“I was sitting at a coffee shop and overheard (I was eavesdropping) two women behind me. One was complaining about her daughter-in-law who’d just given birth to her grandchild. ‘I offered to help, but this ridiculous!’ she said. Here’s the thing. I’ve learned if we really want to help, we just show up. We ring their doorbell and start unloading their dishwasher or play with their kid while they take a shower. We shove a lasagna in the oven so they don’t have to think about dinner.”
‘I was doing her laundry FOR her. She was watching me fold her thong underwear. She just stood there holding the baby! This is ridiculous.’: Mom urges others to remember helping means doing so with ‘no strings attached’
‘I got the call at 6 p.m., left my kids with my husband and drove to her house with my socks crammed into my Birkenstocks.’: Mom urges others to ‘just show up’ when friends need you, ‘She didn’t need Pinterest, she needed me’
“When your friend’s husband dies unexpectedly, when she has a baby, when she is going through a divorce, she doesn’t care if you baked the cookies from scratch and perfectly placed them in a platter. Show up in your socks with pizza. I held her, loaded her dishwasher, read her kids a story and tucked them in.”
‘This is for the Dads who show up.’
“Children won’t remember that you were scared at their births, a little jealous of Mom, that you came home spent, that you would have rather been watching the game…”
10 routines that will strengthen a parent-child relationship
“Kids who feel strongly connected to their parents are more eager to cooperate with them, so it’s worth the effort to enhance that bond. It also just feels great.”
