Just Ask
July.
How did we end up in July 2021!
I’ve got no idea, but life seems to be moving at one heck of a pace. Sometimes you need to remind yourself to stop and look around at everything before you miss all the great moments.
I live with my wife, two children (aged 4 and 2), my mum (and her two lurchers), my mother-in-law and now… our new puppy Ivy.
It’s a pretty busy house.
My mum is in her own flat now, and we’re hoping to start work on my mother-in-law’s flat in a few months.
Yesterday morning was the perfect example of how it takes a village to raise a child!
Holly was working, she left at 7:30am and was being given a lift to work by her mum.
The kids had been up since 6:30am, and we’d been wrestling between trying to get them ready, let Holly get ready and stopping the puppy chewing everything in its path like some kind of demented mole.
Holly left just as I got downstairs, un-showered, carrying a puppy, but fully prepared for the children.
Nope.
Turns out I wasn’t fully prepared.
Letting the puppy outside. Getting the kids breakfast ready, cleaning the kitchen, hoovering the bits of food that had dropped to the floor from cooking the night before so the puppy didn’t eat them, preventing the puppy from chewing the childrens toys, spreading butter and honey on the toast while it was still warm enough to melt it, getting drinks, removing a shoe from the puppy’s mouth.
Oh… I forgot to mention, our house is currently stacked high with boxes as we try to remove as much as possible from storage, because storage units are… ridiculously fucking expensive.
A storage unit business is literally a license to print money.
Combined with a shitty service from a company that I won’t mention (Access Storage), who weren’t allowing us to access our unit 24 hours a day (despite saying you have 24 hour access) because covid will spread at 3am in a storage unit but won’t at 10am!
This is the only storage unit company not operating normal hours. I’ve got no reason why, but I’d speculate they’ve furloughed staff to reduce their costs and are keen on keeping those costs as low as possible until the furlough scheme ends.
I’ve got no idea, so that’s pure speculation, but you’ve got to admit… it’s a bit weird!
We’re not the only ones to think it’s a bit weird. Every single person was moving out of the storage units over the days we were, each saying the same thing. Not one single person, that we saw, was moving in.
Which made me quietly happy.
But I’ve gone off track!
Our living room is stacked high with things we’re selling or getting rid of.
Somehow, Holly and my mum managed to get all of my mother-in-law’s stuff into a couple of smaller storage units, and then our stuff into a single bedroom.
I don’t know about you, but I hate piles.
So having our living room in it is not conducive to low stress in yours truly.
That added to the joys this morning, and just as I was feeling the heat rising, my mum swoops in with coffee, breakfast for me, helps clear out the recycling, while I sort the bins. We get the pictures out of boxes and on the walls.
For some reason unknown to man or women, as soon as my mum comes in, our children begin playing like the perfect grandchildren, the wailing and hitting stops, and it’s as if they’ve only ever wanted to play with their toys together.
Everything that’s being sold and hasn’t been photographed gets done and put on Facebook.
The items in the living room get rearranged to make more space, so now we actually have a living room, rather than eating in a storage unit.
During this time my mother-in-law gets back and empties the dishwasher and cleans the kitchen.
I take the puppy outside and try to persuade her to go to the toilet in the garden instead of the house (she is doing very well!).
By the time my two year old goes down for a nap everything seems tidy, clean, serene and at one with the world.
I don’t really understand how it happened, but I am very pleased it did, because there was a moment when I felt like a kettle!
Sometimes you just need to be in more places than it’s possible to be in, and it’s in those moments when I realise how lucky I am to live with our entire family.
Yes… of course there are frustrations sometimes, everyone is human. But most of the time it just works.
My mum told me something when we moved into this house, she said… “everything will be fine if we’re all kind to each other”.
And let’s be honest, why wouldn’t we be kind to each other!
I am aware how lucky we are to have that kind of support in our home. Regularly I offer to help friends who aren’t in such a fortunate position. They don’t often take me up, but at least they know they can do if they need to.
Me? I’m realising that the most important thing is to ask for help. There’s no point trying to do everything yourself. It doesn’t make you more successful, or a stronger person. It simply means your stupid.
I’ve done enough stupid things in my life that I don’t need to add to the list, so these days… I just ask.
It doesn’t matter if I’ve just had a shitty day and could really do without being screamed at by our children because they need to have their hair washed. We live together so at exactly those moments, we can ask for help, we can take a break, we can go for a walk.
Bottom line, if you need help… just ask.
Even if you don’t live with your extended family, there will always be someone who can help.
Love.
Michael Wilding
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