The Extraordinary UnOrdinary You: Follow Your Own Path, Discover Your Own Journey

THE VIRTUE OF PATIENCE

LEARNING THE “KOREAN WAY”

Some of my greatest lessons in patience have come from being a mother.

We adopted Noah from South Korea when he was just four months old. When we made the decision to adopt, even our closest friends questioned our choice.

“You can have more biological kids right? So, why not just have another one?”

We just explained to our friends that there were so many kids out there simply waiting for a family to love them, and we wanted to be one of those families.

In most cases, when you apply to adopt a child, you don’t get to just pick any child—you’re actually matched with a child. Once you’re matched, you’re sent a photo and information regarding the child they matched you with. When we got that first photo of Noah, it was a beautiful picture of him in a white gown, but my eyes were drawn to the number on a small sign placed over the gown he was wearing. That’s all that identified him. He was K06-410, just a number. When our friends saw the picture, they finally understood why this was so important to us.

When it was time to go to South Korea to pick Noah up, Rob stayed home with our girls, Emma and Olivia, while I made the trip with Jacob. Jacob was only ten at the time, but he really grew up on that trip and was such a big help to me.

We had already been in Seoul for three days before we actually had the opportunity to meet Noah. We explored the capital city by subway, visited some of the most exquisite Buddhist temples, and even had enough time to enjoy Lotte World Theme Park. We really didn’t sleep much because of the massive time difference—twelve hours.

We arrived at the adoption agency office in Seoul on day four not knowing what to expect. As we walked into the office, I was so nervous. Jacob and I sat down and waited anxiously. When the door finally opened, my jitters went away as I saw Noah’s beautiful face and chubby cheeks. He

was even more handsome in person than in the photos we had received of him.

Noah’s foster mom was so sweet with Noah, and we could tell that she really loved him. She had fostered nearly forty children, and I’m sure she loved them all. As she put him into my arms, tears flowed down her cheeks. She kissed him and quickly said goodbye. My heart ached for both of them. I knew she had taken care of many babies, but her tears showed how much she really cared for him.

Once all the paperwork was completed, we were able to take Noah and start our journey home. It took us an hour by taxi to get to our hotel, and Noah was screaming at the top of his lungs the entire time. No matter what we tried, we couldn’t get him to stop crying. Even the poor taxi driver was trying to calm Noah down by shaking his keys. But Noah would not be comforted.

In the hotel room, Noah didn’t like the bassinet, so Jacob offered to hold him. It didn’t bother Jacob at all that Noah was screaming. He just held him and started flipping through the channels on the TV. A baseball game came on, and all of a sudden, Noah went silent.

Jacob and I just looked at each other in awe. We had no idea what had happened, but we knew that the baseball game was staying on.

The next morning, with no more than two hours of sleep, we packed up for our flight home, with Noah crying all the while. I honestly couldn’t figure it out. I kept thinking to myself, “I’ve done this three times before. I should be able to quiet a baby!” I already had three kids, and I thought I was doing pretty well. But maybe I overestimated my mothering abilities; I felt so discouraged.

If you are anything like me, life has a way of making you really question yourself when a choice you’ve made doesn’t end up looking like the picture you had in your head.

I really started questioning myself and my life choices. I began to wonder if I was mentally strong enough to handle the challenges I was being faced with. But I was already all in, and I couldn’t back down. We had to just keep moving forward, crying baby and all.

By the time we got to the airport, we were finally able to quiet Noah down.

“Okay, we’re going to be okay,” I thought.

I spent extra money and purchased a first-class seat so we could lie flat, which was one of the dumbest things I’ve ever done. I thought the plane would take off and Noah would fall asleep on me and we could recline and sleep through a

good portion of the flight. The idea looked great inside my mind but didn’t play out well in real life.

When we boarded the plane, they put the bassinet in the bulkhead area, and they strapped it in. From the second we sat down—Noah started screaming. I felt horrible. Not only was I unable to calm him down, but few people in the first-class cabin were empathetic to the situation. I carried Noah back to the galley, and literally stood there for hours on end, trying to comfort my new baby.

The people on the other side of the curtain kept pulling it open to see the mother who couldn’t quiet her child. I just kept saying, “I’m really sorry. I’m trying my best here.” It was one of my greatest lessons in patience.

