How Baby

When you’re having trouble with something, a certain kind of people looooooove to make themselves known: people who are dead set on insisting that if you had only made a handful of small changes, your troubles would disappear!!

Blessed with the gift of hindsight (and the energy of someone not currently undergoing said difficulties), they’re quite happy to tell you everything you did (or are doing) wrong! How helpful of them, to apply their own situation to yours!

A few months back, the bus drivers were on the brink of going on strike. We’re just out of catchment for Momo’s school, enough that it’s only a short bus ride but a very long walk, in a cold November, and the taxi system was gonna be stressed with everyone trying to get to work. So, I posted on the local Facebook group asking if anyone could take her to school if the drivers went on strike, and, perhaps predictably, the number of people who piled on to call me lazy was absurd.

The willingness of people to assume incompetence on the part of others… it’s like… just… trust that someone has already done the very best they can with the resources they have. Assume that they have weighed all the information relevant to them to make their decision. Don’t snidely offer your judgement under the guise of giving a ‘suggestion’. If someone is struggling with something that seems easy to you, know there’s probably more going on than you perceive, and they are not obligated to share that with you!

Asking for help is hard, asking for help as a parent is a special kind of hard. If someone has gathered the courage to ask for a specific kind of help, they’ve probably thought about it from all angles and already decided what exactly they need.