Anna Kept Trying to Fix the Person Who Was Struggling
Sometimes one person looked like the problem because they were the person whose struggle was easiest to see.
In Anna’s family, somebody was often having a difficult patch.
Sometimes it was Anna.
Sometimes one of the children.
Sometimes David was exhausted from trying to keep everything running.
Anna’s instinct was usually the same.
Find the problem. Find the solution. Fix it.
Preferably by Tuesday.
When a child was struggling, Anna looked for things that might help.
Doctors. Strategies. Food. Sleep. Routines. Counselling. School adjustments. Another appointment. Another idea.
When Anna’s own health became difficult, she did much the same thing.
There was always something else that might improve things.
Often, some of those things genuinely helped.
But the family also had to find the time, energy, money, organisation and emotional capacity to actually do them.
The family had its own capacity
A useful support still had to fit somewhere into real life.
Anna began asking:
“What does this person need, and what can this family realistically sustain?”
At first, Anna worried that this sounded selfish.
Surely if somebody needed help, the family should simply provide it.
But families did not have unlimited resources.
A plan that required David to do ten extra things every day affected David.
A routine that required the entire household to stay silent affected everyone else.
A complicated health protocol might be theoretically excellent and practically impossible.
And a strategy that depended on Anna having energy she did not actually possess was not much of a strategy.
Anna started looking at the whole picture
This wasn’t an argument for doing less carelessly
Sometimes somebody genuinely needed a lot of support.
Sometimes a family had to reorganise substantially around illness, disability or crisis.
Sometimes the person who was struggling could not simply become more independent.
Anna was not trying to turn family capacity into an excuse for ignoring someone’s needs.
She was learning that support that exhausts the entire support system may eventually stop working for everyone.
This changed some surprisingly small things.
Anna stopped assuming every problem needed a project.
Sometimes they tried the easiest reasonable thing first.
Sometimes they chose one priority instead of six.
Sometimes the answer was:
“We can’t solve that this week.”
Anna discovered that the world did not immediately end.
This was useful information.
Anna’s good-enough line
Meet the important needs.Protect the family’s capacity.
Leave room for people to have lives as well as problems.
Good support did not necessarily mean doing everything that might help.
Sometimes it meant finding the smallest sustainable amount that helped enough.
Anna still liked solutions.
She remained particularly fond of a nice plan.
Preferably colour-coded.
But she began adding another question to the plan:
“Who has to do all of this?”
It was an annoyingly useful question.
Because sometimes the best plan was not the most comprehensive one.
It was the one the person and the family could actually keep living with.