Striving for service

Settling for a casserole

Watching Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood every day during my preschool years, it was engrained in me to look out for the helpers. Now, with its descendant, Daniel Tiger, a fan favorite of my son, I’m reminded of this on a daily basis.

It’s not hard to spot them in your life. The people who call, text, visit, and always follow up. The ones who remember the goings on in your life from one conversation to the next, no matter how much time passes. Those who show up, from birthday parties, to births, and especially when you fall victim to a bout of bad luck.

Though emotional support and connection is an art in and of itself, I’ve always especially admired people who can act on the help, breezing into a bad situation with bags of homemade comfort food and supplies, oozing with warm maternal selflessness. How come some people are more naturally adept to servitude? And, how can others so easIly find the words to ask for it.

Because, that ain’t me, babe.

I didn’t grow up with a strong sense of community. As an only child of parents who lacked robust social circles or a religious home base, overextending and prioritizing care for our community wasn’t really an example I saw. While I couldn’t ever articulate why, I felt this deficit my whole life. In retrospect I now see it it in pushing myself into sports teams and clubs I didn’t love and, in college, joining a sorority that did actually pay off with lifelong friends, and an arsenal of embarrassingly fun photos.

But, I know I’m not alone.

Globalization, technology, connectivity, and ambition have led us all to move far away from the families and communities in which we were raised. Many of us sacrificing support systems for ladder climbing, dream chasing, higher learning, and romantic partnering. With the ability to fly home whenever, unlimited minutes, and video chat, it didn’t seem like a pretty bad trade off to be thousands of miles away doing the damn thing––until we all started having kids, health problems, emotional crises, or financial trouble, and began to feel the pangs of needing help without it being anywhere in sight. We learned to muscle through it alone with credit cards, Postmates, and Web M.D.

I never strayed too far from home physically, but emotionally I’ve always felt a bit on an island. It never really mattered much, not even when I had my first baby. In fact, I pretty much rejected all help during those first few months. I was financially supported by my husband and a maternity leave, and physcially fortunate to recovery quickly from birth. It just didn’t seem necessary. I had this under control.

Then a pandemic happened. And, I got pregnant again. Oh, and then in my first trimester, I had an uncontrollable nose bleed that landed me in the ER twice. Month after month of isolation with little to no help, coupled with an undercurrent of years long stress and decision fatigue, on top of a major health crisis? I started to get the whole help thing.

I had no choice but to humbly ask for and accept copious amounts of help caring for my toddler and myself. I even wrote a blog post all about what happened, and how this scary moment taught me a major lesson in what it means to actually support your community a couple months later.

By the time my second baby was born, I was soliciting and accepting support left and right. I may as well have had a permanent sign on my door, “All types of casseroles welcome 🤙.” These trigger events exposed me to role models that didn’t just show me how to be a helper to someone in need, but also how to feel comfortable soliciting and receiving it.

As is the nature of things, a majority of my mom friends starting having their second babies in quick succession after me. This past fall, it seemed like I was making batches of congee (Chinese chicken and rice pudding) and painstakingly chopping toppings every weekend for postpartum friends. If you’ve never experienced homemade congee, then you might not realize what a labor of love it is to cook something so delicious and keep none for yourself. But, I was happy to do it every time. I remembered how much every single home cooked meal meant to me when I was struggling through my second round of postpartum, and felt called to make sure my friends felt the same sense of support.

Multi-tasking to get the Congee made!

A bowl of congee 🤤.

Last month, another mom friend, whom I met in a mommy in me class when our first babies were not even two months old, gave birth to her second child. I congratulated her right away in a text message, but with a busy month of my own family’s birthdays, I had not followed up. I felt terrible, having meant to send a quick check-in text on many occasions to, at the very least, see how the transition to two kids was going. When I finally did, she vulnerably expressed how difficult things were going for different reasons. Feeling like she was drowning, she told me her thoughts had often gone to that blog I wrote after my nosebleed. Why wasn’t someone coming to lift her out of the rushing water? Where was all the help?