I felt completely out of my element, and I had been a mother for over a decade! Most of the people were giving me looks—not nice looks. But some of the people peeking behind the curtain were kind and offered to help me. I just kept thinking, “What am I going to do with this poor baby? He doesn’t really even know what’s happening. His whole life has been changed in two seconds.”

Finally, after ten hours of trying, one of the flight attendants came up and said, “Can I try the Korean way?”

Relieved, I said, “You can try whatever you like.”

She took Noah in her arms, put him on his stomach, placed him on her back, and started bouncing. She was hunched over at a ninety-degree angle as she bounced. Noah’s eyes started to close, and in two seconds, he was asleep.

I had no idea that there was a Korean way of quieting a baby. She could have made it up—but it worked!

EACH CHILD IS UNIQUE

I knew how to be a mother, but this experience taught me that I needed to learn how to be Noah’s mother. Talk about a humbling experience. It required patience, because I needed to learn how to be a different kind of mother to him. I think so many times in our lives, we keep doing things the same way we’ve always done them, not realizing that some- times there’s a better way of doing them. Change is hard. It doesn’t come overnight. It’s often a gradual process, taking time and a fair share of mistakes. But if we’re patient with the process—and especially patient with ourselves and open to doing old things in a new way—we can do so much more.

It was a long trip to Chicago, and an even longer trip home since our flight from Chicago was canceled and we had to spend the night at the Chicago airport. We got a hotel room, but no one slept because Noah screamed the entire time.

The next day, we had two more flights to get us home. Noah cried the entire flight from Chicago to Atlanta—big shocker. But on the flight from Atlanta to Sarasota, he maybe whim- pered once. He was as worn out as I was, and probably had no energy left to get the tears out.

When we landed in Sarasota, not only were we greeted by Rob and the girls, but our friends had come with signs and posters cheering us on and welcoming us home. It was a beautiful sight to see.

When I saw Rob, it was finally my time to cry. I was emo- tionally spent. I handed Noah to Rob, and he held both of us in his arms. I knew that we could raise this baby together.

One of my favorite family photos is at the airport. You can tell that Noah is screaming. Rob is holding him. Emma is standing with her fingers in her ears to drown out the crying. And I look like I’m half-dead. But we made it home. We made it home.

That was the beginning of our life with Noah.

PATIENCE IN THE TRYING MOMENTS

My experience with Noah’s adoption taught me that I can’t always fix things in the moment. Sometimes, I just have to roll with it. I am sure that I am not the only one who has had to try to comfort a crying baby on a long flight home, and

I am certain I won’t be the last. We all have experienced circumstances that we can’t control. It might not be a baby screaming for ten hours on a flight, but we’ve all had situa- tions that we can’t fix and things that lie outside our control. When those moments come, the only thing we can control is how we react to those situations. And oftentimes, we just have to do our best to remain levelheaded in the moment.

We have to figure out a way to make it bearable until we find the solution—because there is always some kind of solution. We just have to be patient enough to find it.

It’s so easy in stressful situations to let our guard down and allow our natural response to take over. Most of the time, our first response to stressful situations comes from our human weaknesses and current emotions. But that’s prob- ably not the response any of us want to have. We’re much more able to manage those situations if we are patient enough to let things play out a little more. We have to be persistently active in finding a solution, while not letting the situation get the best of us.

A lot of times, it’s hard to assess things in the moment. And we are not always able to stay calm when presented with really troubling circumstances. But even if we aren’t able to stay calm, cool, and collected, these experiences teach us valuable lessons. Looking back on them, we can evaluate ourselves and our reactions, recognize the wrong choices

we made because we are human, and commit to do better next time. We can learn so much from our mistakes.

If we find ourselves in circumstances where the outcome is out of our control, sometimes there are things that we can do to lessen the effects on ourselves and everyone around us. I love proactive parents who, when they get on a plane for the first time with a new baby, pass everyone a note with earplugs and a lollipop attached that says, “This is my first flight. I apologize if I cry. Here are some earplugs to help you and some candy to make this flight sweeter.”

