“Just let me take care of you!” I yelled at my four year old as I chased him around our beanbag chairs. I was trying to get him to let me put a cold-pack on his forehead, which was rapidly developing quite the goose egg.
Those words echoed in my head as I argued with my own mom a few days later. A pipe in our basement was clogged. Every time we drained our kitchen sink, water filled with food particles spewed up from a pipe behind the washing machine. Lovely. My mom was worried that if we ran the washing machine, it too would make the flooding worse.
“Let me take your laundry. I’ll do it for you,” she urged. I had a similar emotional reaction that my son did a few days before. Nooooo. I’m a big girl. I can handle my own stuff. We can wait a day for the plumber to come. I can take care of myself! I might have well have been stamping my feet and yelling. Or hiding under a bean bag chair.
“We can take care of it!” I answered, insistent.
Except that we really couldn’t as well as she could. Just like my son couldn’t take care of himself. Sure, we didn’t need all of our laundry done. In the midst of a pandemic when my parents were literally the only people we were seeing, no one would notice if we wore the same clothes that we had a few days ago. But just like most families with young children, we’re usually drowning in laundry. Waiting a couple of days to do any laundry at all would make catching up much harder.
On the other hand, my mom has a lot of time. She’s retired and while she had a very robust social life pre-COVID, that’s all on hold.
More importantly, she wanted to help. And all I wanted to do was say, “No no no.” But for what purpose? Just my pride. Because I want to think of myself as independent, not interdependent. I want to think of myself as always able to do everything right, to be the expert, to Take Care of Everything.
After a few minutes, I realized that I was being ridiculous. I shouldn’t let my ego get in the way of accepting very reasonable, heartfelt help. I said, “Yes, you can take our laundry. Thank you.”
Our laundry returned to us lovely and clean a few days later.
Loving people isn’t just about helping them. It’s about being willing to admit when you need help and accepting it. I realized that if I wanted my kid to let me take care of him, I needed to model it myself. In the short term, I bribed him with ice cream to let me apply the ice cream container to his head as an ice pack. But in the long term, he’s going to remember what I model.