One of the Virtues

A gentleman by the name of Ambrose Bierce wrote the "Devil's Dictionary" in 1911, and in it, he defines patience as "A minor form of despair, disguised as a virtue." Interesting.

I was not born to patience. Some of my earliest memories are of being shushed and told to wait. It wasn’t just my parents, it was everybody - teachers, siblings, strangers on the street . . . everybody. I recall vividly sitting in school and bouncing up and down, hand flailing over my head, ready to explode if the teacher didn’t call on me next. Waiting for Christmas nearly killed me.

However, I was born the youngest of seven children. Patience was thrust upon me. My mother said that when I was small enough to sit on her lap during church, I often would ask questions, expecting immediate answers. If she shushed me, she said, I would stiffen up my body and shoot out of her arms, off her lap and onto the floor in an instant. If she would whisper to me that she would answer my question later, I apparently was more accepting of that answer. Perhaps, then, in my youngest days, it was less a matter of having no patience than it was having a burning desire to be heard and acknowledged.

I haven’t changed much.

I have five children. They were born within nine years of each other – it was a busy decade. My hands and mind were full and busy all the time while John and I worked together to raise those five fiercely independent and distinct personalities. It was our choice – I wanted to be a mom. I wanted my kids to have siblings close in age to play with and grow up with. I had not a clue what I was getting myself into. It took every particle of my intelligence and energy to manage and maintain some semblance of order in our home during those years.

About the time our youngest was a year old, I noticed that I was not a very pleasant mom in the mornings before the older three left for school. I’m not a great morning person, and to be honest, I resented having to get up and make breakfast for children who sometimes complained that they didn’t want what I served them. We couldn’t afford the cold cereal they wanted to eat, so breakfast required actual cooking – pancakes, waffles, French toast, German pancakes, oatmeal, something like that. Some mornings I just didn’t want to do it. No. . I almost NEVER wanted to do it.

One day I heard myself grousing and snapping at the kids in my early morning grumpiness and I realized how awful I sounded. I realized how much I would have disliked hearing someone talk to me that way in the morning . . . every morning. I decided I needed to change my attitude. After a long, long time, I got better. My children have apparently forgotten these “dark” mornings, but I haven’t.

It was during these days of young motherhood that I confronted a presence even more irritating than having to make breakfast for seven every day. I encountered women who seemed compelled to make strange generalizations about my life, right to my face. It really irked me. Rolling them all together, the gist of their inane thinking went something like this: “Wow! Five kids! You’re amazing! I wish I was patient like you, so I could stay home with my kids, too. If I didn’t work, I’d go crazy.” Mostly I just wanted to punch them, collectively, in the nose.

What, me? Patient? I was crazy. I wasn’t patient. I would have loved to have been working outside the home, bringing in income instead of living on a single salary and scrounging hand-me-down clothes for my kids, driving an old nasty car because it was all we could afford and foregoing vacations because we had no money to travel. The thing was, it was more important to me to be home with my kids than it was to have the money. That was my choice, and I was willing to live with its consequences. I couldn’t have imagined saying to one of these women, “Wow! You make $75,000 a year? You’re amazing! I wish I were impatient like you, so I could use daycare and be happy at my job every day.” Okay. Apparently I can imagine it, but I would never have dreamed of saying it. That would have been outrageous! What a horrible, judgmental, unkind thing to say!

Yet somehow, it was okay for them to say it to me – often. Not just one or two, but dozens of women over the course of the years I was a stay-at-home mom made similar statements to me. I was hurt and astounded at how easily they judged me, somehow believing they were complimenting me. It only proved that they didn’t know me at all, and that’s probably what hurt me the most. With their comments, I felt brushed aside, as if my efforts and interests and personal sacrifices were inconsequential to them.

I was not patient, but I was learning. I had to learn to discipline myself; how to bite my tongue, how to read with energy the same story for the 148th time, how to remind myself of my objective and stick to my goal. In that way, I was no different from my working friends – we all made sacrifices. None were more virtuous, nor patient, than the other.

I’ve lived enough years now to acknowledge that I have finally learned some patience. My ability to demonstrate what I’ve learned still stretches a little thin in certain circumstances. I still don’t like it when people assume they know me without taking time to hear me out. I still stiffen up and shoot out of the paddock when I feel myself being shushed, and my patience is still fortified when I hear that figurative whisper, “We can talk about this later.” Maybe that’s all patience really is – just the willingness to wait a bit to have our needs met, holding on in faith that we will find what we want, our efforts will be validated, our voice will be heard. That seems worth waiting for.