Our Long Weekend I

As I wrote previously, we lost power in the early hours of Friday morning. We spent Friday in Tom's lab on campus. Fortunately, he's not the kind of psychologist who experiments on mice; his lab is more like a set of offices, and Ben spent a lot of the afternoon watching DVDs on a computer. When the power was still not on by Friday evening, we went out to dinner, and Ben had a meltdown in the restaurant. (For those of you who aren't parents of toddlers, just know that combining lack of sleep with several new situations is not conducive to impulse control in the young.) As we drove back to the lab, my denial faded: we were still without power, all the hotels were booked, and our only plan was to sleep in an office.


We did. One bright spot was that after Ben went to sleep, Tom and I were able to go in another room and drink tea, each chocolate cookies, and watch Napoleon Dynamite on DVD. It was hardly a restful night; Ben woke crying several times, his voice echoing eerily off the gray walls. The next morning, we walked across campus to have breakfast in a coffee shop. The air was breathtakingly cold. I was amazed by the beauty of the soft pink sunrise over the stone buildings. All the trees were encased in ice, and when the early light struck them at a certain angle, they seemed aflame. Ben walked between us in his fleece snowsuit, and Tom and I each held a mittened hand. I thought that if someone had looked at us across the parking lot, they might have seen an idyllic family scene--it would take a close-up to see our fraying tempers and the shadows under our eyes.


After breakfast, we hatched a plan: We would stop home to get our workout clothes and go to the Y, where we could exercise and shower while Ben was in the nursery. There was only one problem: both our local Ys had no power. We were starting to internalize the fact that the power company was warning that residents could be without electricity for 4 to 5 days. We thought about hotels, but they all had flaws; some were too expensive, some didn't take pets, some were too far away. I finally did something I didn't want to do: I posted the bulletin board for a local moms group that I was looking for a place to stay. I hate asking for favors, but we were so tired and bedraggled, so I made myself.

Within 15 minutes, three people had left messages on my cell phone inviting me to stay with them. I burst into tears when I heard them. One person had met me once, and one had never even met me at all (at least in "real life"). I talked with one person, who had said we could stay at her place and put our cats in her basement, and we made arrangements to come over that evening. That afternoon, two more people called me with offers, and when I logged on to the bulletin board several more people had posted inviting us to stay.

It's making me tear up again even as I write this. I knew that the husbands of several of the people had been having job troubles (unemployment, underemployment, possible soon-to-be-unemployment)--and I was moved that, despite having difficulties themselves, they were reaching out to us. Some of the people who offered had spacious accommodations, but some had very small places. It made me realize that sometimes I don't offer to help people because I'm afraid my help won't be good enough--and that maybe in the future I could work on being less constrained by my insecurities when it comes to giving and receiving help.

During the blackouts this summer, we didn't lose power--but at the time I couldn't help wondering what we would have done if we had, since we have no family nearby. It made me feel a little bit lost to think we had no one to turn to. Now I'm starting to see that we do have people who will be happy to help us--we just have to be willing to ask and accept.

Tune in tomorrow for the exciting conclusion of Our Long Weekend!