Asking For Help

Morning SHMOMas

This week, I was planning to write all about asking for help. It was our focus topic in this week’s New Mom’s Group and it was such a good conversation about the nuance and power of asking for help. I made a short reel about it on Instagram because I felt others could benefit from the insights from our conversation. But, this morning, I’m sharing the trip that we attempted to take to the Catskills this weekend.

We don’t take many vacations; it’s something we’re working on this year. So, we thought it would be a great idea to head to the Catskills for the weekend for a little undistracted family time. The kids have been looking forward to it for the last couple of weeks. We even picked them up from school early so we could get out of the city and to our little getaway in a decent amount of time.

I planned out our meals for our time away. We were going to enjoy a mix of grilled foods and restaurant fare. S’mores were definitely on the menu because…fire pit. 

We hit the rode early Friday afternoon and made it to the Catskills area in great time. We stopped at a Shop-Rite to grab a couple of provisions to supplement what I already packed. I even became a loyalty member for the future trips we’ll take. But, this trip started taking a turn for the worse after we left Shop-Rite.

We didn’t realize there was a snow and ice storm that would cripple many of the backroads that we needed to take to get to our Airbnb…oh but we learned, quickly.

In short, there was a point where Nick had to get out of the car to work with other drivers to move large, emphasis on large, branches off the road. 

After being re-routed several times because of all the fallen trees, the kids were excited for this road trip to be over and I was ready to snuggle in with a new book that I’m reading. 

But, no, no. We would never enter this home that we had spent time looking at for days through the Airbnb picture carousel.

A whole tree had fallen right, emphasis on right, in front of the house and had taken down the neighborhood’s power line with it. When we inched up the hill we found four men sawing through tree trunks to clear the road. They told us there was no power and there likely wouldn’t be any for the rest of the weekend. They suggested we try to access the property from the road behind the house. That didn’t work either. Instead of fallen large branches, we were halted by a tree.

With exceptionally spotty service, I tried to contact the Airbnb host to figure out our next steps. We had maybe an hour and a half until sunset to figure out what we’d do. We decided that aborting this mission was the wisest thing. Trees were breaking left and right and if we didn’t get out fast, we would have easily been pinned between multiple blocked off roads.

After hours of driving and road finagling, the children had expired. Ila was complaining about how she had to leave school early for this botched trip, and proceeded to go on and on about what she had missed for nothing. Just last week she was wishing that it would snow everyday. And, here we were in the middle of snow and it’s sibling ice being blocked from weekend fun out of the city.

What I said to her was my reminder to myself and anyone reading this…We are not in control of much. There’s no way we could have known that this was going to happen when we planned this trip. And, here was the thing that Ila wished for last week ruining her stay. We can find a complaint in just about everything. If we adopt this posture of harping on the ruined in the midst reality, which often doesn’t go according to plan, we will always be disappointed.

Find gratitude in what is. Focusing our energy on what isn’t keeps us sad, angry, and disappointed longer.

I gave thanks for the fact that I was navigating this adventure in a heated car full of gas, with a person who knows how to manage cars in inclement weather and an internet wave to find the nearest hotel. 

I write to you from a Holiday Inn in Poughkeepsie where the children are enjoying the novelty of a new environment. I give thanks for what is even though I, like Ila, was disappointed about what wasn’t.

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