Waiting

I have been doing a lot of waiting recently.  I consider myself to be a very patient person, but I am beginning to recognize that I too have my limits.  I am discovering that buying a house is an exercise in waiting, especially a foreclosed house, held by an out-of-state bank.  I’m waiting for real estate agents, mortgage brokers, appraisers, title agents, and many others, to all do their little piece of the puzzle.  Having a preset closing date would alleviate much of my anxiety in that regard, if it wasn’t for the fact that each party in the process is constantly asking me to push that date farther out.

Unrelated to that, I have been trying to get a hold of someone else for weeks, for something simple.  After no answer to my calls, emails, texts, and messages, I resorted to trying to contact him through other people in his family, his brother and his wife, but still no response.  The entire issue could be resolved in five minutes, at no expense to anyone,

I have a variety of other dialogs in progress at the moment, none of which are waiting on my participation.  Most of them are my efforts to reach out to help others, trying to donate things as I finish settling my mom's estate and cleaning out her house before I move.  It is stereotypical for people to ignore those who want something from them (salesmen, bill collectors, etc.) as opposed to those who have something for them.  But that has not been my experience, especially recently.

I have known for quite a while that the one thing that really frustrates me, is being ignored.  To this point, that is an experience that has primarily been limited to my interactions with female friends.  I very rarely find myself being ignored in the business world, nor by my family or other friends.  (I just seem to have been uniquely blessed with a number of close female friends, who seem to struggle with reliable communication and organization, so I probably unfairly associate that as a distinctly female trait.)  So I had previously assumed that my strong reaction to being ignored was rooted in the emotions that are attached in some way to any relationship with a member of the opposite gender, since that is the primary context in which I experienced that frustration.  But my current situations would indicate that in reality, it is just being ignored in any form that really makes me angry.

Now don't get me wrong, it's not like I have never let something slip through the cracks.  But that second message, "still waiting for such-and-such," is usually a big wake up call for me.  I see ignoring someone as disrespectful, something I am sensitive to in both directions, since deliberate or not, it is an indication of what we value.  I feel guilty if I don't get back to someone else, even accidently, and angry frustration when they don't get back to me.  Sometimes it is justified, other times the junk mail filter or some other practical consideration is to blame.  So I should probably reserve judgment in those situations until I have a complete picture of what is going on.  But that requires a lot of patience.