When I was in seventh grade my health teacher, Mr. Phillips, told me I would make a good teacher because I was so patient.
I immediately declared that I would never be a teacher in the kind of bratty voice that comes with being nearly thirteen years old and not particularly fond of Mr. Phillips.
This brattyness, I believe, was not entirely unwarranted. How much kindness can a middle school student be expected to show to a teacher who tries to cultivate some cred with the class by mocking the then-current ad campaign for Alien by saying, “In space, no one can hear you pass gas”? I mean, come on. If you plan on teaching a bunch of twelve-year-olds you should at least be aware that they will laugh at the word “fart” but will find “pass gas” squirm-inducingly square.
Nonetheless, ever since then (a shocking thirty years) I have considered myself a Patient Person.
It has been only recently — most often when I hear myself telling Lily to Stop Yelling At Me! — that I have thought maybe it’s time to reassess.
Is Patience a Personality Trait or a Practice?
Here are some of the things that have helped me achieve Patient Person status:
- How my manager would trot me out every time an irate customer at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics ticket store started ranting in a language far more colorful than English because, say, the closing ceremonies were sold out well before any ticket stores were even open. (Yes, I worked at the Los Angeles Olympics. And yes that was over twenty-five years ago. And, yes, I am bored to death when the Olympics are on t.v. now and resentful that the are interrupting my shows.)
- My ability to talk the drunk and disorderly patrons out of the park while wearing a non-authoritative Dodger Blue mini skirt during my days ushering at Dodger Stadium. Or maybe it was the mini skirt and the fact that I was eighteen years old that made this possible.
- A year and a half of post-college employment pestering a bunch of graphic designers about ad deadlines without once getting yelled at so violently that it made me cry.
- Three years of the other students at Columbia Law School.
- Four years of teaching law students at St. Louis University Law School.
- Engaging in the most painstaking puppy housebreaking ever, consisting of setting my alarm and getting up every two hours to awaken Roxanne from her bed in the kitchen, leading her outside, and clapping insanely when she squatted in the grass. I am not making this up.
- And, most recently, that time I was visiting my mother-in-law when Jake was eighteen months old and prone to asking “why?” more than any normal human being could stand and my mother-in-law — she of the full-time raising of four children, bless her heart — told Mike that I was very patient with Jake.
It is, perhaps, this last snippet, spoken nearly two years ago, that has doomed me to the belief that I was always perfectly patient with Jake up until the moment Lily was born and I started yelling at him every second that I wasn’t already yelling at her.
Because it seems like that’s about all I do lately.
“Stop kicking her!” I found myself screaming at him as Lily took a break from playing with him in the bathtub last night to squall at being pushed into the corner under the faucet as Jake stretched out for a “swim.” “Go sit at the table with you sister!” I frequently screech as Jake pesters me for the juice I am at that very moment making for him while his abandoned sister yells from the prison of her high chair. “Please stop saying ‘Mama’ and ask me a question already!” I sometimes cry after the eighth or ninth round of “Mama?” “Yes?” “Mama?” “Yes?”
But I can — and do — apologize to Jake. I can explain that when Lily is yelling at me it is hard for me to be patient. I can tell him that he hasn’t done anything wrong. That I’m tired. That I’m sorry.
Lily, on the other hand, doesn’t understand the apologies, and that’s what makes me feel like a terrible mother. The kind who was perfectly patient with her first child and has spent the first year of her second child’s life snarling at her for expressing an opinion.
Part of the problem, I think, is that Lily was never a particularly fussy infant. Even before she could sit up unassisted, I regularly plopped her on the living room floor before wandering off to the kitchen to find something to eat. I made her wait, her little mouth opening sadly for the bottle that was not being offered to it, while I found just the show I wanted to watch on TiVo. And never once did she complain.
But now that she has learned about her ability to get things for herself — and discovered the great frustration that accompanies inability — Lily has found her voice. And directed it, more often than not, at me.
This is okay when I am not trying to do sixteen other things at the same moment that she is yelling at me. At these moments, I praise her communication skills and marvel at what a delightful child I have been blessed with.
But add in, say, a ringing telephone or dogs pestering me for their dinner, and I am suddenly greatly offended by being yelled at. And quick to express my offense.
