I’ll always remember my grandmother spelling P-A-T-I-E-N-C-E out loud to my grandfather during a car ride once. We were stopped in traffic waiting on construction. He went to turn the car around, and she stopped him. By the time she had finished spelling the word, the sign had flipped to “slow,” and we were on our way. Fast forward 30-some years and I catch myself spelling PATIENCE in my head all the time. Patience as my 4-year-old puts his shoes on the wrong feet. Patience as my 8-year-old tries to master changing her own earrings. Patience as my toddlers clumsily make their cautious way up the stairs on their hands and knees.
As a parent, patience is so hard to remember. Patience is always something I need to work on. I’m often tired, stressed and busy feeding, washing, changing or dressing four little bodies in addition to managing laundry, cooking dinner, packing lunches, finding babysitters, scheduling haircuts, going to doctors appointments, getting school supplies, signing up for dance and soccer, volunteering for PTA… oh, and did I mention I have a full-time job? So patience is often in short supply, for various reasons. Why aren’t there more than 24 hours in a day again?
One thing I’ve learned the hard way is that those little ears and mouths never stop listening and repeating everything I say. If I want a mirror for my behavior, all I have to do is turn to my children. I’ve tried to be very, very conscious of how this lack of patience has affected my kids lately. And there were two incidents recently that opened my eyes to how my frustration and tiredness led to a lack of patience that then affected my children.
The first was a day this summer when I took off work to spend a special day with just my son. We went to a Jacksonville Moms Blog park hop, then out to lunch, and then to Target to get the fizzy bath balls of his choosing, which he loves. We had about 30 minutes to kill before getting my older daughter at camp, so, parked in the shade in the Target parking lot, I began to check my work email.
From the back seat I could hear my son getting increasingly impatient.
“Mom. Let’s go, Mom. Let’s go get sissy, Mom. MOM. I WANT TO GO. GO NOW MOM. MOMMMY.”
“Buddy, I need to respond to these for work. We had a fun day, and I need five minutes to help people at work, OK? We will go in a second. We have plenty of time.”
“MOMMY. WANT TO GO NOW.” And then the killer:
“MOM. YOU ARE WASTING MY TIME.”
I stopped short at these tough words from my 4-year-old. Because I had said that exact same thing to him during a tantrum that weekend. For 45 minutes, he screamed and refused to calm down over something I felt was ridiculous. I had errands to run, things to do, places to go, babies to get down for nap, and I was so tired of the ongoing tantrum and screaming. So I told him he was wasting my time. Not my best moment. This comment, in addition to my sweet, sensitive daughter’s increasing anxiety over being late to places, about not being ready when it’s time to leave, panicking when I ask her to do something and rushing to finish simple tasks when I ask for her help made me realize:
Every day I need to check myself. P-A-T-I-E-N-C-E.
As hard as it is, or as tired as I am, whether I have any patience left at all, I need to pretend to for my kids. I don’t want them to be stressed out at 8 years old. I don’t want my 4-year-old to think waiting in the car is a waste of time (it’s a welcome respite for me!). I want my kids to stop and smell the roses, linger at a sunset at the park, take their time getting their art project just right, and have the ability to wait quietly until I am able to get them a snack. I don’t want my impatience at adult things and with adult tasks to color their sense of time or erode their confidence in their ability to get things done on their own. I need to practice patience, so they can mirror taking their time and waiting for others. Even if that means I need to spell it out, every day.
