Please Keep Your Patience

I texted my dad that we were not going through with the house and explained why.

He replied, "I am sorry it didn't work out. Please keep your patience."

Forgive me, but that last sentence has been a pebble in my shoe ever since I read it.

Please keep your patience.

I read it once.

Then again.

Then one more time, trying to figure out what exactly he thought was about to happen.

Because I vaguely remember hearing that phrase from him when I was a teenager. And like most fifteen-year-olds, I had enough hormones pumping through my bloodstream, poking every brain cell, that yeah—I was on the verge of flying off the handle over the smallest inconvenience.

But I'm almost forty now.

I've been married for nine years. I go to bed by nine. I make balanced meals that we actually sit down and eat at the table. I do the laundry every week. Fresh sheets, too. I refill prescriptions before they run out. I compare insurance deductibles. I know exactly how much cat food is left before I need to buy more.

I really can't put into words how stable my life is compared to my childhood, when clothes might sit in the washing machine, wet for days—rank, stank, and mildewing—or dinner was canned green beans because there simply wasn't anything else in the kitchen.

So I kept coming back to that sentence.

Please keep your patience.

And the more I read it, the more it felt fearful. Maybe that's colored by all that pesky past stuff again, but it felt like he was bracing for my inevitable meltdown. Like he thought I might lose my temper. Freak out. Lash out like an animal.

But then I wondered if that was fair.

Maybe he meant exactly what he wrote. Maybe it's just something he says to people when life gets stressful. Everyone at the community center has heard him say it.

I honestly don't know.

What I do know is how strange it feels to realize that, at least a little, I'm still frozen in time for him.

Maybe that's what parents do.

They update your age, but not always your identity.

You can become a homeowner. Build a quiet marriage. Learn how to regulate your emotions. Spend years building a life that is so wonderfully, almost boringly stable that you forget stability was ever something you had to learn.

And yet somewhere inside your parents' minds, you're still fifteen years old, slamming a bedroom door and screaming.

The funny thing is, maybe he hasn't actually missed who I've become.

Maybe he just hasn't had the chance to see it.

Change is so slow from the inside. There wasn't one day I woke up and suddenly became patient. There wasn't a ceremony where someone handed me a certificate declaring I was now emotionally regulated.

It happened one ordinary Tuesday after another.

Unless you were there for all those Tuesdays, maybe you wouldn't know.

I can't really tell if I'm reading too much into one sentence.

But I also don't think it matters.

Call it reflection, healing old wounds, making amends, or whatever the fuck you want, but I feel called to call him today. If he doesn't answer, I'll leave a message. Not to convince him of anything. Just to let him hear, through my words and my tone, who I am now.

Maybe the phone call isn't really for him.

Maybe it's for the version of me that still wonders if she's one bad day away from becoming that fifteen-year-old again.

Or maybe it's simply because I'd like my dad to know that I turned out okay.

The strange thing about growing up is that you don't just outgrow old versions of yourself.

Sometimes you have to outgrow other people's memories of you, too.