I want to say that I’m a patient person, but I’m not. 

If you had to rate my patience on a scale from 1 to 10 with 1 being a toddler and 10 being Job, I’d hover somewhere around -500.

If you were to ask what one of my biggest pet peeves is, “lollygagging” would 100% top that list. 

Apparently patience is something I need to practice and slowly learn. Don’t you hate that? I do. 

This past… well it’s been a bit, I’ve been struggling with this idea of patience in life. I feel like I am ready for something big to happen, ready to take the next step, ready to try something new, but it just is not happening. 

Since I’m not patient this has been…well it’s been extremely irritating actually. 

Here’s the deal, I am not particularly good at the mom thing, and for someone that has spent their entire life trying to be the best at what they do, this is like getting picked last for dodgeball every day. 

Art projects, teaching letters, folding laundry, listening to descriptions of Pokemon battles, and driving people to different sporting events are not in my wheelhouse. They’re not things that come easy to me. I know you’re probably thinking “ok, but these are all really easy tasks, what is the problem?” and while you might be right, they are still hard for me. 

I have to psych myself up (a lot) that I can do this, and if I can’t then at least I can pay for the therapy to make up for my mistakes. 

I’m not a warm and cuddly mom, I don’t instinctively know what my kids need or how to help them. I thought that because they were my kids it would be easier, it isn’t easier.

I see moms who just seem to get it, who seem to love every minute of motherhood, who seem to excel at raising children- I’m not one of those people. If you’ve met me, you’re nodding along right about now. 

And I don’t necessarily think it’s bad. I don’t always think this is a deficiency, I think parenting is a skill I have to work harder at developing than other people, and that’s ok. 

But here’s the deal, parenting is like… hm… math for me. I can do math, but I cannot do it well. I can practice, and practice, and then practice some more but no matter how much I practice, something in my brain gets jumbled and when it comes down to the test I cannot remember how to solve the problem. 

Parenting is kinda like that for me, except the test is every day. 

I knew that kids would be a challenge before I had them. I knew that my need to do things perfectly, and my anxiety about mess and noise would make parenting difficult.  And that’s been true. The noise, the inability to do it “right”, the lack of feedback, the slow incremental change, the repetition, it’s all really hard. 

I know this sounds like I’m complaining, I want to first say I live a charmed life. I am so blessed that these are the issues I’m dealing with. I have plenty of food, clean water, and a safe place to live- if we’re talking about Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, some of the bottom levels have been met and that’s why the concern is leaning towards the self actualization level. 

When I was a teenager I swore I would never be a stay at home mom, because I knew all of these things would be an issue. 

I swore I was going to change the world, that I was going to make a difference one battered woman, uninsured child, or poverty stricken family at a time. I went to college and then graduate school to do just that, but 10 years later… well I haven’t done that, not even a little bit. 

I have learned that I make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches incorrectly. That I don’t have the patience to let my kids help me cook, and that laundry multiplies exponentially, but that saving the world and making a difference piece, somehow that got lost along with my grocery list.

I keep telling Mr. Spreadsheets that it is time. That it is time to get back on track. He’s supportive of this, but here’s the reality, we have three, yes three, children and I have taken the last… 8 years off work. 

How do you even go back after that? How do you regain the skills that have gone dormant as you’ve mopped the floor, potty trained kids, and done all the voices in the Gruffalo? Let’s get real, do I even have the vocabulary to have a professional conversation at this point?

I’m impatient with this process. I want to jump in NOW. I want to believe that it’s not too late, that I can still do something, that I can still make a difference. 

This thought of being left behind is… discouraging. I don’t know that that is the right word, but it’s the best one I can come up with. 

I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately and just getting more and more frustrated. 

I’ve had angry conversations with myself (you know in the most sane way possible) and with God. There’s been some fist shaking as I’ve reminded Him that I did what I was supposed to do. I’ve reminded him that I followed Mr. Spreadsheets around Texas and all the way to Georgia because that is what we thought was right. I’d reminded him that He led me to graduate school, and that I must have gone there for a reason. 

And still nothing. 

Nothing has happened. 

I’m not saving the world, I’m not even staying on top of my never ending laundry pile. 

But when I found myself most discouraged and annoyed I got my answer. 

The answer wasn’t what I wanted, nothing has changed, but it was an answer. 

I’ve led you to the edge so I better tell you what the answer is, right?

Well the answer is patience. 

Yes, patience. 

I don’t like that answer. 

I tried to ignore it. 

This week we studied the Book of James, and if you haven’t read it lately, James talks a LOT about patience. 

I tried to ignore all the verses on patience, including:

But let patience have her perfect work, that ye may be perfect and entire, wanting nothing. James1:4

I told myself that patience can be applied to other situations, I can be more patient with my kids, more patient with other drivers, more patient when the pharmacy screws up AsthmaMan’s medication AGAIN, but that patience is completely unrelated to any career goals I may have. I told myself that this was different because in order   to move forward I had to do something and the more I thought about doing something the more discouraged I got that what I was doing wasn’t working. 

Then the same answer was reinforced (don’t you love that), indicating that maybe patience had something to do with this after all.

Today sweet friend gave a talk in church about patience. I think she gave this talk for a lot of reasons, but I’m pretty sure one of those reasons was so I could hear it. 

I could ignore the feeling that I needed to be patient, but it was much harder to ignore her saying it. Sometimes I think we need to hear things from certain people, and maybe I just needed to hear it from her. 

So it turns out the answer is to be patient with the season. Some days this season feels like a long drawn out Texas summer- the end is nowhere in sight, but just like the Texas summer, the season will change… eventually. The timing is out of my control, I need to be patient, to accept that this is the season I am in, and like a true Texan, embrace the heat and quit wishing for sweater weather even though Thanksgiving is just around the corner.

I read somewhere that as women we want to have it all. We want to have the schooling, the spirituality, the family, the friends, and the career. The author said it is ok to want to have it all and even to work to have it all, but that it is important to know that we won’t have it all at the same time. There are times and seasons for everything, it appears that this is my season of scrapped knees, playdough, and laundry, and while I do still want to change the world, this might just be the time I have to change the world inside my home.