Why Is It So Hard To Ask For Help?

Have you ever had this experience?

A very kind person that you trust,  offers to take your baby for an hour. An hour, completely to yourself to do whatever you want. And you’re paralyzed with indecision. You sit looking blankly out the window. For the past few weeks while feeding your baby, every day, you’ve had dozens of fantasies about having a little time to yourself, but for the life of you, you can’t remember what those fantasies were, you feel stuck.  The next thing you know, it’s over, your baby is back and you spent your one free hour staring out the window. Which is completely fine. Except it doesn’t really feel fine.

On another day you feel overwhelmed, stressed and exhausted. Your mother asks what she can do to help, and you shrug. You have no idea what you need or what would help.

There are a lot of reasons why this happens. You’re spending every waking minute keeping this little being alive and loving her madly. To suddenly stop is disorienting. And when you are doing all the things to keep this little being alive and thriving, you aren’t really paying attention to yourself.

If you want to ask for what you need, you first have to know how you feel. We can either practice feeling overwhelmed, stressed, helpless and  resentful or we can practice tuning in for short moments often, so we are more able to ask, in specific ways, for what we need.  It’s a practice that takes just a few minutes.  In our new book, Breathing Space For New Mothers, we gave this practice a name-GRACE. It only takes a minute or two.

• Gather your attention to your body by feeling your breath, and your feet on the ground.
• Rest and loosen your jaw and shoulders on the exhale.
• Ask, ‘how am I in this moment?’  Focus on the physical, your breath, muscle tension, hunger, energy level.  All sorts of things might come up, you might realize you have to pee, you’re hungry, you need a shoulder massage, a shower, a nap, to cry.
• Compassionately, allow for whatever you feel.
• Engage and begin again.

“No matter how well you prepare for motherhood, you enter it a changed person. You enter as a beginner, and you need to re-center, take a breath and figure it out.”

So here is to hoping that all mothers feel they are worthy of their own attention, so that they can ask for what they need. Next time someone asks ‘what can I do?’, take a few minutes in GRACE with yourself. That is enough for now. The answers will slowly start to come.

There are lots more tools for staying centered in the chaotic world of motherhood in our new book, “Breathing Space For New Mothers.”