I was about halfway to my children's school when my eldest son stopped walking. Half a block later, when I realized he wasn't with us, I turned around and called, "What are you doing?"
"I can't walk!" he said back. "My leg hurts."
"What's wrong with it?"
He points, but, as this doesn't clarify anything, I ask him to show me. He catches up walking with a limp that he didn't have five minutes ago. He pulls up his shorts leg and shows me two mosquito bites. He says they hurt so bad and he can't walk.
I tell him that two mosquito bites wouldn't impede his ability to walk. I tell him he has no broken bones, no bleeding wounds, no muscle or tendon injuries. He can walk just fine, so stop belly aching already.
He refuses.
I explain that I have nothing to soothe his bites. He will either have to walk home or to school to get aid. And I'm not walking home, so let's go!
To this he shouts that he'll never go to school with me even if I spank him a million times. Then, he runs off to the end of the block where he'd originally decided to become "injured."
Annoyance is fizzling inside me like seltzer water. I contemplate what to do and decide confrontation is the best technique. I walk back to him, pushing my stroller and asking my daughter to wait for us a short distance away.
I don't think anyone will be surprised to hear that arguing got us nowhere. I tell him he's going to school one way or another, but if he doesn't come now, he'll get some consequences too. I tell him he's making a big deal out of nothing. I tell him it's rude to make his siblings wait. And I tell him that if this is how he acts after getting to play on his ipad this morning, he can say goodbye to his ipad.
Eventually, my three-year-old, Benny, gets bored of listening to the arguing and climbs out of his stroller. My older son then climbs in saying, "The only way I'm going to go to school is if you push me."
At this point my fizzling annoyance has turned into sputtering rage, but I push him anyways, thinking at least now we're on the move. As I push, I tell him how his friends are going to make fun of him because he's in a stroller, but perhaps that's good because he is acting like a baby.
After about a block of this, the three-year-old starts crying because he doesn't like his big brother in his stroller. This speaks right to big brother's heart, so he gets out and is miraculously healed. In fact, I'm quite certain he's forgotten that he was ever upset.
I, on the other hand, am ticked! How dare he suck me into his temper tantrum! How dare he waylay us for no reason! I was probably also feeling ashamed for the way I'd handled it.
We get to school with no more incidents. I ask him to apologize, we hug, and off he goes with his sister. But I'm still fuming. There's nothing to do about it now except walk home with my three-year-old.
Our school is located on a narrow residential street that, in certain parts, is too narrow for vehicles to pass one another. Cars have to duck into driveways to let each other pass. Today, they were in a proper jam. One lady at the end was making it impossible for the other cars to go. She'd stopped and didn't seem to understand that she was responsible for the crush.
I was pushing the stroller past the cars when a local residence, a verbose man who I'm quite certain is an enneagram 8, bursts out of his house yelling, "Come on, stupid people! Don't you see what you're doing! I see this every morning! Why can't you figure it out?"
He leaps out into the standstill traffic and begins trying to direct people where to go. He zeroes in on the lady at the end, shouting at her to pull into a gap between two cars. He is very adamant about it. And I'm sure the lady felt threatened. He was yelling at her what to do and she didn't want to. She wanted to back out, and nothing he said was going to stop her.
If he'd simply strolled up to the lady and politely said, "Looks like you're in a jam. How do you want to get out of this? Maybe I can help." She would've probably accepted his instruction. She might even have been open to pulling into that gap between the two cars. But because he came raging out into the street, he was ineffective.
You see the parallel. Don't you? I didn't see it for several hours afterwards. And when I finally did I wondered if God had made it all happen to help me understand my own situation.
That man and I were so determined to get people moving that we didn't care enough about the people in trouble. I don't know why my son decided to use his mosquito bites as a reason to not go to school. Maybe he wanted more ipad time at home. Maybe he was afraid of something at school. I don't know. I missed the opportunity to find out. I wasn't willing to wait. Impatience and lack of grace. Both to him and myself.
We all have moments. My son had one on the way to school. I had one in reaction to his trouble. And these troubles are chances to be patient with God's slow process on others and ourselves. They also are reminders of how often God has grace for us.
If we knew how much we'd been forgiven, would it be so difficult to wait an extra ten minutes for someone else to get with the program?
More on irritating things: Lessons on Anger, Hurt, and Fear, High Price of Doing Good, Completing the Argument Cycle, Rules for Disagreeing, Telling God What You Think, When the People I Love Fight, Deciphering My Emotions, Rage Against the Maker, Brain Block, People Not Moving
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