I'll never forget the day I realized this. I've probably written about this elsewhere on the site, but I grew up being told CONSTANTLY how argumentative, intolerable, and generally incorrect about everything I was. Needless to say I moved out the day I turned 18.
About 5 years later I was standing in line at a convenience store behind a mom with two little kids. The smaller one, about 2 or 3 years old, was whiny and fussy the way little kids often are at the end of an afternoon of running errands. To my shock and awe, the mom patted him on the back and said, "I know you want to go home, honey, but we still need to do X, Y and Z and I need you to be patient. Remember when we talked about what patience means? It means waiting without being grouchy."
This blew my mind. It's still blowing my mind 15 years later. It had never dawned on me that parents are the ones who teach you HOW to do things like be patient. I thought you were just supposed to know, and if you didn't, you were basically a failure as a human and worthless to be around. If it had been my mom, she would have glared at me and pressed her lips together and barked that I needed to LEARN TO BE PATIENT. I can't even tell you how many times I heard that: LEARN TO BE PATIENT, even as a really small child. And here I was watching a stranger TEACH her child to be patient. It was this huge revelation--that the skills I was constantly criticized for not having were skills it was her job to make sure I had--and that really, how else was I supposed to ever learn them?
And my mother was an elementary school teacher! I'm not saying this to judge anybody, but she wasn't like a teen mom with no education, no knowledge of child development, and no child-wrangling skills. She literally went to school for it!
