I try not to ponder about the presence of disappointment that I bring to my family and mostly myself. The unseen threads that grew between my native home and my life away were strung with shiny baubles of expectations, and tripping upon them, they shatter around my feet. 

"It's okay, you never knew" I am told, of being that panacea I was expected to be.  But I do know.  It's a tight fist of frustration, wondering why I cannot seem to be doing anything right, much less make you (and myself) proud.  Thinking of ways to be gooder, hating the simmering feeling that so far I'm not enough.  I try daily to pepper those bald spots in my existence with gooder things, intentions, words, gestures.

One sobering morning, I learned that even in this, I failed.  My wanting to be gooder hadn't gotten anywhere, because the math of disappointment and forgiveness is often exacting in one direction only.  The times that I held my tongue was a stage for previous slips to show themselves.  An act of physical aid a reminder of the ones I hadn't been around to perform.  What good I did today didn't matter nearly as much as what no-good I did that other time.  Memory was like a bright lamp-cum-magnifier looming larger than life, and my meager acts of repentance were left to writhe like worms in their glare.

"You planted seeds at each of these times," I was told.  Panic-stricken, I realised that those vines had grown from seeds that grew more virulent in anger than the ones I was sowing in reconciliation.

Why is it that disappointing is so easy and appointing so very hard?