Helen had been learning to ask for help for nearly two years.
It started with a counsellor, who listened to her describe a lifetime of managing everything on her own and asked, quite gently, who had taught her that she had to. Since then Helen had practised. She let a colleague cover her shift when she was ill. She let her brother put up a shelf. Each time it felt like owing someone money; although each time it got a little easier, it still felt uncomfortable.
Then came moving day.
She had told everyone it was fine. A small van, a few boxes, she’d manage. By eleven o’clock she had hauled forty boxes up two flights of stairs, pulled something in her back, and dropped the box with her mother’s plates in it.
She sat on the stairs among the broken pieces and cried, and it wasn’t about the plates.
“Two years,” she said out loud. “Two years, and I’m right back where I started.”
Then she stopped, because that wasn’t quite true.
The Old Helen
The old Helen would have finished the job. She’d have carried every box, unpacked by midnight and told everyone on Monday it had gone brilliantly. She’d have been in pain for a week and never connected it to anything. This Helen was sitting on the stairs at eleven in the morning, knowing exactly what she had done and why.
That was not the same place at all.
She took out her phone and typed a message to her brother. She deleted it twice. The third time, she sent it. Can you come over? I need help.
The reply came in under a minute.
On my way. Bringing bacon sandwiches.
Forty minutes later he stood in the doorway, looking at the boxes, the broken plates and his red-eyed sister.
“Why on earth didn’t you ring me this morning?”
Helen wiped her eyes and laughed.
“I know. I’m glad you’re here”
The story is fiction. The point of it isn’t.
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