Petulance
Nobody has measured or recorded how many hours I spent alone in my teens and early twenties in our backyard pool, floating on a tube, reading a book. When I got too hot, I’d wait until I got close enough to the side and throw my book on the cement, then slide down into the hole of the tube or flip off the edge and cool myself off in the refreshing blue water. I remember the luxuriousness of these days, looking up at the cerulean blue sky so high above me in my summer happy place, and I would feel the sun warming me so tenderly. One day I vividly remember spending pretty much the whole day in our pool; I was reading The Chosen by Chaim Potok, and I read the entire book floating or walking in the water in that nine hours or whatever it was.
But I will openly admit that those incredible days as a teenager and 20-something spoiled me for life. I now hate sharing a pool with anybody else. I like the freedom of having it all to myself. Splashing irritates me. My book getting wet agitates me. Other people’s laughs or noise rub against my brain in the most negative way possible.
We have an above ground pool set up in our backyard, and it is well-used by my husband and our four kids. In fact, they are all out there now. I am sitting in the living room with a fan blowing on me and the gentle breeze outside ruffling the curtains occasionally while I write. I tried to enjoy the family time in the pool. I brought my new library book in there with me, and I did okay for awhile. And then I started noticing that this pool was definitely smaller than our old one we replaced this year. I couldn’t get far enough away from everybody else. When we got our tax refund this spring, I was still budgeting out the places it could go, and my husband was eagerly waiting to order another pool as our other one had lasted as long as it could possibly last and had parted ways with us at the end of last summer. But when I gave him the nod to go ahead and order it because the tax refund was large enough, somehow the little bubble next to it got switched to the next size down. We tried to return it and get the bigger size, but it would have cost $300 for them to ship it back to the company. We decided to keep the smaller pool, two feet less in its diameter.
All that togetherness - teasing, occasional arguing, a bit of splashing, maybe even a child pretending to be a baby - just a lot of commotion… pushed me to my breaking point, and that was the end of my pool time for the day. I felt a little bit of remorse as I climbed out, but mostly just crabbiness.
My mind shifted as I got out as I glanced back at my family all delightedly floating, drifting, walking around in the whirlpool procession around the perimeter, putting up with each other and loving each other. I knew that it wasn’t about the size of our pool or the interactions of my family members with each other; it was about me and my introverted soul being so selfish and irritable that I couldn’t even take a few moments to celebrate the joy of the six of us crammed into a space together. I’m not saying I have regrets about getting out; I escaped just in time before my annoyance flared into something regrettable, but I do take the blame for my own unhappiness in that moment and in that situation.
In chapter 4, Tish Harrison Warren tells us of something that she does in her own life: “I learn to look for God in the cracks of my day, to notice what these moments of failure reveal about who I am” (59). This chapter revolves around the concepts of repentance, absolution, and forgiveness, and I acknowledge in this quiet moment on my loveseat that my tolerance for other people is not what it should be.
When I’m in a moment of honest reflection about myself or in a job interview, I think that I would list patience as one of my virtues, but perhaps that would not be the fruit of the Spirit that other people would use to describe me. They might view my quiet but petulant departure from the pool as an example that contradicts this particular quality. This crack in my day today forces me to acknowledge my own failure to love others as they are while I am in community with them, and in confessing that, I see that I am in every sense a person who needs forgiveness.
