Practicing Patience

I have lately found myself re-telling the story of how I became a patient person.

Well, at least a more patient person.

When T & I were hoping to become parents, I had all the usual concerns... would I be able to care for an infant, would I be able to make all the decisions that parenting requires, would I be able to find another good job if I left the one I had, yada yada yada. But the one worry I decided to try to do something about centered on something less common. I was afraid that I didn't have the patience to be a parent.

I'd always enjoyed children, so I knew from experience that their sense of time is completely different from an adult's sense of time. Leaving the house with a three year-old in tow? Add 23 minutes. Trying to understand a two year-old's sentences? Pull up a chair. I trusted that it would be different when the small person in question was mine, but still... I worried.

So, in keeping with an oft-repeated pearl of wisdom from my father – "Fake it 'til you make it!" – I began impersonating a patient person.

Stuck in the slow lane at the grocery store behind some dingbat who couldn't remember which credit card still had some credit left, I pasted up a fake smile and breathed deeply. Waiting at a light behind someone who was apparently unable to discern green from red, I seethed while trying to move myself into a mental gear that could experience this as more time to listen to music. I felt like a fraud.

Still, I persisted. (I may not be patient, but I am for certain stubborn.) And slowly, as I started to vocalize my patient pretending, I started to feel a shift.

As I said, "It's not a problem, take your time," to the flustered Lands End phone clerk, she thanked me profusely. When I said, "Don't worry, I'm actually not in a hurry," to the restaurant's waitress in training, she looked shocked, then smiled and said, "You know, nobody ever says that." My little "patience project" was becoming less about my internal experience, and more about the gift that patience – feigned or not – could be for the people around me.

I love giving gifts. And during my whole growing up I watched my mom's kindness to the unnoticed workers of life – toll booth collectors, the woman named Mary who mopped the floor at our local coffee shop – so my gifts of patience began to seem like a small reflection of that legacy.

So. Am I a more patient person? I think I am. Or at least I am less reflexively impatient, and that's a start.

(Patient enough to graciously accept
offers of help that lengthen the task at hand.)