While I looked around for my possibilities, I was so hard to please.

Things take time.

The boys remind me of this nearly every day—each time I get impatient with how unquickly they're doing what I'd like them to do. 

"Things take time, Mommy," they'll say.  "It takes time to move through space and do things."

There's no denying their geeky understanding of how their world works, though my 12-year-old will often lament that physics is a bitch!

But there's so much truth at the heart of their admonition.  For everything we do, every movement we make, time must pass.  Each occurrence in our lives happens in a modern-day fourth dimension of spacetime, through which our lives must constantly move.

Just because thought seems instantaneous, it's not.  The process of electrical impulse passing across neurons happens in fractions of seconds, but it still transpires in measurable time.  The further process of bringing thought to fruition—walking, talking, getting a drink—takes even more time. 

When things don't happen in my preferred timeframe, I get frustrated.  If I tell the boys to put on their shoes right then, it shouldn't take more than a minute or two, even if they have to stop for socks and go into another room to find their sneakers.  And if they don't start that process immediately, instead being waylaid by innumerable distractions, it frustrates the hell out of me. 

Generally I get tense and will sometimes raise my voice.  Skip the non-verbal cues and go straight to the vocal warning of irritation.  You're wasting thirty seconds on superfluous minutiae, which means putting your shoes on your feet is taking 25-50% longer than it should.  You're wasting time.

But is it really wasted?  Maybe it's delaying us from being somewhere, but there is something that has demanded their attention, something that needs a moment to shift in their psyches.  Just because it seems inconsequential to me, that doesn't mean it's not important to them. 

It often makes me want to just jump in and do whatever myself.  Maybe it's grabbing the laundry or unloading the dishwasher or finding their shoes for them.  For a long time, they couldn't do those things; those were absolutely a part of my job as mom. 

As they're growing up, moving their bodies and those delicate psyches through spacetime, my role in their lives is shifting.  I've been working to teach them how to care for themselves—how to do the dishes and the laundry and clip their own nails.  It can be a painstaking process, and it often butts against my own infamous impatience.  Part of being their mother is teaching them how to be self-sufficient young men, just as it was to keep them alive when they were babies. 

At the heart of mothering is doing for them what they cannot do for themselves.

Much in the same way I had to learn to reparent myself after my separation, I have to constantly examine what they are and are not truly capable of doing.  While it may irritate me that they don't do things on my preferred schedule, they are only capable of doing anything in their own time and space, and ultimately in their own way.  What works for me may not be what works for them.  Only they will ever really know for sure. 

Standing back and letting them try, even when it's unbearably frustrating for us both, is part of my journey.  As badly as they need the lesson to do things, I need the lesson to let things happen in their own time.  I am efficient and impatient and often readily see how something is most likely to occur—my hummingbird-wing-dizzy brain is always running through possibilities and plausibilities.  Even when I'm confident in being right about an outcome, I have no choice but to let it just happen. 

In a way, it's a refinement of my previous lesson to be still.  It's not just a matter of calming myself in the chaos so I can wait; I have to actually find the good in that experience.  With the children, it's their own learning of how to manage the logistics of their lives.  With relationships, it's not fighting the other person's opportunity to meet me halfway.  With myself, it's allowing this energy to spread before me, time for the ripples to glide and bounce off of stones and shores and other ripples and make their way back to me in unique fractal beauty. 

While I may want these things—the chores, my children, my writing, my love—to be immediately what they can be, I know they can only happen in their own time.  Had anything that came before been different, it would not be the same experience now.  And it's that confluence of energy that makes each moment so incredibly special, so complexly beautiful that it sometimes makes my heart ache with its beauty and the joy that I get to watch and experience this unfold, that I have done something right sometime in my life and am being rewarded with this life and this experience.  These moments are for me.  I have earned them and I have to treasure each one as it burgeons, because these are the stepping stones of my path, for my journey—damn the destination.