Patience in the Moment

Motherhood challenges the patience in serious, frequent, and unremitting ways. Five years into it and I feel like I can say just a tiny bit about it, although still have so much to learn.

As a Christian, I am to fulfill the duties according to my God-given vocation (which, in my case, right now, is being a wife and a mother-of-children [versus mother-of-adults]) in a thoughtful, diligent, patient manner. (I'm not taking the time to cite Scripture, Church tradition, saints, or the Catechism, but I don't think people would disagree with me.)

One aspect of this (perhaps deserving its own blog post) is fulfilling the duties of my vocation . . . not the duties of another person's vocation, and of my vocation right now, not my vocation at another time. I don't know about other mothers, but sometimes I feel desires to "escape" by doing things outside my vocation that would make me feel more glorious or more appreciated. For example, sometimes I dream of serving food at a soup kitchen for homeless people instead of serving food at my own kids' dinner table because other people would see my serving at the soup kitchen and think I'm a really fabulous Christian, but there doesn't seem to be as much glory or as many witnesses in my serving mac and cheese to my own children.

But, back to patience. A couple of years ago, I taught myself a trick of resignation (a word that has an inappropriately negative connotation outside of Christian literature) that has helped me grow my patience (from infinitesimal to something more than that). Having read "Trustful Surrender to Divine Providence" approximately a zillion times so far, I've begun making some minute progress in actually surrendering to such providence. We are to praise God in good and in bad (cf. Job). Therefore, the trick I came up with to help myself was that when the plans change awry in an instant, I tell myself, "Oh, so this is what God wants me to be doing right now!"

• I'm trying to serve dinner and Mary pours a cup of chocolate milk on the floor: "Oh, so God wants me to be wiping up chocolate milk!" or ". . . to be teaching a three-year-old how to wipe up her own milk!"
• I've got all the children loaded up in the van and buckled, engine started, when a child announces he needs to use the potty: "Oh, so God wants me to take a child to the potty and be late to our appointment!"
• I want to be writing a blog post but the children break out in a fight about playing Ring Around the Rosey: "Oh, so God wants me to focus on my kids and teach them how to negotiate play nicely and fairly!" (Ask me how I thought of this example.)

And so on.

Maybe such a trick won't help other mothers, but it sure has helped me to stay calm more often instead of busting a gasket.

Then a few days ago, I heard a wonderful perspective--to me like a bolt of lightening--from a mother-friend at a meeting at which we were studying the virtue of Christian patience. She was describing her impatience and audible groans when the children need her attention yet one more time. To paraphrase her as best as I can remember, she said:

"I've realized that it's wrong of me to say, 'I don't have time for this!' The reality is that this is why God has given me time. I have time so that I can teach things to my children . . . over and over and over again."

Whether it is teaching how to tie shoes or how to exercise patience in waiting for attention instead of throwing a tantrum or how to negotiate peacefully instead of hitting your brother, this is why God has given time to us mothers. It is God's providence when to create life and when to end life, so it is with His good pleasure that we are alive right now--and to what purpose? God entrusted these exact souls to these exact parents (mother and father) for us to raise -- not to allow them to grow up passively, like letting a plant grow wild in the garden, growing according to capricious sun and rain.

I've been parenting for only five years and only three kids, so the one thing I am sure of is not being an expert of any sort. But I have found one trick that has helped me in my walk of Christian motherhood for the last couple of years and now a second trick I am going to employ, so I wanted to offer these to my sisters.

1. "Oh, so this is what God wants me to be doing right now!"
2. "This is why God gave me time!"