I am one of those women who struggles under the delusion that everything is my job.

And my responsibility.

And my fault.

I’ve never found that I can do everything, but that hasn’t stopped me from trying.  Or from feeling incredibly guilty when I fail.  Asking for help has been a last resort for me for as long as I can remember.

When my husband and I first started living together and sharing household expenses, I avoided asking him for money to pay bills.  I’d be down to my last dollar and in tears before I would bring up the uncomfortable topic of money and needing him to give me some of it.  He was always baffled that I hadn’t asked sooner.  We finally had to set up a joint checking account just to remove the option of me trying to handle everything on me own.

Issues.  I have them.

Over the years, I’ve learned that refusing to ask for help isn’t fair to me or to the people around me.  Oddly enough, my husband expects to be included in major decisions.  And it seems he would much rather be told in advance that his assistance is needed than live with a woman who is cracking under impossible expectations and insane amounts of stress.

Knowing is half the battle.

Of course, now that I know that I need to ask for help, all I have to do is figure out how to ask for help.  In the past, I’ve tried hoping really hard that someone will notice I need help, sighing very loudly to draw attention to the fact that I need help, and crying incessantly when no one noticed or cared that i was so obviously screaming for help.

Surprisingly, none of those methods have proven to be reliable or effective.

Now I’m working on using actual words.  So far I’ve found that the most useful ones are “I need help”, followed by a detailed description of the assistance I’m seeking.  Apparently, this works with or without profuse apologies and excessive guilt.

Asking for help is hard.  In fact, even now I have difficulty sitting down and saying the words out loud to my husband before I am absolutely out of my mind with stress and worry.  I’ve found that writing - either via email or my personal blog - helps us get over that initial communication hurdle.  It’s not ideal, I’m sure, but passing notes seems to work better for us in stressful situations.

I wonder what other people do to ask for help.  Whether it’s from our spouses, our children, our parents or our employers, the fact is that none of us can do everything on our own.  Do you wait until the last possible moment to ask for help?  Do you only accept help that you pay for?  Or are you one of the lucky ones who seeks out and accepts help without any baggage attached to it?

How do you ask for help?