I used to think I was patient.
Not just sometimes patient, but that patience was part of who I was.

As a kid, waiting was just how life worked. We were a humble family, and most things arrived late. Every Thursday afternoon, around 4:00 p.m., I waited for my father. He was always late.

This was before phones, before scrolling, before easy distractions. I had to sit with the waiting itself. I don’t remember what I thought during those afternoons, or how I passed the time, but somewhere in that stillness I learned how to stay calm without becoming anxious or bored. Over time, patience became something I carried with pride.

As an adult, that reputation stayed with me. I was the one who didn’t get flustered in traffic or irritated by delays. While others complained, I waited. To me, patience meant exactly that: "the ability to remain calm when things took longer than expected".

Then I had children.

Children experience time differently. Everything feels urgent. Every desire feels immediate. And because I thought of myself as patient, I tried to teach them that. When breakfast wasn’t ready instantly, or when we couldn’t go to the park right away, I’d think they needed to learn patience.

A few weeks ago, I was reading a book about values to my kids. One chapter was about patience. Its definition felt familiar: "the capacity to remain calm during a long wait". I remember feeling validated. That’s what I’ve been doing my whole life, I thought.

But my kids kept challenging me in ways that had nothing to do with waiting.

When my daughter refused to put on her shoes for the third time that morning, I didn’t feel patient. When my son asked “why?” for the hundredth time about something I didn’t have an answer for, I didn’t feel calm. When they fought over a toy or ignored me completely, lost in their own worlds, none of it felt like a waiting problem. Yet I kept failing at patience.

That made me uncomfortable.

If I can wait in line without anxiety, but can’t handle my children’s chaos, am I actually patient?

Maybe patience isn’t just about waiting.

Children are unpredictable. You don’t know who they’ll become, what will challenge them, or when something will suddenly click after months of confusion. As a parent, you live with constant uncertainty. You make decisions whose results may not show up for years, or ever!. You face situations with no clear solutions.

This is where my patience collapses. Not in the waiting, but in the not-knowing. In the chaos. In the moments when the situation asks me to adapt rather than endure.

I think I confused patience with tolerance.

Tolerance is passive. You wait for the discomfort to pass. Patience is active. It asks you to stay present when you want to control, fix, or rush things along.

Real patience isn’t just staying calm during delays. It’s staying curious when things don’t go as expected. It’s accepting uncertainty without judgment. It’s admitting you don’t have all the answers and remaining open to what unfolds, even when what unfolds is your six-year-old refusing to wear a pair of socks for reasons he can’t explain.

My children are teaching me this. Not by learning patience from me, but by demanding I learn it myself.

When my daughter takes twenty minutes to put on her shoes, patience isn’t staying zen while I wait. It’s curiosity, what’s going on in her mind right now? What does she need that I’m not seeing? When my son asks “why?” over and over, patience isn’t tolerating the interruption. It’s a genuine interest in how he’s trying to understand the world.

I’m still learning this. Most days, I fail.

But I’m beginning to see that the patient person I thought I was had only mastered the easiest kind of patience, the kind where you’re not responsible for outcomes, where all you have to do is wait.

Parenthood demands a harder kind. The kind where you sit inside uncertainty with someone you love, with no clear endpoint, facing problems that can’t be solved by simply remaining calm.

That’s the patience I’m trying to learn now. Not the static patience of waiting, but the dynamic patience of staying curious. Of accepting what I can’t control. Of trusting a process even when I can’t see where it’s going.

My children are wonderful teachers.
Not because they’re learning from me, but because they keep showing me what I still need to learn.