It will come as a surprise to literally no one who has known me for any extended amount of time that asking for help is very difficult for me. Over the years I’ve come to understand some reasons for this (therapy meet little Lauren growing into larger Lauren) yet still, even knowing self-reflective stuff doesn’t mean those situations are not still a challenge. Which is why this week, when a truly wonderful thing happened, my nervous system went into Lamborghini overdrive and rolled me into twisty-turn high-speed panic rather than top-down, breeze-on-face appreciative movement forward.

My dad’s oldest, dearest friend, who died a little over a year ago, had included my father in his will, which this week became viable for distribution. While I’d known that some sort of something was going to be gifted to my dad, when the whole of it was announced, what had been my dad’s very basic estate became a little more complicated. This is also where I began to feel the pathology of my kick-back against needing help rear up. I’m also understanding more fully that this resistance is in some way an inheritance from my dad. He liked to keep it so simple that he was sometimes invisible. For him, asking for help appeared almost excruciatingly painful, which is why in his final few months things became very complicated. You’d think my observation of our similarity in that regard would move me toward an Aha moment of “well, naturally, we all need help and, even more important, people you love (and even some you barely know) LOVE to give you that.” But no, that understanding was apparently only a light scarf draped on my shoulders and it blew off around the time I began sorting out the details of my dad’s end-of-life matters as I reached for my (mohair?) super-accomplishment-girl cape, wrapped it around myself, and dove. Self-amnesia is awesome?

Enter dear, wonderful Tom and his friendship with my beloved dad. And now is when I will regale with amazing memories of them: Such as the time they were out with a couple of other guys and closed down a bar, then drove some distance down a main street in Pasadena mostly on the sidewalk (this is according to my dad as I wasn’t there; no animals or humans were hurt in this story). On a very basic level, this is a terrifying story that didn’t really initiate joy in me except for the fact that when my dad told it he was grinning as if it were magical. So, OK, then. I could appreciate his lightness around it and absolutely call up a half-dozen (undercount?) moments when I’ve done absolutely daft things that in retrospect were nowhere close to safe, yet they’re tinged with silly sparkle. I can also absolutely understand why my mom, who wasn’t married to my dad during the sidewalk surfing situation, had such a sense of trepidation when my dad and Tom would go out together. I get it. Yet also, friendship. They’d known each other since early adulthood. My dad met him as he was setting up his graphic design business and pitching himself to a local bank. Tom was a manager at said bank. Later, at what happened to be each man’s favorite neighborhood watering hole (RIP Monty’s), Tom came up to my dad, introduced himself and they became fast friends, sometimes roommates, and, as it came to pass, do-or-die buddies. Tom was also a lifelong bachelor and would spend holidays at our house. He was in essence family. It was yet another reason I felt happy to have been out here the last few years to spend time with Tom and my dad as his last days were approaching.

So this week: the gift. Tom’s life, while also simple in day-to-day, was in actuality richer than my dad’s. I mean that literally. When I received the message of how generously true that was, it required me to face my need-help reflex. It looked a little like this: AAAHHH, what do I do? Is that a proverbial hole in some sand for my head to stick into? That last thought was about a millisecond because then: Holy-gawd-Petra, now I need to learn everything about estate distribution and probate law. I must now become skilled in law language, court dates, big long words that resemble no language I’ve ever known. Then I took a short walk and remembered that my own dear friend, who is a lawyer, had helped me find a family estate lawyer just in case I needed one. And this is where all my challenges for letting go and trusting rose up, screamed at me a little, then, as we stared stricken into each other’s eyes, it shrugged, and retreated with a “good luck with that” glance. I made the call with pen and paper in hand. I wrote down all the words she said during our intake interview. I didn’t even spell most of them correctly because naturally I’d never heard any of them before. I also realized that not only was I not required to know, I didn’t have to have scribbled them down since her follow-up was a detailed email that included everything we’d talked about. She was handling it. Would continue to handle it. Every bit of it.

It took another walk to shake off my overwhelm so that the sheen of acknowledgment around this great gift could surface and get some air. I spent about a block-and-a-half wondering about the part of me that is so often hell-bent on making things more difficult while also realizing that’s OK, that’s what happens, that’s who I am. So it took a block-and-a-half to get there emotionally rather than the ten crosstown long blocks it used to. Fine. It reminded me that on the same day I heard about this bequeathal I’d been talking to my amazing friends, one of which being the lawyer, and she’d mentioned about how her self-excellence meter was set high all the time as well. How our personal ten can often be an eighty-two on other folx’ scale. Yes. one-hundred-percent yes. Self-directed high scaling. In fact, I would say the majority of my female friends carry those scales with them (yes, for sure, there are men in my life who also render their own impossible self-expectations but for the purposes of lady overachieving, I’m keeping a tight lens on them for this particular writing and could make a case—perchance in a future moment—that societally that gendered tendency is overwhelming.)

Again, for me, I have more of a clue about where my I’ve-got-this, nothing-to-see-here attitude comes from (see aforementioned therapy meet little Lauren on up) and half the challenge is knowing from whence it springs. Then having humor around that. Then (eventually) calling out to someone for help.

Thank you Tom, for giving me that opportunity.