Patience is said to be a virtue, but I think it's a life skill

Christmas 2013

It's somewhat ironic that I struggle with patience.  I say it's ironic, because I work mostly with dementia and Alzheimer's patients (no, they're not the same thing; you can have dementia without having Alzheimer's), and that requires nothing so much as patience.
Let me give you an example.
One of my dementia clients drinks from one of those plastic cups with a lid and a straw to cut down on spills and broken glasses, which had become a real problem a while back.  The difficulty with that is that she doesn't always remember how to drink from a straw.  She will hold the cup and tilt it up, sometimes with the straw in her mouth, sometimes with the straw pointing off to the side.  Every time this happens, I resituate the cup- if necessary- so that the straw is in her mouth, and remind her to suck through the straw.  Often, I need to hold the cup still so she doesn't tilt it up again.  This explanation and process is usually repeated four or five times every time she takes a drink from her cup.
It can be frustrating to repeat something over and over like that.  My mother tells me it is good practice for having children, but I maintain that I don't want any children.
I do, however, want to understand aging.  I want to understand how better to help these people I serve.  Maybe that's what makes me good at this job.  I want to know everything about my clients; I want to understand how their minds work and why they react to certain things in
certain ways.
It's not about patience or compassion for me.  It's about connection.  Connecting with people isn't something I pride myself on.  It's just something I do.  And fortunately for me, I've always connected to older generations than mine better than I do to my own.  Some might find that weird.  I just consider it the natural order of things.