Today was an epic exercise in patience and acceptance. After spending another exhausting night nursing my nine-month-old every hour and a half, I overslept. I snoozed my alarm, thinking, “I don’t have anything going on this morning,” without bothering to check my calendar. If I had, I’d have noticed the 8:45 a.m. allergist appointment for my daughter. So when I actually woke up at 7:15 a.m., I realized I had an hour and a half to get the kids and myself fed and ready, drop my son at daycare, pick up one of the foods for the allergist’s food challenge at the grocery store, and drive across the metro to the doctor’s office…all of which, assuming everything went completely smoothly (which, of course, it never does) would take at least an hour more than I actually had. So I found myself having to rush around like mad, reminding myself constantly that the word of the month was ‘patience.’ Honestly, I think I did pretty well all things considering, only being snippy with my three-year-old a couple of times, and I managed to get everyone packed up and into the car without completely losing my cool, which in and of itself is a minor miracle.
After loading the kids in the car, I stood in the driveway I realized that my goal of dropping the baby off at daycare on the way was absolutely not going to work. Normally, I would have gone ahead and tried to get him to daycare, making us late to the appointment, but this morning I had a moment of clarity and decided to try to use some of the tips I’ve been reading about in “The Power of Patience” by Mary Jane Ryan. I took a deep breath and thought to myself, “what are the consequences of being very late to the appointment versus the consequences for having the baby with me during the appointment?” Slowing down actually helped me make peace with the fact that the only reasonable solution was to take him with us—so, we made it to the appointment on time (after deciding to skip the grocery store), and, because the decision to take him had been my choice, I felt a lot less stressed about the situation. Good going so far!
That is, until I get to the doctor’s office and realize I’ve forgotten the kids’ busy bag. Facing the prospect of an appointment with no toys, coloring books, or basically anything to keep the kids entertained before and during the appointment, I just shrugged internally and figured I could use some imagination to keep them entertained for an hour, or at least long enough to avoid complete chaos.
Two hours later and we’re still in the doctor’s office, and the cracks begin to show. I am confronted with the fact that forgetting the busy bag was a really critical error. By this point, my daughter is climbing the walls (literally, as well as the furniture), and my son is yelling, “mamamamamamamamama dadadadadadadadadadada” at the top of his lungs. Deep breaths, I tell myself. As M.J. Ryan suggests, I try to reframe the situation to see it from their perspective. Okay, so their behavior is totally normal and expected for a preschooler and an infant under the circumstances, and we’re in a private room, so the only person they’re really bothering is me…so I was going to choose not to be bothered by it. Instead, I focused on redirecting wherever necessary to avoid obvious safety hazards, provided comfort and resources where I could, and otherwise left them to their own devices. You know, if patience is a problem for me, it’s a thousand times worse for my kids, so the opportunity is probably a good chance for them to learn a little patience too…or at least some creative problem-solving to handle their own boredom.
I set to work trying to be productive while they played. Next problem: my daughter’s allergist appointment was at 8:45 a.m., and I had an urgent appointment of my own at 11:00 a.m. When scheduling the appointments, I had been completely confident I’d be able to make both appointments, even if that meant taking my daughter (and now son) with me. But one glance at the clock showed me just how wrong I was. Not only was it well past time for us to leave for my appointment, but we were showing no signs of leaving this one anytime soon. As someone who often feels physically sick at the thought of being significantly late or missing an appointment without giving the appropriate cancellation notice within the requested period, this realization brought on the next significant test of patience. Even on a good day, unexpected scheduling conflicts bring out the absolute worst in me, and on a bad day, they can reduce me to an panicking rage monster. But, I was committed to trying out the strategies I’d heard while listening to the audiobook in the car, so I mentally flipped through the rolodex of ideas before landing on a couple I thought might work.
First, I started out with some deep breathing and tried to center myself—I could already feel the effects of the physiological symptoms of anxiety creeping in, so I focused on shutting those signals down first. Then, I tried to apply the mental brakes to keep my thoughts from careening out of control. What are my options here? Well, there weren’t any, really, because at this point, even arriving late to my appointment was out of the question. Unfortunately, the appointment was pretty urgent, and the last time I tried to reschedule an appointment with this particular doctor, it took me three weeks to get back in. I had to stop myself from catastrophizing, and I could feel a meltdown was imminent. But, I’d learned that a huge part of patience is accepting that “things take as long as they take,” and nothing you can do will change those things that just take time…this is a concept I understand intuitively as a gardener—I would never plant a bulb and expect it to burst through the surface and bloom overnight, so why couldn’t I apply that same principle in the rest of my life? Although I’m definitely not at radical acceptance at this point, I at least tried to have faith that it was all going to work out even if it took a while for me to get back in. With another exhale, I reached out to the receptionist to see if there was any possibility of slipping me in between existing appointments or plugging me into a cancellation. As the book suggested, I tried to be as kind as possible in hopes that she’d take pity on me.