She’s not alone. I’ve had multiple people tell me the same thing since I wrote it, and even I think about on a regular basis. It’s not that I wrote anything particularly groundbreaking, but in the middle mucky sloggy part of a pandemic, maybe me sharing what felt impact for me in a moment of need was the reminder we all craved of what it means to be good friends and family members in a real way.

So, I took my own advice, and I asked her if there was a meal train. I offered to come clean her house, hold her baby, or just be entertainment to her preschooler. I told her not to be afraid to tell people what she needed, because most of us want to show up, we just don’t know how.

Then, I checked myself. Sometimes, it’s appropriate to wait to be asked, but mostly it’s a cop out. Why wait for someone who needs help to request it? I stopped offering up a diner menu of what I could do, because when you’re really in the thick of it, sometimes you just need to be told––not asked to choose.

“I”ll bring dinner over Saturday afternoon. Any dietary restrictions?” I texted.

“But, when am I going to do this?” I immediately thought to myself. I work full time, have two small kids, and go to grad school. In theory and in practice, I don’t have time. Every crack of my day is filled with a chore, email, wiping a running nose, or making a lunch, and there really isn’t any time to look up a good vegetarian comfort dish, let along get the supplies, make and deliver it. That’s why GrubHub exists. But, while take-out will be eaten, a homemade meal will be loved.

And, I didn’t want to just send food. I wanted to send my love.

It turns out, there’s no good time to go out of your way, but I was determined to find it. So, I worked a little later the night before to get ahead, cleared my schedule, made sure my husband was on for childcare, ordered the ingredients via grocery delivery service, and got to work.

I spent the entire day cooking, both for my friend and my children. Caring for one family doesn’t mean you can also neglect your own. Hours passed in the kitchen preparing and cleaning on repeat. Other than keeping my kids alive, and prepping this food, nothing else was accomplished. But, I didn’t stress out about it because I planned ahead, which is––as I’ve found––the key to caretaking.

And, I was happy to do it. She didn’t care that I was, like, a half hour late.

Supporting and showing up for your people takes initiative, time, resources, energy, and a little intrusiveness. Living in little isolated nuclear units, all car-driving distance away from one another, we are in the practice extreme politeness with one another. Showing up unannounced, even with much needed supplies, feels downright rude. Even reaching out “just to check in” too often feels like an overstep. Everyone is so afraid of bothering each other!

But, in my experience, most people want to be bothered! How many of us even still call someone without first texting, “Is this a good time to call?” Just to make sure we aren’t met with being put on the spot to leave A DREADED VOICEMAIL.

When nobody is in your business on a regular basis, it takes an awful lot of effort to get them there in a pinch. We no longer live in the small, tight knit villages we’ve all been told it takes to raise a family, so it takes a lot more effort to shorten the miles between us enough to connect in a real way. It’s not easy. It often requires a large lift to plan or remember. How many important birthdays and anniversaries show up as reminders on your phone now? I say this from the bowels of my own embarrassing knee-jerk reticence and discomfort.

Though it’s often the thing that can give you the clarity and drive to act, it’s not necessary to wait until you’re drowning to learn and practice life saving techniques. Every new mom I know (including myself) has looked back and said, “Wow, I was so shitty to all my friends who had babies.” It’s not that anyone means to be. It’s just…sometimes you just don’t know until you know. But once you do, there’s a sense of responsibility to better moving forward.

While some people do have more personality traits that lead to acts of service, a strength is really a natural talent that has been honed into an expertise through time and practice. And, to maintain that strength, you still need to get in those reps to keep it sharp.

Even though the experts make it look like they’re easy, breezy beautiful helper girls, they are no different. They don’t have a trust fund of time that we don’t have. Like athletes and musicians, they practice even when they don’t feel like it.

This is the kind of person I want to become, someone who prioritizes acts of service for important people in my life, even (or especially) when I really don’t think I can. It’s far from one of my natural talents, but I’m hoping to make it one of my strengths.

And, even if it ends up as another line item in your to-do list for the week, it does not make it any less meaningful. A casserole is still a warm cooked meal someone else didn’t have to cook or think about, no matter how many obligations you had to move around to make it, how much stress it caused you, and how many hours late you are in delivering it. It is a special type of love everyone can feel, and (hopefully) eat.