Family Issues Archives

Wait!
By Benjamin D. Garber, Ph.D.

As parents, we do it almost as much as eating, sleeping and breathing. It starts in advance of your children’s conception and demands more and more of your time from birth onward, long past the time when your kids are grown and gone.

Your skill in this area is more important than the size of your budget, more important than your intelligence and your empathy and the number of parenting books you’ve read and seminars you’ve attended. It doesn’t matter whether you’re mother or father, young or old, parent of one or one hundred. You still have to wait. Endlessly.

You have to wait in grocery check out lines, parrying impulsive hands and whining demands, screams and pleas for this and that chocolate, this and that gum, this and that knick-knack in the "no candy" aisles. You have to wait while they dress and while they pee and while they fall asleep. You have to wait for the bus to take them away in the morning and to bring them back in the afternoon, in car pool lines breathing other parents’ exhaust, coping with car envy and smiling at neighbors whose names you never knew. You have to wait in crippling tiny plastic chairs for teacher conferences and IEP meetings and therapy and more therapy. You have to wait in crowded, sweltering hot hallways, in unheated auditoriums, in stinky stairwells and on muddy sidewalks.

And waiting rooms. So many waiting rooms filled with so many dog-eared, outdated women’s journals, some more familiar than your own bedroom; so familiar, in fact, that you begin to resent intruders who sit in "your" favorite chair. Some become so familiar that you begin to think of the familiar faces who fill those sterile spaces as family. You know that the woman in the corner wants to be left to her knitting, that the couple with the twins are glad to share their cell phone and that the tall mother in sweat pants is always glad to share a story. Waiting together makes you family. You learn to share dreams and fears, successes and failures with these strangers, bonded by time and your shared commitment to your children.

But the waiting rooms are just the beginning. You have to wait for insurance authorizations, then to speak with the representative who denied the authorization ("push one if you’re still waiting..."), then for the supervisor of the representative and finally, once you have the authorization, you have to wait to see the specialist. "I’m sorry, his first opening is in twelve years," they all say. And you wait some more. Endlessly.

How often have you waited to be put on a waiting list? Then there’s waiting to spend money. It’s not bad enough that you have to work long hours to earn it. When you’re a parent, you quickly discover that you have to wait even longer hours to spend it. You wait in line to sign him up for this or that group, only to spend fifty dollars an hour, this or that program at a hundred dollars a shot, this or that opportunity he so dearly needs, just like the three thousand other parents who wait along with you for horseback riding therapy and aquatic therapy and any other thing that might be worth a try.

You leave work early to be certain that she gets to her appointment, only to be left waiting two hours because "he’s running late," or "she had an emergency."

But worst of all, is waiting without knowing. Sitting passively, feigning patience, trying to trust your own decisions and the specialists’ decisions and your child’s own decisions while your mind boils with questions: Should I have refused the surgery? Is she okay? Will she be in pain? Why is it taking so long? Should I have gotten a second opinion? A specialist? Maybe I should have flown to Seattle first? What if...? And we wait.

It’s an essential ingredient of parenting, the element that can determine the quality of your child’s social life and his physical and athletic development. It can make the difference between getting by and really succeeding, between being "in" and feeling left out, between a broad extra-curricular experience and becoming a couch potato. But for all of its importance, waiting is torture.

You Are How You Wait. It’s true. No two people wait the same way. Next time you’re in line to sign up for that special class everyone is talking about or camped out hoping to get your little one in to see the local expert, watch your fellow waiters and see what you see:

(1) The Frustrated Waiter resents the wait. He (or she) may be impatient by nature, full of energy but too disorganized to have come prepared. He fidgets and shifts, inventing little distractions that never succeed for long. The guy in the back row trying to reprogram his watch is a Frustrated Waiter. So is the woman on the left cleaning out her pocketbook, the father scribbling "To Do" items on the back of a shopping receipt and the mother organizing a fistful of old coupons. Watch out for the Frustrated Waiter. Left to wait long enough, he can snap, abruptly leaving the queue, muttering under his breath, determined that he can convince his kids that chess club really is more exciting than soccer if only because there’s no wait for sign up.

(2) The Efficient Waiter comes prepared. A veteran of the parents-must-wait game, he arrives looking as if he intends to move in, snacks and cell phone, laptop and paperback, sun screen and lawn chair in hand. He is the envy of all who surround him, comfortable and occupied, no matter the delay. Time seems to be on his side as he shifts between productive activities. If you’re not an Efficient Waiter yourself, find one to be your friend. He has all the stuff that you forgot and is generally glad to share, even if he does smirk a little at your disorganization.

(3) The Social Waiter is neither frustrated nor efficient. He sees waiting in the dentist’s outer office and the grade school corridor and the damp dawn air as little different than a casual neighborhood get-together. Shaved and showered, smiling with a steaming mug of coffee in hand, the Social Waiter is well-intended in his greeting and may not understand why the rest of us run from his approach. Bad hair days. Old sweat pants. He’ll greet you by name from across a crowded waiting room, causing everyone else in the room to turn and stare. Much as your impulse might be to shrink behind the large woman next to you, your best bet is to stand your ground. Smile back, wave, and hope that he won’t give up his wobbly plastic seat to come to chat.

(4) The Content Waiter is the rarest kind; the parent who has learned to enjoy a good wait for its own sake. Neither frustrated nor efficient, neither determined to make new friends nor adverse to the experience, the Content Waiter seems to absorb his surroundings, one shuffling step at a time. Easily identified by his calm, compliant manner, the Content Waiter can be an excellent resource and a calming influence when you’re confused. Which line should you be in? Do you need the pediatrician’s form today or next time? Who should you make the check out to? Did they already call the B’s? The Content Waiter knows these things and is glad to help. Be wary, however, any time you find a Content Waiter queued up near a Frustrated Waiter. The first only flusters the second, sometimes creating an explosive dynamic.

(5) The Non-Waiter can’t, so don’t ask him to. Whether a victim of Post Traumatic Waiting Disorder, a failed Frustrated Waiter or a parent who is constitutionally unable to stand and stare at the back of a stranger’s head, shuffling three steps an hour for hours on end, the Non-Waiter simply cannot wait. Capitalize instead on this parent’s resources in other areas as room-mother or coach, IEP editor, chauffeur or cookie parent, but whatever you do, don’t make him wait.

The Anatomy of a Wait. The sad truth is that there should never be any reason to wait. Waiting is a pitifully low-tech, antiquated, herd-mentality concept which promotes competition among families, sleep-loss among parents and fallen arches. Forced waiting should have been outlawed decades ago, but lives on, promoted by such self-serving institutions as Disney World (Have you ever tried to get on Space Mountain?), computer technical support personnel and the International Union of Delicatessens.

With a little planning, many waits could be replaced by a simple lottery. For example, rather than corral the parents of every child in need of a social skills group at 6 a.m. on some chilly Sunday morning to compete for the three available slots with the local guru, everyone interested could easily be assigned a number. On selection day, parents could call in from the comfort of their own living rooms to learn whether their son or daughter made the cut. No need to pack a lawn chair. No worry about bad hair days.

And the waiting without knowing dilemma? No lottery can save you the torture of awaiting that doctor’s call, the lab results, that last insurance authorization or the one that really counts: the wait to see whether she’ll be okay. If you could stop loving her, you could stop waiting. But because you’re a good and loving parent, you know that you have to do these things. You have to keep waiting while the cogs of the machine turn oh-so slowly, oh-so imperfectly. You always make the best decisions you possibly can, you set your priorities, and you let her know that you’re always there, waiting.

 

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