Ìrànlọ́wọ́
Help me! Help me! Help me! Please!
Dear Bolu,
It’s 10:15 p.m., and I’m on my last legs. I stare at the dishes in the sink, too tired to decide where to begin. Among them is a pot whose insides seem designed to pry away the last bit of strength in me. There are plates, bowls, two cups, and some cutlery in the mix. I settle on a strategy: I will wash them all before rinsing. Standing at the midpoint of the sink, I pick each item from one half and place it in the other after washing. I’m washing a cup when she walks into the kitchen.
”You know you can wash them in the morning, right?” she asks.
I know I can. But I can’t. Growing up, Nana always said that an empty sink is a clean kitchen, and that it was bad luck to wake up to a messy one. I don’t completely buy the bad luck part, but it’s a habit I’ve imbibed nonetheless. I do the dishes before going to bed.
”I’ll be done soon. You can go sit down,” I reply.
It’s my turn to host. I prepared jollof spaghetti, the only thing I can make that she enjoys. I also made it the last time she was here, about a month ago.
”I don’t think you fried the pepper for long enough,” she had commented then.
Tonight’s comment is better. It is something about the taste being good but the oil being a little too much. This is progress. I’ve heard worse.
”Do you need a hand?” she asks, standing in the doorway behind me.
I do. Oh, I do. But I don’t want to burden her. She has had a long day. It’s a long drive from her side of the city to mine, and it can be draining. Add to that the congestion on the roads after a workday, and the body I welcome home is knackered and desirous only of rest.
She has yawned a few times tonight. I have yawned, too, but I joked that her yawn made me yawn. I’ve had a busy day as well. But it’s alright. I am host and she is guest.
”Oh no, it’s alright,” I say. “I can handle it”.
I am washing a bowl now. I am handling it, but I hope she asks a second time. Or that she insists. Then I would say, if you insist. My legs are hurting. I hope she asks again.
She doesn’t ask again. I start to regret not saying yes. She starts to yawn. By the time she’s done yawning, she’s standing by the sink. She pushes my right side with her hips. I’m on my last legs; it doesn’t take a lot to move me. She always moves me. I shuffle to the washing side of the sink, and she’s on the side with the washed plates.
”You really don’t have to,” I say in weak protest.
I am too late. Before the protest ends, she has rinsed two plates. I wash and she rinses until we clear out the sink. Nana would be proud.
”Thank you,” I say, as we dry our hands with a towel.
”Pẹ̀lẹ́, Mr. Handler,” she replies in the middle of a yawn.
I yawn, too. We both laugh.
Oh well.
In a cottage in a wood
A little old man at the window stood
Saw a rabbit hopping by
Knocking at the door
“Help me! Help me! Help me! Please”
Before the hunter shoots me down
Come, little rabbit, come with me
Happy we shall be
As we lead our lives, we may—wait. It’s a curious phrase: to lead a life—one that suggests that we are in control of our lives. That we have agency, in the choices we make at every turn on this journey. I fall in love with it as I write this, with the idea that we must lead our lives lest we be led by life. But I digress.
As we lead our lives, we may find ourselves in difficult situations where the challenge, though surmountable, would leave us worse for wear in any number of ways: physically, emotionally, mentally, even financially, if we tackled it alone.
Sometimes, we have to tackle it alone. We may not have the presence of help, or even if we did, it may be help that comes with debt we’d rather not owe. Our would-be helper may come to our aid with help in one hand, attached to a ball of strings in the other. It may also very well be one of those challenges that we must overcome unaided in order to transform, in order to become. And so we fend for ourselves, jumping over hurdles, warding off wolves, and hauling boulders of responsibility with only our wit and will for aid.
Other times, however, help may be at hand—in the shape of a man or the form of a woman; in the relationship of a brother or the purse of a sister; in the strong back of a friend or the watchful eyes of a stranger. Help may be close and willing, perhaps even perfectly suited in skill and the generosity of time to give us a hand for as long as we need. Help may be just beside us with two hands, and strings in none. If only we would ask, they would help. They may even move the world for us, no questions asked. If only we would ask. But we don’t.
