I'm coming! Hold your horses, already! |
Thomas is
the child who will start getting dressed, and then fifteen minutes later will
still be sitting in the spot you left him, with one pant leg on. He’ll just sit there like that until you say “Come
on, Thomas!”
At this
point in our relationship, I’ve learned a few tricks and frankly have acquired
a bit more patience, but it wasn’t always this way. One morning before church I
got so irritated (yeah, I know it’s ironic) that I told him “Thomas, you have got to move more quickly! We are going
to be late! If you don’t learn to move more quickly, I don’t know what’s going to
come of you! You won’t be able to keep a job because you’ll always get there
late, and your wife, if you ever get around to proposing to someone, that is,
if you don’t wait too long and she marries someone else, will be very unhappy
with you!” At the time I think he was like, four, and I admit I went overboard.
Contemplating his bleak future, Thomas started to cry. Oh man. What kind of
mother does that? So, I decided I
just had to respect this boy’s temperament and devise ways to work with him.
Thomas is
now eight, and he’s accepted this aspect of who he is. I know because a year or
so ago, as we were getting ready to go somewhere, I said (teasingly, because
now this is joke between us), “Thomas you are sooooo slow,” and he responded
matter-of-factly, “Slow is my motion.” We both laughed at that.
I have to
admit that he got it honestly. You know how you have to be somewhere and you’re
running late, so you speed your actions or leave a few things out of your
routine to stay on track? Not my husband. I don’t care how late we’re running,
all parts of the routine must be followed, and there is no such thing as
speeding up. And Thomas’ grandfather (my father), and his uncle (my brother)
are all slow and late for just about everything all the time. (For the record,
my brother denies this, and perhaps he only keeps me waiting? I’ll have to check with his wife about this.)
My husband
also has this habit of saying he’s
ready when he isn’t. For years, when we’d be preparing to go somewhere and he’d
say “Come on, let’s go!” I’d put on my coat and go to meet him at the front
door. Only, he always had to run back and find something—I mean always—and I’d end up waiting by the
door, all dressed up with nowhere to go as they say, for five, ten, fifteen
minutes, just going crazy. Now when he says, “Come on, let’s go!” I say “Uh
huh,” and if he ain’t walking out the door while saying it, I keep doing
whatever I’m doing. That’s how I cope.
The point
is, you can’t beat genetics, baby. Slow is Thomas’ motion. His future wife and
I will just have to deal.
Oh I know how this feels. I feel like I ask my son to hurry up about twenty times a day! So frustrating at times.
ReplyDeleteI always thought I was a patient person until I had kids! I've had to learn to adapt our routine to compensate for the snail pace too - otherwise we'd always be late and I'd have lost all of my hair by now!
Great post as always :-)
Oh, the things we do for love, huh? I never actually thought about my patience (I started having children at age 21. I didn't have time to think about anything), but I quickly learned that oh no, I'm not patient. Not at all. However, being responsible for others means lots of compromise, as you've learned!
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