While waiting on the receptionist to respond to my message, I decided to kill time by trying out another patience strategy—evaluating my trigger and response to see what I could learn about myself from the situation.
Why does something as seemingly innocuous and commonplace as a scheduling conflict totally make me run off the rails? I wondered to myself. I traced the thread of thoughts backward and it occurred to me that this is an area of my life where there is a significant conflict between my personal values and my executive functioning skills.
One of my most important role models, my grandfather, is chronically early to everything. During my childhood, he instilled in me a sense that being timely was a way to respect others and that taking personal responsibility for your schedule was a hallmark of maturity. Further, his belief that being on time was the same thing as being late took root deeply in my personal value system. He was never critical or resentful of others who weren’t on his schedule, and he never demonstrated impatience with me, but I wanted to hold myself to the high standard that he set.
Unfortunately, as someone with severe ADHD and related executive functioning challenges, try as I might, I regularly fall short of my own expectations in this respect. This combination generates feelings of shame, inadequacy, and guilt. But instead of offering myself the same patience and generosity of spirit my grandfather always offers others, I beat myself up mentally or else look for other people or circumstances to blame for my tardiness. Worse, I tend to project my own frustration onto those I love, holding my family to the same (and typically unnecessarily high) standards regarding timeliness, leaving me perpetually at odds with my very distractable preschooler and time-blind husband. I take my negative feelings out on them, generating more negative feelings of guilt and shame, and the cycle continues. That’s a whole lot of unhappiness on a fairly regular basis over something that, in reality, usually doesn’t matter all that much.
I wanted to try to break the cycle by reframing the situation in my mind, offering myself the same grace my grandfather always offers me. I started by acknowledging that I generally do my best to avoid scheduling conflicts and that this conflict was unintentional. I was unaware that the appointment would last this long, and I would have avoided overlapping the appointments if I had. The situation is not one I can change, so the only path is to move forward. Thinking about it that way helped to alleviate many of the negative feelings that arose. Since I couldn’t change the situation and had no control over the ultimate outcome, I made the decision to accept that my appointment would have to be rescheduled, and I’d deal with whatever consequences that rescheduling entailed. I was surprised that this simple internal dialogue of choosing to accept the consequences rather than trying to wriggle free of them or stuff them down actually helped me to feel more positive and optimistic about the potential outcomes.
And, in the end, the bad things I’d been picturing never came to pass—the receptionist was able to sneak me into a cancellation spot in two days, which is hardly the three-week wait I was expecting. The key takeaway: accepting reality as it is rather than wishing it were otherwise leaves you with the same outcome with significantly less anxiety.
Fast forward: it’s now 12:07 p.m. We are still at the doctor. The nurse just came in to tell us that we will need to wait 20 minutes to see if there is an immediate reaction, and then another hour after that to make sure there is no delayed reaction. Which will put us somewhere in the vicinity of 5 hours when it’s all said and done. On a work day. When I’ve had nothing to eat since lunch yesterday. With two kids who are tired, bored, hungry, and cranky. Cue a whole lot of deep breathing. Part of me really wants to make a federal case out of the fact that they did a really crappy job of setting expectations for this visit, but obviously, doing so won’t change anything except for upsetting the very nice staff who work at the allergist’s office. The impulse to snap at my daughter every time she asks me the same annoying questions over and over, “when are we going to leave?! When can I have a snicky snack?!” is becoming harder and harder to tamp down as my blood sugar continues to plummet. So far I’ve resisted…yay me! The baby won’t take a nap but also won’t sit still and continually pulling up my shirt, latching hard, and then unlatching, over and over and over again. I can feel my blood pressure rising. I keep reminding myself that it is LITERALLY the mission of the month to learn to exercise patience, so I’m doing everything I can to white-knuckle it though this experience. There’s a tiny part of my brain (the only sane part left) that is thinking about how proud I am of myself for hanging tough in a situation that just a week ago would have likely ended in me screaming at one or both of my kids, but even that part of my brain is starting to be eaten away by hunger. Even putting every ounce of energy I have left into staying cool, I’m definitely not feeling the serenity (but luckily, my kids seem to be pretty oblivious to my distress at this point). M.J. Ryan says that patience is like a muscle that gets stronger with exercise, but if that’s true, my patience muscle is seriously fatiguing and that wall is coming up fast…help!
Epilogue: after 5 ½ hours, we finally left, and I definitely snapped at my daughter a few times on the way out to the car (did you know that 3 year olds are the slowest walkers in the entirety of human existence??). But, other than scarfing some fast food in the car on the way home, none of us were really all that worse for the wear. By the time I dropped my kiddos off at daycare and tried to get a little work done, my nerves were frayed, and I was mentally and emotionally exhausted, so I didn’t have a lot of reserves left for the rest of the day, but I tried to acknowledge the normalcy in that and give myself grace. I yelled at the cat for peeing on my son’s pajamas, but other than that, I somehow made it through the rest of the evening without issue, even managing to keep from taking the bait when my husband was cranky with me. Absolutely unbelievable—go me!
Related Posts
