Sugar Baby Love

Impatience is a virtue

Mammoth multitasking ability, check.  Introduction of books from day one (or thereabouts) so that child becomes as literate as early as possible, check.  Clean home of which Kim and Aggie would be proud, check.  Patient mummy?  Yeah.  You’re funny.

It’s fair to say that the so-called virtue of being patient has never graced me with its presence.  Yes, I can be patient when I really have to (oops, sentence ending in a preposition – bad ungrammatical mummy).  It wouldn’t have been fair to tell the elderly residents in the home in which I used to work (better, but a rather unwieldy construction) to upgrade their snail-like pace to that of a meerkat, say.  Oh yes, I can be remarkably patient when I want to be  – that’s the benefit of being a contrary Libran.  But, in general, patience tends to pop its head round the door, ask if it can stop for tea, and then leave immediately when I give it the look.  If any film character epitomised my inability to wait, it would surely be Miranda in The Devil Wears Prada.  ‘By all means, move at a glacial pace.  You know how that thrills me.’  What a line, dear reader.

‘Get to the point’, my friend Fiona would say.  Well, what I really mean is that, for all its bad press, a little impatience can be a good thing.  For example, if I didn’t sometimes (ok, all the time), lose my perpetually lost rag with Asher, I doubt if he would ever do the washing up (sorry love, but you know you need my influence).  And if I didn’t sometimes overtake the impossibly slow drivers on the A256, I would never get anywhere – literally.  So the real reason for my impatience is high standards.  If I stopped nagging or trying to be Lewis Hamilton (my dad’s nickname for me), I would stop caring.

Indeed, I prefer to save my very small reserve of patience for the new man in my life – baby Jude.  For those of you unacquainted with the lad, he is about 50cm long, has blue eyes, resembles an infant Phil Mitchell in the hair stakes and is incredibly chilled out.  Seriously.  I’ve never known a baby who only cries when he wants something and smiles at me every time I get him up in the morning (sadly, I don’t always return the gesture).  Jude is as helpless as those lovely ladies and gents I used to look after, and doesn’t ask for much, and so it would be totally unfair for me to be impatient with him.  That’s not to say that I haven’t found motherhood ever frustrating, or overwhelming, or, dare I say, a little boring (feeding isn’t exactly the most thrilling thing in the world).  But I would be telling a giant, Pinocchio-style fib if I said that I didn’t spend most of the time being fascinated by my little lad and the new things he learns every day, and going into his room each night to watch him sleep, his hands above his head as if he is saying, ‘Don’t shoot!’.

Ok, my nickname is Croccy for a reason.  I am never going to be earth mother.  Yet each day, I become a little more patient with Jude.  And a little bit more frustrated with the socks on the floor.  That’s just me.