Impatience

Impatience may be the worst emotion or idiosyncrancy a person can have.  It can cause you to behave in very adverse ways toward the people you love and cause a lot of harm to that realtionship.  I am very impatient with my children at times and say things that I would normally never say to them or any other person in my life but given the circumstances of my impatience I can't seem to find the self-control to hold back, I immediately open mouth and insert foot, which is a terrible idiom because if I did indeed insert my foot, the foot would have kept the shitty thing I just said to my kid inside my mouth.

 I had a bad parenting moment today with my 11 year old son Seth and to make matters worse, it was public.  I misunderstood where he was being picked up and what he had to where and how long he would be gone and... well let's just put it this way, i missed all the memos on his agenda for the day and now in the span of about seven minutes I had to make it all happen and when i received the phone call to tell me where he was to be dropped off, i was in my underwear prepared to take a quick shower; the shower never happened and by the time I picked him up I was down to having about two minutes left on the clock before I had to have him  to another locale and he informed me he wanted to change his clothes, so i took him back into the building I was picking up from (church) and threw his clean clothes on the bathroom floor and yelled:  "Get dressed!" this with a bunch of members of church walking by and witnessing my behavior.  First of all I don't care what any of them think, I care about what the kid in the bathroom thinks and I know that I have just scared him and embarrassed him severely.  he doesn't deserve that, he's a great kid, he does everything we ask of him, gets good grades, treats us with respect and is a great big brother to Sam and because I can't take a little curve ball in my schedule I took it out on him.  It wasn't fair and I told him immediately that it wasn't fair, it wasn't his fault and that I loved him.  He forgave me.  But when I picked him up many hours later at the same rendevous point: I apologized again and tried to make him realize that I understood what i did to him was wrong ands that I would try to nver do it again.  "I know, Dad, I know."  What he knows truly is that I will get impatient again, i will be a dick again and I will apologize again.  But I'm trying son, I'm trying and I love you so much.