So, too, I can marvel at how Lily holds out her arms to me with a big smile every time her beloved mother comes into sight. Except for the times I am on my way to do something that does not involve carrying around a twenty pound baby girl. And when she expresses her disappointment at the unexpected sight of me walking right past those beckoning pudgy arms I express my frustration at her.
A million times a day, it seems, I remind myself that Lily is not, in fact, yelling at me. She is just yelling. Because that’s her primary means of communicating. Especially when I am too slow to pick up on the “ba ba” request accompanied by the appropriate ASL gesture of “milk.”
And yet, a million times a day I hear my mother-in-law and Mr. Phillips praising my patience in a chorus of adulation. I see my little boy who had, I am certain, my undivided attention without another sibling in the house.
And I wonder why, oh why, I can’t be kinder to my baby girl.
Memory, Expectations, and Practice
I can make fun of myself here for my belief that I was perfectly patient and Mother Teresa-like when Jake was a year old. But, honestly, I still kind of believe it.
It’s hard to remember the times I senselessly yelled at him, even though all I have to do is hit the archives link here to be confronted with hundreds of stories about me acting just like I am now and feeling at least as bad about it.
In fact, I remember more than one occasion when I broke down in tears in front of him, blubbering that it wasn’t his fault and cursing myself for condemning him to endless hours of therapy when he is thirty-five years old and inexplicably blames himself every time someone he loves feels sad about something.
And yet I still expect myself to be perfect now. By pretending — believing despite the obvious evidence to the contrary — that I was perfect for Jake.
It’s amazing what the passage of time will do, how it can make me forget how hard it once was. And how that necessary forgetting can make me even harder on myself today.
Because the truth is that I was no better and no worse with Jake than I am with Lily. I was no more patient and no less patient. I was then and am now a mother full of love and tenderness for her children who also loses it sometimes.
The truth is also that Melanie Wilkes is a fictional character who, it occurs to me, maybe you aren’t supposed to be as attracted to as I was when I was nine years old and reading Gone with the Wind and thinking this milquetoast virtue was something to which I should aspire.
In fact, I think most of us would be bored by such a person. And yet most of us want to be her — at least where our children are concerned.
We quite logically want to be endlessly patient, endlessly supportive, endlessly able to stave off every single temper tantrum with our ability to intuit our child’s needs.
And even if we know it isn’t possible, we strive for it. We chide ourselves for failing. We set up false expectations and then fail to meet them.
I’m willing to bet even the Dalai Lama loses his patience sometimes. Because, I can hear him saying, it’s in the losing of our patience that we learn to be more patient.
Think about it. Human beings have triggers. We get tired and cranky and sick of being yelled at by a one-year-old. We get frustrated that it’s eight o’clock and dinner is still not on the table. We get annoyed when our alarm clock is a screaming baby at six a.m.
And we’re allowed to.
But maybe if, instead of using our energy to feel bad about being tired and cranky and frustrated and annoyed, we accepted it and moved on we would learn something. Maybe we’d be a little bit less tired and cranky and frustrated and annoyed if we didn’t hold onto those emotions, if we freed ourselves up. Thought, “Geez, that was no fun. I’ll try not to do it again.”
There will be those times — like this weekend when Aunt Minnie was available to hold Lily every time I needed a break and Jake’s cousins were tiring him out running in circles and sledding and making necklaces — when I think I’m the most patient person in the world, that I’m done with yelling, that I adore my children and this adoration will make it possible for me never to yell at them again.
And then I’ll come home and Mike will be sick in bed and I will be trying to get everything ready for school and Lily will crawl after me crying to be picked up and I will tell her to get over it.
That was my morning. Which means that already today — before putting on my yoga clothes, before rolling out my mat — I’ve had a yoga practice.
Are Trees Patient? Vrksasana (Tree Pose)
Balance poses are the very worst thing to do when you’re impatient. And the very best.
Talk about humility. Not being able to simply stand on one foot is a lesson in it.
Balance does not come naturally to me. And so, over time, I’ve come to accept that fact. I’ve worked to drive the images of the people I’ve seen balance perfectly from my mind because I only use them to berate myself.
I have, in short, learned to fall with grace. To be patient with myself. And — I speak the truth here — to love vrksasana.
There is a joy to finding your center in this pose, to opening your heart, feeling the wobble of your legs without feeling the need to fall over, and realizing that this is, truly life.