It was supposed to rain all day.
Instead, the rain came and went, barely enough to cool anything down. The air still felt warm and humid.
We don’t have air conditioning at home, so in summer, we use several fans around the house.
A few days earlier, my son had turned off two of them.
“They’re too dusty.”
The weather had been getting cooler, and with August almost over, I figured we probably wouldn’t need them much longer anyway.
So I left them off.
But now the heat was back.
I brought another fan out of the bedroom, put it in the living room, and turned up the air-circulation setting.
The room immediately felt cooler.
It really is less cool without those two fans.
I looked over at the dusty fans.
I might have to clean them after all.
Just looking at them made me feel heavy.
The Part I Hated
Removing one screw with a Phillips screwdriver was easy enough. The part I hated was the cover.
It was fastened so tightly that I had to pull, twist, and try again when it wouldn’t budge.
I hated that feeling of struggling with something that just wouldn’t come off.
Why Didn’t I Just Ask Him?
My husband was sitting at the table eating his breakfast. Every now and then, he rubbed the back of his neck.
Maybe his neck is stiff from looking at his phone so much.
As I watched him, a thought occurred to me.
Why didn’t I simply ask him to take the fan cover off for me?
I could wash everything afterward.
But the first feeling that came up was not relief.
It was annoyance.
My husband has never been someone who likes working with his hands. He isn’t particularly handy either.
Early in our marriage, I used to ask him for help with things around the house. Eventually, I started doing most of them myself.
I was simply better at many of them.
Once, not long after we got married, I asked him to hammer a nail into a wall. He put so much force into it that his muscles hurt for days afterward.
After that, whenever we moved, I just asked the movers to hammer in any nails we needed. They would look at the wall, find the right spot, and do it in seconds.
My husband no longer had to hammer nails.
The fan was another example.
Years ago, before summer began, I decided to wash a fan I had left dirty because I hadn’t felt like cleaning it at the end of the previous summer.
I asked my husband to take the cover off.
But it didn’t mean that I could walk away and do something else.
“Bring me the screwdriver.”
“Hold this.”
I had to stay beside him and help.
It wasn’t coming apart easily for him, either.
I couldn’t very well say, “Just do it yourself,” when I had asked him for help.
And once he had started, even if I said, “I’ll just do it,” he wanted to finish what he had begun.
So I stayed there and helped him.
If he had been good at it—if I could have said, “Can you take this cover off?” and come back later to find it done—I probably would have kept asking him.
But that wasn’t what happened.
It simply made the job more complicated.
I would rather do it myself when I felt like doing it.
Something My Friend Said
Then, unexpectedly, I remembered something a friend had said to me when we were in high school.
“You’re too perfect. As your friend, I wish I could help you, but there’s nothing for me to help you with. Someday, when you meet someone you love, ask him for help. Asking for help is part of love, too.”
For some reason, I have never forgotten those words.
And now, decades later, they came back to me while I was looking at a dusty fan.
Is that why I don’t ask my husband to take the cover off? Because I always want to do everything myself?
I didn’t think so.
It was just easier this way.
The part before the help and the part after it often took more energy than simply doing the thing myself.
It Was Easier This Way
Then I thought about my son.
He is much like his father in that way. He’s more of a thinker. Working with his hands is not really his thing.
And come to think of it, my father-in-law was much the same.
My mother-in-law, on the other hand, was very good with tools. She handled all kinds of little household jobs herself.
In that way, perhaps she and I were alike.
And suddenly I understood something else.
For years, I helped my mother-in-law prepare huge amounts of food for the family’s ancestral rites.
When we worked together in the kitchen, I would talk to her, tell her funny stories, and try to keep her in a good mood.
“Bring me the flour.”
“Get me the sugar.”
I would stop what I was doing and bring whatever she needed.
Meanwhile, the food I was responsible for barely moved forward.
By evening, she would eat dinner and go home, and I would stay up late finishing everything that was left.
Sometimes she became so exhausted from preparing the food that she would lie down at our house before going home.
There were even times when she felt so unwell the next morning that she couldn’t come for the ancestral rite.
Eventually, I started telling her,
“Just rest, Mother. I’ll do it. Come in the morning and help me set the table.”
And I would make all that food by myself, sometimes staying up through the night.
For a long time, that could have looked like this:
I’ll just do everything myself.
But now it looked a little different.
Perhaps I had also been trying to stop my energy from leaking away.
Doing everything myself had looked like one thing.
Now I could see something else in it.
Maybe I had been trying to save my energy.
These days, I don’t want to push myself into doing things just because they need to be done.
I looked at the dusty fans again.
My daughter was walking around the living room when she suddenly said,
“It’s raining.”
I looked up from my laptop on the sofa table and turned toward the window.
“Oh, it’s coming down nice and cool.”
