Patience is not my strong suit. I am better than I used to be but I’m still not great. I hate the feeling of helplessness that patience requires. I hate things outside myself that don’t move or react as quickly as I do. This made me a less-than-stellar mother when my kids were little. I honestly couldn’t wrap my head around how much my kids didn’t know. And the messes they made! That there is some pretty dysfunctional parenting.
I hate when some illusion I harbor of being in total control is tested. I was never in total control, of course. Far from it. But what a handy deception that was. It usually alienated or amused others who fully got that it ain’t happening until it is supposed to happen. They traded stress for relaxation and enjoyed the unexpected downtime. This used to horrify me.
“WHAT do you mean “siesta”?” “Why can’t these people keep their stores open all day?” “Back at WHAT time?” “Am I supposed to hang around here waiting for you to get back from lunch until I can purchase my – pick one – train/ferry/plane/bus ticket?” This was particularly galling in the then so-called “third world” countries. Customer service standards were variable at the best of times. Those populations had a lot of patience to put up with it. Or they had given up caring.
The qualities of being demanding and impatient generally made me a fairly typical entitled Yuppie and an unpleasant person to be around. Why can’t this task be accomplished in this amount of time I expect it to be to a suitable performance standard without so much whinging and whining about inadequate time and resources and blah, blah, blah? Not only did I not get the results I wanted with this attitude, but I also frittered away MY downtime. That was dumb.
I come from a family of worriers so in part I know it is genetic. Or environmental. My Nanny would frequently fret about just about everything. Maybe that was her coping strategy. She’d fret about the weather and if it would rain or not. And if the bread in the big mixing bowl would rise sufficiently if the air got too humid. We lived in mortal terror of opening and mistakenly slamming the oven door. The cake would definitely fall. I once saw a cake this happened to. It was a slippy-slidey, lopsided-looking creation on the plate. But with a generous dollop of icing on top, it still tasted delicious.
So today my fate is entirely in the hands of some faceless bureaucrat. Months of planning and negotiating a visitation schedule are likely to go up in smoke if the unnamed bureaucrat doesn’t come through. Blame and punishment are equally useless in a situation like this.
Eons ago, life won the arm-twisting contest and I started my transition from demanding Arschloch (That’s German. Look it up.) to a more patient and reasonable person. It was around the same time I learned the world’s shortest prayer that I regularly employ when I conclude there is not a damned thing I can do to make the current circumstances any better: Fuck it.
“Fuck it” has a dazzling breadth and range of applications to an equally dazzling breadth and variety of situations. This particularly patience-trying situation I am now in included. I believe it is wise for me to employ that short prayer right about now. So, fuck it. Que sera, sera. (That’s French.)
Expressive Compulsive 