Aggressive Patience

What it means to write in fragments, live in paradox, and raise masterpieces.

“This is the battle that I admire most in you…”

Joseph shifted his gaze from the members of our small group back onto me.

“You are a highly driven and ambitious creative. You have art and ideas that you want to put out into this world, but you’ve chosen not to. At least, not now.

Instead, you are completely devoted to motherhood. You give all of yourself to this season of life, and you’ve embodied this, almost, aggressive patience.”

When Joseph said those words, I felt seen. But I also felt the sting of everything unsaid: the unfinished drafts, the half-formed ideas waiting in notebooks. Aggressive patience isn’t gentle. It aches. It demands something daily. And yet, it’s also what steadies me in this season of giving everything I have to my children.

I looked at my hands folded in my lap, begged the tears stinging the corners of my eyes not to fall heavy down my cheeks. My thumbs rubbed small circles against my knuckles, an unconscious attempt at composure. The lamplight caught the tremor in my fingers. I pressed them tighter, as if sheer will could hold me in one piece.

This is something they don’t tell you about motherhood: every child birthed into this big, wide world softens your heart incrementally more. You learn to live with the tender throb of your heart beating outside your chest, raw and unshielded. At first, you think the pang will dull. Instead, it spreads; seeping into your ribs, your throat, even the backs of your eyes, until it is nothing but all-consuming.

I cry more than I ever have before. Sometimes from grief, sometimes from awe, often from both at once. And I am convinced this is the way it was always meant to be. We are designed to be porous. To be touched, influenced, undone, remade. To be moved into motion.

And motion has always been my key. It unlocks what’s stuck: closed doors, guarded hearts, dammed-up streams of creativity. Rhythm is my reminder that I’m still here, still tethered to this body and this moment, even when my mind tries to escape.

I stole a glance at the faces of our small group members. Palms press, unclasp. Fingers knot, release. A small ritual in my lap: motion.

That same rhythm follows me into the night. Most essays this year have begun in the pitch-dark of my son’s nursery, bouncing on the exercise ball. The floorboards creak in familiar protest beneath me. The faint scent of milk lingers in the air. His soft breath rises and falls against the crook of my elbow as I count the rhythm of the bounce: one-two, one-two.

With each rise and fall, sentences begin to string themselves together. Words surface like bubbles, fragile and fleeting. I repeat them under my breath until I can slip away to write them down.

Over days and weeks, I collect these fragments. Scraps of thought, half-formed sentences murmured between bottles and bath time. I piece them together like a quilter, trusting that eventually the patches will stitch into something whole, something warm enough to wrap around me and, maybe, someone else too.

Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t. Sometimes I’m left with a pile of patches that I’m not sure what to do with; at least, not yet.

Up and down, up and down, the ball squeaks beneath me, and ideas tickle at the edge of my consciousness. Emotions flood fast and heavy into my chest, and the steady rhythm quiets the noise until there is nothing left but this voice inside my head, penning itself without a page.

Before children, this voice roared. It demanded whole mornings, thousands of words spilling onto paper before breakfast. Now, it whispers. It waits. It trusts me to carry its fragments in my pocket, to gather them in the margins of my days, and to remember them when the house finally exhales into sleep.

Because Joseph is right, as he would argue he always is. The ideas inside of me are secondary to the children in front of me. Motherhood demands the best of my attention, but that does not mean my ambition has dried up, or that the art has gone missing. It is still here, humming beneath the surface.

It has simply shifted direction. Instead of a canvas or a collection of poems, my children are the living, breathing masterpiece. Of course, I cannot (and would not) form them as I would a painting, each stroke under my control. But I am shaping them all the same. Loving them into who they are becoming is its own art form, as consuming and painstaking as any devotion to craft.

So yes, motherhood has demanded a new kind of patience from me. One that trusts unfinished work can wait without being abandoned. The books and ideas are still there, waiting their turn; as this chapter asks for my whole heart, my entire mind, and every ounce of energy that runs out by nightfall and starts over again by morning.

As I sat in the circle of our small group, Joseph’s words still hanging in the air, I realized this patience wasn’t exile from my art. It is preparing me for it.

Around us, the babies squealed on the playmat, toys clattering against the floor. Upstairs, feet pounded and laughter echoed faintly through the ceiling. Life hummed around our conversation, and somehow the symphony made his words feel steadier, truer.

In a way, I am betting on borrowed time. I carry within me the promise of future decades; years I pray will hold bestselling books and purpose-driven work. They are not guaranteed, but I hold them close like a gentle vow to myself of what’s still to come.

Not unlike the way I promise my daughter that she can be whoever she dreams of being when she grows older, knowing she will change her mind a hundred times but believing in her possibility all the same.

While I hold the potential of what’s ahead, motherhood insists I don’t miss what’s here. It’s the paradox I’m learning to live in: holding tomorrow loosely while giving myself fully to today.

This chapter is called Don’t blink. The walker will turn into a scooter. The thigh rolls will vanish. The cheeks will sharpen. The sticky hands will find new things to cling to.

This chapter is called Don’t rush. There is always time for one more bedtime story, always room to be late if it means listening longer to their wonder.

This chapter is called Don’t forget. I prayed for this, every detail. The voices will deepen. The baby hair smell will give way to teenage musk. The nonsense chatter will grow into fierce questions. And the warmth of their bodies curled into my chest will become a memory.

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Joseph’s phrase was “aggressive patience,” and as he said the words in front of our small group, I felt a strange relief. He was naming the permanent tension I carry as a mother; the pull between art unfinished and children who cannot wait. His words didn’t tell me to endure more, they told me he already understood.

The room was quiet. My eyes stung. And for the first time, I felt less alone in the weight of it.

Maybe aggressive patience isn’t about putting my life on hold. It’s about building strength I didn’t know I would need: endurance, attention, resilience. These years are shaping me just as much as they are shaping my children.

So I lean into the rhythm: rocking in the dark, small bodies in my arms, the daily giving until I’m emptied and filled again. This is not wasted time. This is the work.

One day, when the pages and projects return, I’ll write from the soil of this season: rich, hard-won, alive with every ounce of love and tension motherhood taught me to carry.

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