Asking for What I Need

Image credit: Photo by c@rljones on Flickr Licensed under Creative Commons

Earlier this week, I had a rough morning with my daughter, my son was sick, I had an IEP meeting scheduled (those of you who don't know what that is, be glad you don't) and on top of it all, I couldn't find a family pet (which would later turn up dead). After I got my daughter off to school, I called my husband Mark at work. He answered the phone hurriedly, as he often seems to at work, and said, "Is everything ok? Can I call you back?" This is the point at which I usually answer, "Yes, it's ok. Call me back."

I tend to treat calls to Mark like calls to 911: unless it's a life threatening emergency, I let him go. And there wasn't anything so wrong. There wasn't anything he could do; I didn't need him to rush to meet me at a hospital anywhere. I had one kid with a cold and another still on the cranky tail end of one and I couldn't find a pet that would probably turn up just fine in an hour or so. I thought I "should" be able to deal with that without interrupting his work day. But instead, I said, "No. No, I'm not ok."

I told him we were all well, but I was scared and worried about our pet. I told him that I was stressed and exhausted from caring for sick kids, and I just wanted to hear a safe, friendly voice: the voice of someone who loved me. I felt terribly guilty for taking time from his day for something so seemingly trivial. But it felt good to talk to him. It was what I needed right then. When I hung up the phone, I looked at the time the call had taken: 5 minutes and 9 seconds. And I thought, "That was it? That was the huge, unreasonable need I was so reluctant to ask him to meet?" Five minutes on the phone with my husband, my life partner and very best friend, out of a work day that usually lasts twelve hours. Five of the 720 minutes he works. Less that a hundredth of one workday.

Look at that. My needs aren't the huge burden my distorted thinking would sometimes have me believe. And it's ok to ask for help when I need it, even if I feel I "shouldn't" need it. Years into recovery, that is still hard to remember, and harder still to execute, but it still feels so good when I do.

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This post was originally published at The Second Road.