I hear that a lot these days. I certainly appreciate the offer, but how do you ask for help when you're accustomed to doing everything yourself? How do take help from other people you've never offered help to yourself?
How do I ask for stupid stuff? Things like needing someone to:
- carry off the broken exercise bike sitting out at the trash can.
- spray the weeds in the rose garden and the vegetable garden and the shade garden and in front of the house and behind the back fence.
- dig potatoes and pick tomatoes - and keep plenty of them for yourself.
- prune the roses - and take as many bouquets as you want. I'll even give you some vases for them.
- go through my mail. I get home and stack it in a pile(s). Sometimes I sort it, sometimes I don't. Either way I'm tired of catalogs, magazines, and credit card offers cluttering my space.
- take my car to get serviced. A terrible rattle appears to be coming from under the car and the maintenance required light that came on this week and won't go off is pressing me to take action. That is, whenever I can get there during business hours.
- wash and chop vegetables for me. I'm trying hard to keep juicing, but the washing and chopping cuts into either hospital time or getting-to-work time.
- clean out the irrigation pump filter. It's in a case in the ground, too low and screwed on too tight for me to clean it out. Sprinkler pressure is down and things aren't getting watered properly.
- dig up my daisies. They spread too much, they take too much deadheading, and they get too tall. They've taken over practically all my wildflower-turned-perennnial garden and I'm getting tired of having to stare at the ugly mess every time I pull into the driveway.
- pump my gas. In addition to driving back and forth to work I'm driving almost 80 miles roundtrip to the hospital several times a week and am using up gas like crazy.
How do I ask for help with those things? I don't. I say thanks for the offer and leave it at that. For a person who never asks for help maybe it's just easier to live with a messy house, messy gardens, barely-working sprinklers, a broken exercise bike, and intermittent juicing.
It was almost easier to live without a picture today, too. Of all the days I've taken pictures, all 526, today I believe was the hardest. Today was the day I couldn't find anything. In desperation I snapped a picture of a plant the high school staff gave my husband when he first wound up in the hospital. Both of us may not be flourishing right now but the plant is, some three weeks later.
