Getting Over Myself to Accept a Favor

One day about two weeks ago, I got a phone call from a friend of mine. She was headed off to the hazardous household waste disposal and wanted to know if I had anything I needed taken over there.

Boy, did I. I have been saving dead batteries for years, knowing that they didn't belong in the regular trash. However, I never quite managed to get them to any one of the not-so-conveniently located disposal facilities, so they piled up. So what started out as a small plastic bag of dead AAs and AAAs became a larger bag, which then finally ended up as a 25-pound box of batteries. (Yes, I weighed it before I handed it over to her.) To her credit, though my friend was visibly surprised when I lugged it out to her car (I think she was expecting a few CFLs and maybe a handful of batteries), she gamely took it, even when I expressed doubt that the facility might have a limit on how much material you could turn in at once. She reported "mission accomplished" via text about half an hour later.

Here's the crazy part of this story: When she called to ask if I had anything to get rid of, I almost said no. While one part of my brain immediately started trying to figure out where in the garage that box had been stashed, an internal counterargument immediately kicked in, which sounded something like, "It will be a lot of trouble for her to take care of that for you. You should do it yourself. It will be too embarrassing to show her how long you've been putting this off." It did take a slight effort of will to ignore that inner voice and just take her up on the offer. After all, she was just offering to take something along to a place she was going anyway--so why did I feel like it was such a big deal to let her do me a favor?

There are two answers, one simple and one more complex. The simple one is that whatever that box physically weighed, its weight in guilt was enormous. It was a pretty potent symbol of the domestic things I do not manage to get done, and getting rid of it appropriately was, from an emotional standpoint, a pretty huge favor.

The other one, though, left me wondering about the nature of friendship. I realized that I often do not ask for favors from my friends, even when I need them, even when the task is simply accomplished, and even when I know the friend who I would ask would be more than willing to help out. But the part that gets really screwy is that I don't mind being asked for a favor when the situation is reversed.

I found when I first moved to L.A., over 12 years ago, that making friends was harder than I expected. My main avenue for meeting other women was through my kids, and I rapidly found out that sometimes all I had in common with them was the fact that we both had kids. It took a long time to find anyone with whom I felt comfortable discussing more than the superficial dishing that parents do with one another on short acquaintance about lack of sleep, the nastiness of dealing with diapers (and the related discussions on green poop), and Odd Things That Children Put in Their Mouths. It felt kind of lonely to constantly be communicating at the level of cocktail-party banter, all amusing anecdotes low on substance.

In those early years, I made some rules for myself to help weed out the acquaintances that I knew would never end up in the category of Friends I Call for No Reason Whatsoever When I Need to Talk. One of the first rules was to avoid flagrant violators of the unwritten Social Contract of Sisterhood in Motherhood, which states that when someone tells you something unflattering about their child, you do not respond by talking about what a perfect angel your child is. For example, if I told another mom about how Son #2 got into the laundry room and dumped a cupful of cat food into the fountain-type water dish, necessitating a half-hour cleanup and a superhuman effort on my part not to swear in front of him, and she responded with an anecdote about how her similarly-aged daughter insisted on putting her own dishes into the dishwasher immediately after every meal, then I'd know she wouldn't make the short list. You are supposed to then relate how your child did something similar (i.e., telling a tale about how your child is apparently using the scientific method to determine exactly how large a toy can be flushed down the toilet before it stops working entirely and a plumber has to be called) so that your friend can feel assured that her child is not the only one in the world who does stupid/mischievous things.

The other major rule was to avoid the What Did Your Little Devil Do to My Little Angel types. These people are pretty easily spotted when their kids are in preschool, because preschoolers tend to get in spats where everyone involved has done something wrong (i.e., Child A grabs toy away from Child B, Child B responds by whacking Child A). In a perfect world, Child A's mom would explain to Child A that while it was not okay for Child B to hit them, it is also not okay to grab toys away from other people, and Child B's mom would be giving the reverse explanation to Child B (with perhaps a soupçon of "hitting is worse than grabbing" thrown in). Ideally both moms would then talk to the kids about the appropriate way to interact. With the Little Devil/Little Angel types, what happens in practice is that whatever your kid did was wrong and whatever their kid did was okay, thus throwing all the blame on to your child no matter what the situation is (i.e., Child A's mother insists that Child A had been waiting a long time for that toy and just can't be expected to wait forever, and Child B is a monster for hitting them). These people are impossible to deal with, and while the situations get more subtle as their kids age, the basic M.O. is the same. 

The rest of my friend-selection strategy simply has to do with time. I don't have a lot of it, so I'm choosy about who I spend it with. I love to read and I hate reality television, so I'm not likely to have much in common with someone who reverses those preferences. My idea of a luxury shoe buy is a pair of Dansko clogs (so comfortable...), and most of my friends similarly favor comfort over style in their footwear. In short, I do consciously what we all used to do unconsciously in our youth--find my level with people who have similar interests and attitudes.

Luckily, in the nearly eleven years we've lived in our current house, I've gotten to know a number of women I would describe as good friends. So why do I hesitate to accept help from them when I need it? And why do I almost never ask? Have I simply lost the ability to instinctively know who to trust after all those years of holding people at arm's length until I could determine if I could relate to them? I'd describe this as a personal problem except that I see my friends do the same thing all the time. Not all of them, though; clearly the "rugged individualists" among us need to take a cue from the moms who are more willing to connect and ask for help.

I'll remind myself of that the next time I hesitate to take up a friend when they're offering me a hand. After all, what's 25 pounds of dead batteries among friends?