A knee injury landed my youngest on crutches for 2-4 weeks. Crutches in NYC is not an easy assignment. Our long planned visit coincided with the crutches. Asking for assistance at every turn, the New Yorkers responded with kindness, another reminder to be suspicious of stereotypes. Usually, our time together in NYC consists of long walks and lingering in museums. At one museum, we finally asked for a wheelchair. The staffers at the coat check were impossibly kind, asking us to wait at a bench then doing everything they could for us. Their abundance of help felt like an embarrassment of riches that we did not deserve. After all, this was just a bruised knee, an injury that would heal eventually.
Observing my youngest navigate the crutches and the bigger challenge of asking for help reminded me of someone else. I am not very good at asking for help. There may have been a point in time, roughly the first four decades of my life, when I thought complete self-sufficiency was an admirable trait. Asking for help felt like a weakness, an admission of frailty.
As a child and young adult, I found it hard to trust people. Trust and asking for help are inherently intertwined, requiring a degree of vulnerability too. Additionally, I didn’t know how to ask for what I wanted or needed. It turns out that disappointment is guaranteed if your expectation is that people can magically read your mind.
I no longer expect people to read my mind. I am learning to ask for what I need or want, as I learn more about who I am. As far as asking for help, I am working on it. Of course, I love to help others. I have made several careers out of helping people. It feels good when I can make a recommendation for a restaurant or a tree trimmer. It is fun to connect two people I really like and respect together, either professionally or socially. When we are invited over for a meal, my immediate reaction is to offer a dish or two.
As a parent, asking whether I am fixing or helping is a good place to get curious with myself. I easily become overzealous in my desire to be ‘helpful’. Another of life’s lessons that I am enrolled in for the second or forty-second time. It is uncomfortable for a helper/fixer like me to realize the only ‘help’ needed or desired is quiet companionship and a hug. It is hard not to offer ideas, solutions, and platitudes. All offered in the spirit of helping, yet truly designed to assuage any discomfort I am feeling.
Asking for help and offering help is one of the most simple and beautiful gifts we can share with each other. It is not a weakness. We are fragile. We are strong, too.
