How to Ask Without Apologising

Part two of three: why asking for help feels like a moral test, and how to make a clean ask without apology.

I had not been enjoying bedtimes.

There - I said it.

It has always felt like a taboo thing to admit. I am supposed to love it, aren’t I. The bonding at the end of the day. The cuddling up, the books, watching them drift off to sleep. The “should” sits heavy on this one.

But recently, with everything going on - packing to move abroad, working, living in someone else’s house, juggling the endless summer school events, trying to see everyone before we leave, keeping on top of health appointments - bedtime had become the moment it all caught up with me.

There I was, trying to encourage a three year old who was bouncing off the walls to put pyjamas on, trying to give my seven year old a few minutes of one-to-one attention whilst being interrupted every thirty seconds by said three year old. Exhausted. At the very end of my patience. My mind running through everything still left to do, trying to action tiny tasks in the micro-pockets of time between books.

It is not the bonding experience the Should had promised me.

Then, after a particularly hard night – where I was not the sort of parent I had set out to be, I had a word with myself.

My mother-in-law was in the house. So I asked. Could she read to my daughter while I settled my son?

She couldn’t. She was about to head out and had things to finish first.

And my heart sank.

Not because she had done anything wrong. She wanted to help; she simply had somewhere to be. But in that moment, the no landed heavily. It felt like a rejection.

That sinking feeling is one of the biggest things that stops us asking at all.