At some point we all need an extra pair of hands… And we shouldn’t be ashamed to ask for this says Liz Fraser, Modern Family Expert for Care.com
Despite what the children’s books and car adverts might want to tell us, family life is not a fairy tale, bathed in golden light and permanently filled with the happy sound of laughing children. It’s hard. VERY hard.
The very concept of lots of people all sharing their time, space and varied desires and needs with each other, every day, for decades, is enough to make most minds boggle a little. Far from a permanently harmonious scene of love and joy, family life can often be a headache of epic proportions, and all families go through really tough times.
Whether it’s minor marital problems (no relationship I’ve ever known has not had some of these) or the exhausting, shattering hell of divorce, to just needing time to think for a while. It could be one parent who is away on a lot of business, a sudden increase in work-load, illness, redundancy, and so on. There are times when a family just feels pulled apart at the seams, and unable to cope.
As parents, we strive to maintain harmony as much as possible, not only for our own sake, but, often more so, for our children’s. We strive for a perfect, happy family, free from argument, upset and sadness. We want to protect our children from the hard realities of life, and from any pain or distress they might experience as a result.
And we feel enormous guilt if we feel any sense of failure to do so.
But sometimes, despite our best efforts, the pressures life throws at us can all become too much to handle. Everything piles in on top of us, we lose sleep, we worry, we argue, we become stressed and tired and even ill… And eventually, we can crack. We stop being who we really are, and become a poorly functioning shadow of who we once were, and can be.
When this happens, (as it almost certainly will to all normal people not in possession of a ‘rewind/erase/start again’ button for life), it’s important to see this as utterly normal, and not a sign of failure or weakness. It doesn’t mean we’ve let our children down, or that our family is ‘bad’ or sub-standard.
In fact, tough times in a family are so normal that when I see a family that appears to have no times of struggle or difficulty, I always think….oh come on, are these people even real??
Being human, being you
Soldiering on is what most of us try to do first. We busy ourselves with trying to stem the constantly incoming flow of problems, putting out fires left, right and centre. And for a while, it can work.
But eventually there really does come a time when you have to accept that this is not working. You are not Wonder woman or Ironman or a Fairy Godmother. You are you, a normal, fallible, tired human being. And you need some extra support and help.
And realising this is far from an admission of failure; it’s the moment you are brave enough to see reality and face it, and can start to make things better.
Luckily, help IS available to you. To all of us. Depending on your situation, there are various options worth exploring. If you’re struggling in yourself, with personal issues or worries, then a trip to your GP can be hugely beneficial. Even if they don’t actually seem to do anything, as such, just talking to someone can help enormously.
If it’s more just domestic juggling that’s the problem, or you need to create time, then create some by temporarily off-loading the things you currently spend time on to someone else. A couple of hours of extra childcare, just for those chaotic, tiring early evenings, can allow you to go out with your partner and talk. Or finding a cleaner for a few months, to free up a few hours at the weekends to talk, or go to a yoga class, or see a friend and laugh for a moment.
These things are often short-term. An emergency band-aid for support, to hold you up while times are extra difficult. Mothers especially, need to try and realise when this is not only a good idea, but absolutely necessary. We have a tendency to try and do everything ourselves as we feel that if we’re not coping magnificently with everything, we are failures.
This is absolutely not the case! So when the going gets tough, the tough gets going…. get some extra help, whether its childcare or a housekeeper. Don’t try to be a hero. Be a human. You, and your family, will be much better off for it.
