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sometimes you really can’t do it all
By heather | January 26, 2010
This morning I got up super early because the woman who cleans my house was supposed to come today, and I needed to pick up and straighten and get everything ready. At 8:15am, she called me to see if she could come on Thursday because she would really like to run some errands uninterrupted today. My first instinct is always to accommodate, even if accommodating someone else is greatly inconvenient for me. If it had been the first time, I would probably have said yes, but this happens routinely – in fact over the 10 months she’s been cleaning for me, she calls to reschedule 70% of the time, usually at the last minute.
With the phone to my ear, I looked at my kids eating breakfast, and looked at the playroom that I told them they couldn’t play in this morning because the toys were all picked up and I said no. ”No”, I thought, “you cannot come on Thursday because you do a terrible job and the only reason I keep paying you to clean is because I feel guilty that you are a single mom and haven’t got up the nerve to fire you.” What I said instead was that she could come earlier than normal so that then she could have the rest of her day free.
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I have known for two weeks now that today Brett wouldn’t be able to get the kids because of a class he’s taking this week. Tuesday is normally when I teach yoga and two other classes. When I couldn’t find subs, I lined up a babysitter. At 11:40 this morning, the babysitter informed me that she was sick. She didn’t mind watching the kids, but she was sick – really sick, runny nose and foggy stuffy head sick. Any mother knows better than to do that, because whatever the occasion, nothing is worse than the aftermath – two sick, cranky kids and an excellent chance that you’ll get it too.
Faced with a dilemma that is now impossible to solve without asking someone for help, I run through combinations of scenarios, from canceling the classes altogether to some complicated combination of part time babysitting/part time emergency sub/possibly canceling one and teaching two. I called my friend Liz who also teaches yoga -she couldn’t sub but was willing to come over and babysit for us.
Trying to figure out what to do for a class that would start in 4 hours while I’m at the car dealership getting my oil changed with only half a phone battery and none of the phone numbers I needed, combined with guilt over things getting screwed up in the first place left me shaky and confused, unable to decide on a course of action.
Why the meltdown over something so minor? Because I hate asking for help. I especially hate doing it last minute. I feel, and part of me knows how irrational this is, that I shouldn’t ever need to ask for things – I should be able to get and do things all on my own. Before I had kids, I didn’t ask. Or did only rarely. Asking for help is humbling, and hard. Admitting that I need someone else is not a personal failure, logically I know this. Being this way has made my life and ability to love harder than it needs to be.
It was Brett who made the decision for me, telling me he would leave his training early to come meet me at the gym. He did it selflessly, without any attempt to make me feel bad about it, all for a few stupid classes that I wouldn’t even make $30 teaching. Maybe he knows me well enough by now to recognize that the self-flagellation would be worse than anything he could say.
I came home from the dealership having paid too much for an oil change, and trembly with gratitude for the people I called that were willing to help me to find the cleaning lady still here, only halfway done. I kept driving past the house, and as I rounded the corner swearing about what to do next I had the first calm, rational thought I’d had in over an hour.
“You could go back there, and tell her you no longer need her services. You could take care of this right now, instead of coming home to a still half-dirty house and being ticked off as you dust all the things she missed, and next time complaining about the same thing. You could act like an adult, and handle it.”
So I did.
Topics: self improvement | 1 Comment »
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January 27th, 2010 at 9:41 am
Oh, I hear you. I also hate asking for help. That being said, lately my trouble has been that I don’t have people available to even ask for help. My friends and family all live too far away.
Good for you for figuring out a course of action. And keep in mind that asking for help may feel like a loss of control, but it actually reflects that you have enough control over the situation to know that you need help and to know how to get help.
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