Why? Maybe somewhere along the line we learnt to interpret all requests for help as signs of our weakness and incompetence. We may have, in our younger years, asked mother for help with our math homework only to be directed to father, who dismissed us before hearing our request. One long holiday, we may have been berated by an oversabi aunty for clarifying how we might cut the vegetables she’d brought from the village.
“At your big age, you don’t know how to cut waterleaf?” she’d said at the top of her voice, so the neighbours would hear, for the second time in as many minutes, precisely how grossly inept we were at the incredibly mature age of eight.
We may not even have had anyone around us to ask for help. As firstborns, we may have grown up with people who viewed food and shelter as the limits of their responsibilities to us. We may have had to figure a lot out for ourselves, with no one to show us how to make tidy stitches for the third patch on our school uniforms, or how to neatly pack our hair so it looks presentable for one more week because God forbid we ask for salon money twice in a month.
We are strong for it today. But it’s just one type of strength—the one for self-reliance, which may not always be enough. It’s the type of strength that often keeps us from accepting help when it is offered without our asking. We cannot come across as someone in need, so we reject the first offer. And when the second offer comes, we reluctantly accept it, sometimes as though we’re doing the helper a favour.
“Yeah alright, if you insist,” we say with an unbothered air, as if the help hasn’t brought us a dose of relief.
We may have also been treated unkindly by someone we trusted. They’d offered us help, and we’d taken it, blind to the strings attached. Eventually, they came for their due, and it left us broken and full of regrets.
“Nothing goes for nothing,” they’d said, as they licked their lips in satisfaction.
And now, we see strings everywhere. Some are real, some imagined, and some we will not recognise until we are already entangled. So we manufacture them in advance, so that we can cut or, rather, detach them. We insist on some form of compensation when the helper has no need for it.
“I owe you one,” we’re quick to say, even when they don’t feel owed.
We may, therefore, be reluctant to ask for help for these reasons: the fear of perceived incompetence and weakness, and of attached strings.
But it needn’t be like that.
We usually cannot become competent without some form of help. If that is true, then asking for help is not a failure or a weakness, but active participation in the formation of our competence. We cannot live as if we were Sisyphus every day of our lives, condemned to bear every burden alone. If we must be him, then let us imagine him with a twin, as Sisyphi, whenever we ask for help. And as for the fear of attached strings, we need only ask ourselves if we’ve ever helped anyone without attaching any. If we have, then perhaps nothing may sometimes go for something. Help, when requested rightly—without abuse or undue advantage—is an indication of trust and an invitation to be cared for. And we all want to be cared for, dear friend.
Fin.
P.S.
When the roles are reversed and we are the ones being asked for help, what we do in that moment carries weight. Too often, we are quick to dismiss a request, unaware that the desire for connection is frequently shrouded in the ask.
We shouldn’t always tell someone to “ask Google” when they ask for a definition. We shouldn’t simply send a child to their mother when their shoelaces need tying, nor should we mentally weigh the box a neighbour is carrying to judge if it is heavy enough to warrant their request for help.
When they ask us how to make jollof spaghetti or pancakes; how to create Canva animations or cross-post on Instagram; when they ask for an explanation of vibe coding or hexadecimals; or even when they ask for help with a stubborn zipper on their way to work or a necklace clasp when they return from church, they may not be doing so because they are lazy, or because they lack other information sources. They aren’t necessarily trying to use us as a tool either. Often, it is simply an expression of their trust. Beyond that, it is an invitation to be cared for. And if we truly want to care for them, we must try to honour those invitations, dear friend.
And if we cannot help for whatever reason, let us at least be kind in our refusal. It takes a lot of effort to ask for help, as I’m sure you know.
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Write you soon, merci!
- Wolemercy
Everything you’ve written here, I agree with. Thank you for the reminder.
What does ‘Ìrànlówó mean?