technology only allowed part of the sentence to appear on his phone within the first ‘text bubble.’ Apparently, horrifyingly, some final letters were missing–the six very important characters at the end. Long seconds later, the crucial word appeared for Greg, all by itself, in its own text bubble: 

orange.

I’m lucky. Both Greg and Abby knew my heart–that I wasn’t a lonely seductress seeking a clandestine affair–and assumed something techy was amiss. The ‘seducing’ incident is now legendary, revisited again and again over lemonade and beer on front porches. My jovial husband, safely on my arm, finds it hilarious, a humbling reminder of the way a communication breakdown, just a few missing letters, can create calamity.

Mere letters can alter what we mean. Even three letters preceding a word–a prefix–can change everything. With this in mind, I’m suggesting a new word. I move that our culture reconsider an overused word, a possible misnomer, its prefix potentially harmful: the word disappointed. Replacing the “d” with an “m” would often be more etymologically accurate. 

Disappointed is, of course, an adjective that describes a condition. Its meaning references 1) a person who’s sad or displeased because someone or something has failed to fulfill her hopes or expectations; or 2) an expectation prevented from being realized. The root word “appoint”  from 12th century Old French apointier  means, "to duly and fitly arrange, settle, place.” In the early 15th century, it came to mean "to put in charge, authoritatively nominate or assign.” Following these semantic bread crumbs, to appoint is to attribute a job, a position to someone or something. We ‘appoint kings,’ when we put them on a throne, crowning them with authority to duly rule over us. 

Which begs my question: What expectation or hope have I appointed to a place of such prominence that when it falls from its perch, I’m wrecked…disappointed? With maternal hindsight, I wince at what I allowed to dis-appoint me as I cheered on my kids to adulthood. I “appointed and gave authority or assigned a high position” to so much that didn’t belong on a pedestal. Pedestals are precarious. I allowed outcomes to rule over me, and outcomes are not manageable. Whether my child was nine or nineteen, whether they landed that part in the play or that scholarship or that job….these idols of my heart were often misplaced. Misappointed.

Mis-appoint is a more intellectually honest word. Three little characters shift the onus from them (unfair) to me (fair). Mis– is a prefix of Germanic origin meaning "bad, wrong.” It’s found in Old English to mean "divergent, astray." Take, for example, “misstep,” from the 13th century missteppen: to "make a false step, stumble”  We go astray from the correct step; we step wrongly.

You get it….

Let me brag. My kids are creative, intellectual, deepl-souled humans who are in a moment of hard-won flourishing. But as they’ve journeyed toward and through their twenties, I confess that identifying where I end and they begin has been tough for me. I placed on them too great a burden: emotions too tethered to their choices in that liminal space. In every parent’s defense, we just care so much. We want them to thrive, so we tend to misappoint. 

I find in Wendell Berry’s Hannah Coulter a tender ally who gets me. Getting on in years on their farm, Hannah deeply loves her children and grieves their departure, one by one, from life on the farm, from life with her: “I have this love for Mattie. It was formed in me as he himself was formed…my love for him goes all around him just as it did when he was a baby and a little boy and a young man grown…For a while, especially if you have children, you shape your life according to expectations. That is arguably pretty foolish, for expectation can be a bucketful of smoke…After your expectations have gone their way and your future is getting along the best it can as an honest blank, you shape your life according to what it is…”

Hannah’s longing mirrors mine. Berry’s words on love and expectations are a salve echoing that I miss my young children even as I celebrate their adult friendship. I recognize it’s involuntary for parents to “shape our lives according to expectations,” even when they become “a bucketful of smoke.” We sit on our hands while we pray they prosper. We try not to misappoint.

Famed psychologist Eric Berne exhorts, “Every person has the right, the responsibility, and the capacity to make the decisions necessary to take charge of his or her own life.” 

I bet he was a perfect parent. As for me, I too often misappointed my happy hopes on their decisions. 

I’m in good company. My friends and I, all enjoying our late forties and fifties, chide ourselves and each other about the ease with which we misappoint and plant our feet on the false summits of our kids’ agency. Will they pursue an ecclesio community–or not?  Are they caring for their mental & physical health? Did they study enough for the SAT? Why are they dating that person? Why do they smoke and order UberEats and say bad words? What choices led to that fender bender, lost job, or overnight jail stay? Will they vote my party line? And most importantly: why did they wear that stupid thrift shop wolf t-shirt to brunch with Grandma? Throw in unmanaged depression, young adult anxiety, and the messy stuff of real life, and parenting Gen Z-ers sometimes feels like roller skating across an undulating, plank-and-rope suspension bridge while trying to catch a curveball. The stakes feel high, and we’re motion sick. 

One doesn’t need to be a parent to do a “prefix check”: is it intellectually honest to nurse disappointment right now, or is this a misappointment? Have I put my hopes in an uncontrollable outcome that shirks the burden of responsibility from me to someone else? 

I’m not advocating we steer entirely clear of “disappointed” or wave a “Boycott Sadness” banner. I energetically agree with the important insight of Dr. Kate Bowler: “toxic positivity is fundamentally unhelpful.” Suffering is baked into the human condition and demands our full range of emotions–grief, anger, and yes, unfiltered disappointment. No linguistic contortion can diminish the sting of tragedies leveling us–chronic pain, death of a beloved, lost relationships. Sometimes, we’re gutted–full stop. As Kate cautions, we must “be picky about the words we use” to describe ourselves to avoid the danger of “performative joy [and] forced optimism.” 

Hope is essential to life, and life is unfair. I’m simply offering that sometimes, replacing “I’m feeling disappointed because _____'' with “I feel I’ve misappointed because____,” can pivot us from the unsteady to the stable, beckoning us as my friend Kirsten says, “to slip our hand into the hand of our Savior.”  In my own relationships, this minor alphabetical tweak has released me to love more freely. Perhaps I’m late to this party (Boundaries was published in 1992, after all), but as a forgetful creature, I need constant reminders about what is and isn’t a healthy summit. I return often to a song from my childhood–the final phrase notably repeated:

My hope is built on nothing less

Than Jesus' blood and righteousness.

I dare not trust the sweetest frame,

But wholly lean on Jesus’ Name

On Christ the solid Rock I stand,

All other ground is sinking sand;

All other ground is sinking sand.

Edward Mote’s great 1854 hymn refreshes my memory: the solid rock is not a friend’s choices, nor a spouse’s, nor a child’s. I can only control where I stand, choose my own firm ground. I’m learning to pass on to grown humans, over whom I want to hover, the script my counselor suggests: “You get to decide what you do with your own life. You have agency. I believe in you and think you’ll choose your own path wisely. You don’t have to worry that your choice might topple me from my summit, because my feet are firmly planted on the Rock.”

I’m so misappointed in ______ is my new phrase. It’s liberating, for me and for those in my orbit. (I’ve already been thanked for becoming–to steal Sissy Goff’s word–more “breezy”). It demands an internal spell check by forcing me to ask, “On Whom have I wholly leaned?” It demands, in life, that I review the message I’m sending before I hit ‘send.’ Sifting the sinking sand from what is solid rock, I may speak a better word to both myself and to others.