Lessons in sabr

Schenectady, you're surrounded. Come out with your head down.
Alas, if it were that simple! My marriage taught me, among other things, that I cannot control another human being's choices or actions; the end of my pregnancy is teaching me that God and my child have plans that are better than mine and I have no say. That lesson will be reinforced many, many times in the future, insha'Allah, and it's also giving new dimensions to my patience and my impatience.

The need for patience, and the need for haste, are no longer my needs alone. It's not so much a matter of being tired of waddling instead of walking, or feeling part of the "pregnant woman's club". It's about knowing that I can't go blithely into month number ten without the threats of induction, Cesarean section, and being separated from my little rascal should there be any chance that something's wrong. It's also about knowing that the best thing, by far, for Schenectady is to be patient, even if such patience is dogged by doomsayers.

Being a knitter, however, has taught me something about the nature of patience. Some folk think that they cannot knit because they lack patience, a notion that many knitters find silly. We don't knit because we are patient; we are patient because we knit. The hours spent on airplanes (TSA, we knitters despise you), waiting at the doctor's office, the DMV, or the bank are not wasted. While waiting for my husband to return from deployment, I made a monstrous pair of slippers for him. I could have spent my days feeling bored and lonely, but instead I turned to measuring my love out in (too many) stitches.

Perhaps patience isn't about sitting idly by, waiting for things to happen. Perhaps patience is about not letting the wait control you. Instead of allowing the wait to consume the best of your energies, patience could be making the best of the wait, enjoying the time that is yours to spend. A watched pot never boils, so why not whip up a dessert to chill in the fridge? The water, the pot, and the stove all know what to do without you, and dessert's never a bad thing. Perhaps patience isn't about being inert while you wait- to the contrary, it's about being engaged in the world while what you desire comes to you. It is knitting a pair of lusciously soft booties for someone else's baby while you await the arrival of your own.