Cat Food: Lessons on Patience from a 3-Year Old

Our kids can teach us so much about how to love--its apparent to anyone who has spent any significant amount of time around kids that they come fully-formed with extraordinary capacities to both give and receive love.

This morning, I asked my daughter ("A") to help me feed our two cats because I was busy getting food for baby boy ("T"), and the cats were meowing so loudly they were obviously starving to death (reality, they definitely weren't). A noticed that the bowl belonging to our 13-year-old senior cat was still mostly full and asked me why she hadn't eaten her food. I explained that old cats (and people!) sometimes have difficulty eating crunchy foods like kibble, and that I had ordered our cat some wet food to make it easier on her--it just hadn't arrived yet.

Fast forward an hour later when I was rushing like mad to get the kids out the door. When I called for A, she didn't come immediately, so I stomped into the kitchen to see what she was doing. There she was, crouching on the floor, scooping handfuls of cat food and dumping it into the cat's water bowl. Naturally, I assumed she was being naughty--I mean, she's three, and three-year-olds do crazy stuff to push your buttons and test your limits all the time. In a hurry and running late, I snapped at her to stop and asked her in a clearly exasperated tone (rhetorically, mind you), "Why on earth would you think it's okay to ruin the cat's clean water and waste her food?" Seemed like a reasonable question to me.

Instantly, her sweet little face fell, and she said in a small voice, "I was making wet food for the kitty so she can eat without hurting anymore." Obviously, I felt like a complete ass and the world's worst mom. How lucky am I to have such a sweet, thoughtful, and observant daughter--a fact which I had totally taken for granted in my impatience. I was in such a hurry that I couldn't be bothered to give her the benefit of the doubt or even stop to consider whether she might have a logical (to her) reason to do something that outwardly looked bizarre to my adult eyes.

This got me thinking--how many times a day do we unknowingly hurt or interrupt those we love while they are attempting to be kind to us or others? How often do we, in our impatience, misinterpret others' actions or take them for granted? What could we gain by pausing for just a moment to consider someone else's perspective, or even to ask questions, before jumping to conclusions about others' motivations? It was certainly an eye-opening moment for me.