Kari Kampakis headline
“Just a minute.”
“Hang on.”
“I’m coming.”
“Be patient.”
“I’ll do it when I can.”
“I’m busy—not now.”
“Give me a second, will you?”
How many of these parenting clichés ring a bell with you? Do they spill from your mouth automatically, buy you extra time to finish the task at hand? If you’re anything like me, the answer is a resounding, “Yes.”.
And while I’m not particularly proud of this, I do cut myself some slack. Waiting is a part of life, and the sooner my kids learn they’re not the center of the universe, the better off they’ll be. Even if I could be at their beck and call, drop everything whenever they needed me, that’s not how the real world operates. We all know adults who grew up so catered to that they expect attention at the snap of their fingers. They don’t understand why people get put out—and often struggle to sustain healthy relationships.
Who wants to create that monster, right?
In all seriousness, I’ve never thought much about how often I ask my kids to bide their time. After all the hours I log on the mothering wheel, I feel entitled to jump off periodically. But an email I received from a father I know opened my eyes wider to the holes in my logic. I’d put a post on Facebook asking for column ideas, and within minutes he sent me a message. His story was brief yet compelling.
“I was putting my five-year-old daughter to bed,” he wrote, “and trying to hug her. She kept pushing my arm away. I asked what she was doing, and she replied, ‘You can hug me in a minute.’ I started laughing—until she said, ‘That’s what you tell me all the time when I ask you something. ’ ”
“Now every time I start to say that,” this father’s email continued, “I think about what’s important.”
The first time I read his message, I felt a little pang in my heart. After a moment I realized it was because I, too, was guilty. That scene could easily play out in my house, and the fact that it hadn’t surprised me. I imagined this father to be more patient and attentive than me. If his daughter said it to him, what were my girls thinking?
I didn’t want to know. Then again, I did. So I asked Ella, my eight year old, and a friend she had over how often they heard the words “Just a minute.”
“My mom says it all the time,” her friend replied.
Ella nodded. “Yeah, and when adults say ‘Just a minute,’ they really mean an hour.”
I wish I had a magic solution on how to balance the demands of dependents with a million other obligations. The challenge has eluded parents for generations, and while it’s easy to say we should simplify, only so much scaling back is possible. As my dad says, these are our “working years,” and in addition to raising kids we must pay for them. The financial burden requires a dedication to work that takes time and energy—two valuable resources that, ideally, we’d like to reserve for our families.
There are times I have four kids crying for me at once. It becomes a competition, a test of whom I love most. As I sputter, “Just a minute…Mommy’s not an octopus!” I silently discern who needs me first. Should I clean the baby’s blow-out, listen to the daughter who has “something important to say,” or administer Tylenol to the one with a fever? How quickly can I do all three and get back to the column I’m writing? It’s a helpless feeling to have my dearest passions pulling me in opposite directions.
I’m attuned to the advice dispensed by parents older and wiser than me: Treasure their childhood, they grow up fast. One day they won’t need you, and you’ll be sad. Savor small moments. These, too, are parenting clichés, words that will gradually replace the “Just a minute” phrases I now throw out. I doubt I could go a day without telling someone to hold their horses. I could, however, stop what I’m doing more often and tend to my kids. Sometimes, all they really want is proof that they’re important.
When I look at it that way, can I even blame them?
