I’m not good at accepting help.  I’m even worse at asking for it.  I love to be the one who gives – I’ll happily spend hours in my kitchen making meals for friends with new babies, or working gift-wrapping stations for charity, or packing up food bank donations.  But I’m terrible at picking up the phone and admitting that I need something.

We spent last week huddled in our house watching as Mother Nature pelted us with snow.  The region was hit by a massive lake effect snowstorm, which would have been legendary even had the snow bands moved over the region and dumped a few feet on everyone, like they usually do.  This storm, though, was unusual.  Instead of blowing through, a narrow band settled on the towns just south of Buffalo – where we live.  So while friends in the city and in the north suburbs saw a few inches, a foot at most, we found ourselves buried under six feet.  We couldn’t open our doors, let alone go anywhere.  Hubby and I spent the week trading off who got to work on the computer and who was on Peanut duty, and aside from being a bit stir-crazy and a little stressed about not being able to get as much work done as usual, we had fun.  We played with Peanut, watched Tinker Bell over and over, read stories and cooked time-consuming meals.  We had power, heat, and plenty of food – we were lucky.

As the storm started to wind down, hubby and I began trading bets on when our snow service would come by to plow us out.  We had enlisted a service because our driveway is just too long for hubby to snowblow himself – let alone shovel.  We weren’t expecting to be plowed out until the end of the week – our town was under a driving ban and anyway, this was a historic storm.  But we thought our service would come by on Friday.

Friday came and went with no plow.  Hubby asked me for my prediction on when the snow service would come.  I said, “11:00 a.m. on Saturday.”  He said, “I’ll be really depressed if it takes that long.”

11:00 a.m. on Saturday came and went with no plow.  And then I started to get worried.  We had planned to roll out of bed and go straight to the grocery store on Sunday.  We still had plenty of food (although not as much as we had at the beginning of the week), and I hadn’t even broken into my emergency stash of freezer meals I’d been compiling for use after Nugget’s arrival.  But our supply of whole milk was starting to dwindle.  We could make it through Sunday if absolutely necessary, but no longer.  For adults, milk isn’t essential – you can always turn on the tap and drink a glass of water.  But for a toddler?  Milk is a necessity.  By Saturday evening, when our snow service was still nowhere to be seen and the owner of the company wasn’t answering his phone (and voicemail was full) I was starting to worry in earnest.

Then hubby suggested that I email a coworker who lives a few doors down from us to find out if her family had been plowed out yet, and if so, what service they used.  We’d already exchanged “checking on you – call if you need anything” emails earlier in the week, so I dashed off a quick email explaining that our service hadn’t come, that we were needing to get to the market, and would she mind sharing the name of her plow guy?  Then I sat down to feed Peanut dinner and forgot about the email.  As I was feeding Peanut, hubby looked out the window and said, “I think the plow guys are here.  The biggest snowblower I’ve ever seen is in our driveway.”  Sigh of relief.

After dinner, I had two missed calls and a voicemail from my coworker.  I listened to her message; she sounded as worried as I was about our milk stash.  She explained that her husband has a tractor with a snowplow, so they don’t use a service, and she was sorry but she couldn’t be very helpful with referrals – but she’d be happy to send him over to plow us out if I wanted her to.  And she asked me to call her back.  I called and thanked her for her concern, and told her not to worry – it looked like our plow guys had just started.

“No,” she said.  “That’s my husband.  He said, ‘They have a kid, they need to get milk!’  He didn’t want to wait.”

I picked my jaw up off the floor, stammered thanks repeatedly, and tried not to burst into hormonal-pregnant-lady-with-cabin-fever tears until I got off the phone.  My coworker told me not to mention it, they were happy they could help, and anytime we needed to be plowed out to just call.  Then we hung up and I cried for real… and started brainstorming baked goods to make for their family the next day.  Apple bread, definitely.  Lemon yogurt cake?  Nutella swirl pound cake?  And cookies?

I don’t like asking for help.  My standard line throughout this storm has been, “Awwww, thanks, we’re stuck but we’re fine!  We have heat and plenty of food!”  I wouldn’t have emailed my coworker/neighbor had I thought she’d send her husband to clear my driveway immediately – I expected that the plow service would come by the next day, at the latest, and figured I could pick up milk on the way home from work on Monday if necessary; I was just hitting her up for a referral, like I do with babysitters, in the hopes that she might have someone to suggest for the next storm.  But you know what?  They were happy they could help us out.  They don’t know us well at all, but they were worried about Peanut.  So they cancelled their evening plans and cleared our driveway instead, and left me feeling overwhelmed with gratitude.

I may not be good at asking for help, but I’m trying to be good at accepting it when it comes, and accepting the fact that I sometimes need it – and maybe I’ll get the chance to give back to them at some point.  Or maybe not – maybe it’ll just be enough to be grateful for good neighbors, and to say sincerely, “Thanks.”