Dear readers, I wish I could say I am back and fully functional but sadly that is not the case at all. It seems that my recovery will indeed be a process that needs the one thing I often don’t have enough of and that would be time. No worries I will one day be back and in full effect talking much shit as I usually do but while I have many thoughts swirling around in my head (AZ immigration situation, homeschooling and the list goes on), running to the computer to write them out is easier said than done.
Instead I am taking a break from my much-needed rest to share a lesson that I have learned and am continuing to learn, sometimes you have to ask for help. It’s funny because as a member of the helping professions, we are often quick to get help for others, in fact we demand it at times. Yet in our personal lives asking for help is often hard to do.
To be very honest life has been pretty chaotic in my house, the Spousal Unit deserves a gold medal or something for juggling a challenging week of work and remember he is self-employed, so if he fucks up a clients work, the repercussions are severe. We learned that lesson years ago when the girl child was born and he had to take care of me and again juggle work, it wasn’t long after when one of his clients pulled their work from him resulting in a huge loss of income that we had to deal with. People often think being self-employed sounds romantic but it can leave you financially vulnerable since if you find yourself without any work, you lack access to things in the safety net like unemployment benefits. So while its been great to hear friends who are not local telling me to take it easy while recovering the fact is I have not been able to focus a hundred percent on recovery as much as I would like since the Spousal Unit has to work and the kidlet was home all week and he took up 90% of childcare duties on the one week generally that I would have taken a greater share had I not been recovering.
Last night I saw the weary look on his face as he struggled with the fact that I had taken the girl child out for a couple of hours and later we went grocery shopping. He was looking at a serious deadline and I knew he needed to focus 100% and I knew the girl child had been getting increasingly antsy as she realized Mama was still not well, so last night I did something I never thought of which in hindsight I should have done before my surgery. I called in the calvary, that would be I contacted our church that we have been members of now for a while. It’s a fairly large church and while we don’t know a lot of folks in church, many are familiar with me because of my job.
There are some similarities that church folks share regardless of race, class…you get the gist. When a call goes out that a church member needs some prayer due to illness and some help, in most cases the church is there for you. As I type this, I have been informed by the good ladies of the church that dinner for tonight will be dropped off, childcare is coming to assist with the girl child in the form of playdates and they are working on a plan to assist for as long as needed. As I told my church contact who is the same age as me and a member of the ministry team, this was hard to accept but I knew I needed it. She told me she understood all too well because she recently had some health issues and also being the mother of small kids, she too had learned sometimes you have to be on the receiving end at times.
I have tears in my eyes as a I write this because really asking for help is just that difficult for me yet I share this story because among my readers there might be someone who needs to hear this message. It’s not weak to ask for help, people often don’t know what we need until we tell them, so don’t be afraid to let folks know.
As for me, I am going to hobble back to the couch soon and get my nose back into this mystery novel I am reading. Have a good weekend.