I’ve received this cute note on a few different flights, and it really breaks the ice from the beginning. It lets people know what to expect, so when the crying does happen, people are a little less annoyed by it. But I truly believe that all the candy in the world wouldn’t have made people happy on my flight home with Noah.

Sometimes you will feel that you can’t control anything. There will be days when you will say to yourself, “I can’t believe that just happened. And there’s nothing I can do about it.” When those days come, the best thing you can do for yourself is to accept what is, and move on. It’s in the past—it’s done. Tell yourself you’re glad that it’s over, and learn from it. Just move on.

When you feel that you are in a circumstance where you have no control, it’s important to remind yourself that you do have control. You may not have control of the situation, but you will always have control of how you react to it.

PATIENCE IN DISAPPOINTMENT

We’re our own biggest critics. When things go wrong, as they often do, we sometimes blame ourselves for whatever it is we lack. But in those moments of weakness, it is import- ant that we learn how to be patient with ourselves. We may not see the end from the beginning, but we can learn to take the disappointments when they come and learn to adjust our direction when our journey doesn’t take us where we had planned to go.

When my son applied to Stanford, he was devastated when the rejection letter arrived. It was heartbreaking to watch as a mother. I encouraged him to apply because I didn’t ever want him to look back and say, “I wish I would have tried.” I wanted him to understand that he would never know what could have been, if he didn’t put himself out there in the first place. By applying, he would get either accepted or rejected. Either way, he would learn from the experience.

He did everything right when it came to his application—he had straight A’s, near perfect standardized testing, meaningful volunteer work, and he even published a paper in a major medical journal. If you looked, based on requirements, he checked all the boxes and did everything he knew how to do in order to get into Stanford. But in the end, it was their decision.

Life doesn’t always work out the way we want. When the rejection letter came, he had two choices: he could throw his hands up in the air and quit, or he could learn to adjust his direction. He may have lain on the floor for a while and wallowed in his sorrow, but then he chose to let go of Stan- ford and look for opportunities at other colleges.

Just because you feel like you deserve something, and you don’t get it, doesn’t mean you should stop moving forward with what you’re doing. Everybody has disappointments. It’s about learning to be patient with yourself as you figure out, through the disappointments, how to move forward on your journey.

My son’s plan to go to Stanford didn’t work out for him. He didn’t get into his first-choice school. Nor did my next daughter. But they learned to make new plans. Jacob decided to attend Harvey Mudd College. The life experiences he had at Harvey Mudd changed him completely. He went from being super quiet and shy to a strong self-advocate because of the program and the people he was surrounded with. In time he realized that he ended up exactly where he was sup- posed to be. If he hadn’t attended that school, he definitely wouldn’t be the same person he is today.

Jacob was accepted at every school he applied to for grad school. Today he’s at Stanford—not because they chose him, but because he chose them. In the end, my son’s path to get to Stanford was totally different than what he expected. But through his patience, he was still able to get to where he wanted to go. Although his journey to Stanford began as a disappointment, it was the exact journey he needed to become the man he was meant to be.

Life is full of disappointments. But we can’t let those disappointments stop us from progressing. Sometimes, we don’t ever get to that place where we thought we wanted to go. If we learn to be patient with ourselves, and with our journey, life will lead us down the path that will take us exactly where we need to be.

PATIENCE IN OUR JOURNEY

We live in a world where everything is fast-paced and instant. We want what we want now, and we struggle when we have to wait for it. We have fast-food, instant photos, streaming movies, and online shopping. All that is required is a click of the button, and the whole world is right at our fingertips.

All these instant things may bring instant pleasure, but they don’t bring lasting joy—although Amazon makes me pretty happy.

Sure, there are the pleasures of life—a piece of chocolate or a walk on the beach—but these things are only pleasurable in the moment. Once they’re gone, they’re gone. Those things that bring happiness that lasts beyond just a single moment are things that you invest in like family, good friends, a great job, something to believe in, and something to fight for. These things require small, continuous efforts over time before you see the fruits of your labors—and the outcome is rarely immediate.

It’s going to take patience and work to get anywhere worth going. Houses aren’t built over night, excessive weight isn’t lost after one good day of dieting, scholarships aren’t awarded to just anyone. All of these things require hours and days, and maybe even years, of consistent work before the results will come.