When Love Means Letting

Have you ever replayed a moment in your mind, wishing you could change just one tiny thing so that what happened never would have happened?

I keep doing exactly that.

If I hadn’t changed out of my hiking shoes into my flip-flops.

If I hadn’t jumped up to go tell the kids dinner was ready.

If I’d noticed the easier path up the hill, and told my grandson to go that way rather than reaching down to keep him from slipping backward.

If. If. If.

Hindsight is twenty/twenty, I guess, and no amount of wishing will change the fact that my three-year-old grandson and I ended up both slipping down the steep incline, my flip-flopped foot twisting under my leg so painfully I knew right away something was very wrong.

Two broken metatarsals, it turned out. Six weeks in a walking boot. Ugh.

So much for summer.

And the hardest part hasn’t even been the broken bones.

It’s having to sit in a chair while everyone else—my entire family, to be exact, who have come to spend the week with us—buzz around me doing, well…everything.

The cooking. The cleaning. The grocery shopping. The playing.

And there’s nothing I can do to help. I’ve been sidelined in a way I’ve never been before, and I have to say—it’s humbling.

I. Do. Not. Like. It.

Maybe—as I’ve often said to friends who’ve broken bones before—it’s the universe’s way of getting me to slow down. To let go of the oars and let others do for me the way I do for them. To learn to receive as easily as I give.

I know I’m bad at all of that. For instance, if someone compliments me on a meal I’ve prepared, I’ll thank them, but then quickly add what I wish I’d done differently. My kids have started to call me out when I do this, reminding me that by deflecting their compliments I’m robbing them of the joy they get in giving them.

But as hard as it is for me to accept a compliment, it seems I have an even harder time accepting help. The past few days have been a real eye-opener for me—I don’t think I realized how often I do something simply because it’s easier than asking someone else to do it. Nor did I realize how often I jump up first, even if someone equally capable is right there, offering to help.

I wonder why I do this?

Maybe I notice things before other people and, being a fixer by nature, feel compelled to handle them rather than waiting for someone else to notice.

Maybe I somehow decided that the Sunday school lesson I learned as a child—that “it’s better to give than to receive”—meant that receiving was inherently selfish, even when the receiving was just someone else’s help.

Maybe—and this is a bit unsettling to consider—I decided somewhere along the way that being useful was the same thing as being valuable.

I don’t know. I could be overthinking this just a little.

Because I have to admit, there might actually be something to letting other people help me once in a while. Like the other day. We were next door having a drink on our neighbor’s porch when Sarge, our almost two-year-old lab, got sprayed by a skunk. It was chaos as my husband tried to coral him while I frantically tried to explain over the din where the “emergency skunk kit” was back at our house.

Left alone in the quiet aftermath of the crisis, I felt pretty helpless—at least at first. But then, underneath the familiar pang of guilt at not pulling my weight, I noticed a certain relief. My husband and I are no strangers to dog run-ins with skunks and have, at times, been known to disagree on exactly how to deal with that particular situation. It was kind of nice to just let him figure it out.

Hmmm…maybe the universe is on to something.

And then the craziest thing happened. As I was contemplating the idea that accepting help isn’t always a bad thing, a character on a show I was watching literally said to another character:

“…sometimes when someone wants to help, it’s not because they think you need it. It’s because they want to do something for someone they really care about.”

I had to rewind to make sure I heard it right. Then I took screenshots as proof that I had heard it right.

So maybe this whole experience really is trying to teach me something.

I’ve spent most of my life believing that love means doing and giving, and that may well be true. But these past few weeks have made me realize that love also means letting:

Letting someone else carry the groceries.

Letting someone else cook the dinner.

Letting someone else scrub the skunk smell off the dog.

Maybe this stupid walking boot isn’t so stupid after all.

Maybe it’s trying to teach me that it’s okay to let other people love me the way I’ve always tried to love them.

Maybe. Maybe. Maybe.