Patience

I sit here and look at the new pictures my girls brought home from school. Alyssa’s in blue and Olivia’s in red. I can’t help but think of those as their colors these days.

I look at those pictures and I imagine the mother those sweet, loving girls deserve. And I always fall short of that ideal.

I know we’ll never be quite ideal but I want to try harder to get there.

I want to be more patient. More loving even when I have to discipline.

Take meals for an example. It drives me nuts that Alyssa takes forever to eat dinner each night. How hard is it to eat four green beans? It doesn’t even matter that they’re drowning in ranch dressing, she can take fifteen minutes to eat those stupid beans. And I get irritable and grouchy with her.

She’s just a kid. She doesn’t like green beans and so she puts them off to the end of the meal. And then she draws it out even further, trying to avoid eating them at all.

In the end, she eats them and we can all leave the table. But while we’re waiting and she’s telling stories and being silly, I get more and more frustrated by the fact that I have a lot to do and instead of getting all that stuff done, I’m sitting there waiting for her to eat those damned beans.

But…reframe: I get to sit there with my daughter and listen to her imagination as it spills out of her mouth. Yes, the beans are still uneaten but I should be treasuring this time that she wants me nearby. This is a precious moment in her life when she wants to talk to me. And I need to step back and take it all in rather than thinking of all those other things that need to be done. She’s only going to be eight for ten more weeks. She’s still so little in so many ways.

Instead of nagging her to eat her beans, I need to listen to her, bask in her beauty and her intelligence. Those beans almost always get eaten anyway. I think a little nudging instead of nagging will get the job done. And that will allow the mood to stay jovial instead of it deteriorating into frustration all around.

Both girls deserve a little more patience from their tired old mother. I’m trying. I hope, someday, when they look back, they’ll know how much I love them and how much better I wanted to do. I hope they know that they were the most important things in my entire life. I hope I manage to show them how special, how amazing they both are between my snapping at them to eat their beans and to just go to sleep already.

There’s a lot of hope flying around my life these days.