One of the toughest things for human beings to do is ask for help. We don’t like it. We don’t like to admit that we’ve had enough. We don’t want to confess to holding onto more than we can handle. We don’t like to expose any vulnerability. We don’t like to feel helpless. And let’s be honest—babyloss parents and those suffering from infertility already feel so completely helpless. We couldn’t prevent the loss, we can’t force our bodies to make babies, as much as we try to help them along.
But overloading yourself, taking on too much, not being able to let go of any responsibility, failing to delegate where you can, these are not routes to self-care. These are routes to illness, exhaustion, and anxiety.
You see, I speak from experience. I am the last person to ask anyone for help with anything. Truly. I am independent to a fault. And a huge part of it, which I discovered during grief counseling, is the fact that I, Rachel Kain, am a control freak. When you have a need for control, it can be exacerbated by life events that emphasize how little control we truly have–like loss, or the inability to conceive. In the midst of the reeling and grasping, we try to control every other aspect of our life over which we feel we can exert it. At work, we may take on more work than we can honestly complete on our own. We may join too many committees. We may obsess over the condition of our house or our laundry room. I’ve done all of these things. We can also just honestly feel like our normal day-to-day has become too much to handle. Or the day-to-day we would like to have, with the commitments and the happenings is just simply not do-able.
And then what happens? We feel like failures. We should be able to do it all on our own, right? What it really boils down to is two things: First, we already feel like we’ve failed. After all, a parent is supposed to protect their child. Even if deep down, we know that we’ve done all we can do, we still feel responsible. Second, we’re all prideful, to some extent. We want to be independent, not needy. Asking for help emphasizes and/or creates a sense of incompetency.
I’m here to tell you, it needn’t be that way. It’s really, truly okay to ask for help. The plain truth is that everybody needs some help with something at some time. In our lives, we never accomplish anything without the help of someone else. That help may be painfully obvious or it may sit quietly in the background. But we don’t go through this world alone. Not ever.
Remember in the beginning, when people were asking what they could do to help, and you couldn’t come up with an answer? Or maybe your loss is fresh and people are offering right now, and you’re similarly stymied. Tell them this: “I don’t know what help I need right now. But will you promise that when I need it, no matter how many days, months, or years have passed, you’ll help me?” I’ll bet the answer is “Yes.”
I was offered help when Colin was still in the hospital. My women’s Sunday school was told of a “family in need” at Christmastime. They decided they wanted to marshall their combined resources and talents and put Christmas together for this family. We opted to remain anonymous, but I guess I’ve just outed us. It wasn’t that we couldn’t afford it (but so what if we couldn’t). I just didn’t have the time or the energy to go to work, take care of our older boys, and be in the hospital with Colin as much as I needed to be. I had, frankly, forgotten about Christmas altogether. So we accepted the help. And in return, we pay it forward whenever we can. That was a hard thing to do–to let go of the control of picking out the gifts and to admit that, no, I couldn’t do it all by myself. But I’m so glad we did, because we were able to relax and enjoy our holiday as much as we could. There have been other times since Colin died that I have asked for help in a timely manner, and other times that I didn’t. I can tell you that the times that I did ask for help, before I was hurting and feeling overwhelmed, I was as grateful to myself for asking as I was grateful to the person who helped me.
So go out on a limb. Ask for help. Someone will oblige. I promise.
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