Why Didn't I Ask for Help

For an assignment in Creative Writing, I needed to write a memoir.

Why Didn’t I Ask?

It was June 7th, 2018. It was a bright, sunny day, and school had gotten out for the day 30 minutes ago. It was the day before the last day of school, and my brother and I were very excited for summer to begin. We were at Barkemeyer Park in Huntley. For the first time in three years, I was going to try to do the monkey bars. My whole life, I have been notoriously bad at doing the monkey bars. As I am about to start the monkey bars, I yell out to my parents, “Hey! Mom, Dad, watch me do the monkey bars and fail!” I get to the second rung of the bars and fall, and all the wind is knocked out of me, and I can barely breathe. My parents and I all assume that that is all that happened, but when I go to stand up, I fall right back down. I feel horrible. There’s an intense pain in my ankle, it’s throbbing, and I start crying. That’s when I call my dad, it feels like I broke something. My dad first takes my sock and shoe off my foot to look at my right ankle, then helps me stand up and tells me to limp. I immediately scrunch up my face, the way I do when I am confused sometimes, and ask my dad, “How do you limp?”, “Just walk and try to put most of the pressure on your other foot.” So I attempt to limp to the car, and I fail. I’ve never had to limp before, so I didn’t know how to. So my dad has to help me into the car. I could tell he was getting frustrated with me, but I couldn’t help it; I was just a weak little eleven-year-old who was severely hurt. Finally, we get to the car, and I’m crying, my mom is trying to calm me down, and my dad is trying to wrangle my three brothers into the car. We drive to the ice cream shop in Huntley (this shop is now closed and is a thrift shop/boutique). My mom asks me what kind of ice cream I want, and through my tears, I tell her I want a huckleberry ice cream. After getting back to the car, my mom passed out everyone’s ice cream. She gets in the car, and my dad starts driving home. Luckily, at this point in my life, we had already moved to our house next to the bowling alley, so it only took about five minutes to get home. Once we get home, my dad helps me hobble up the stairs to get into the house. In the house, my dad sets me down on the couch, and I lie down. My dad then goes to the freezer to get me an ice pack and the bathroom to grab a towel to wrap the ice pack in. My dad then goes to help my brothers get some snacks and dinner, and I fall asleep on the couch. The next day, I woke up on the couch. Understandably, my parents didn’t want to carry me downstairs and back upstairs in the morning. It is Friday, and since I can barely walk, I stay home from school. This is also the last day of school, so I didn’t get a yearbook that year and was unable to say goodbye to all my friends before summer began. On Saturday, my dad made me start walking around more and doing chores. My ankle was not at all healed yet, and so this is the reason that I have pain in my right ankle to this day. For the first few days, doing my chores (luckily, I had been on dishes duty during this ), I grabbed a chair and rested my ankle on the chair while I did the dishes. This was my routine for doing the dishes for around three days before my dad started to get annoyed with me limping and dragging a chair around the kitchen every day.


As a kid, I always wanted to be viewed as a big kid. In my five-year-old brain, big kids got to do whatever they wanted and had no rules (extremely flawed logic, I know). This happened in the very early hours of Christmas Day. As a child, my brother RJ and I would wake up around 3-4 am every Christmas morning. That particular year, my parents understandably wanted to get a little more sleep, so they told us to wait in the living room. Leaving two little kids in a room full of presents is not necessarily a good idea. It was a horrible idea this year because there were scissors in my stocking.
Up until this point, I had extremely long hair, my hair was so long that it was past my butt So there I am, a little five-year-old with very long hair and a brand new pair of scissors. I thought to myself, “Mom did say that I needed to get a haircut soon, so why don’t I do it for her?” Snip, snip, snip. By the time my parents woke up and got out of bed, and came to the living room. They saw me sitting on the floor of the living room with strands of long, black hair all around me, and I was sitting there as happy as a clam, excited to show my parents how well I did on my haircut. All my dad did was shake his head and sigh while my mother took the scissors away from me. Before my brother and I were allowed to open our presents, my mom took me to the bathroom and cleaned up my hair from the hack job I did. So I spent around half the year with a bob cut.
It was a warm summer evening, my dad had taken my brother Rj and me out fishing at Lake Elmo. Ever since I first went fishing when I was three, I knew that I loved to fish. This took place when I was about seven and my brother was around five. We got out of the car and took all of our fishing gear out of the trunk of the car. Once we got to the pier, I thought we would stop there like we normally did when we went fishing at Lake Elmo. Instead, my dad told me to “Keep going, Celia, we aren’t going to fish on the pier today.” Confused, I say, “Okay, Dad!” and keep walking. Eventually, we get to a small bridge and cross over. A little way away from the bridge, there is a bench and a small path leading to the edge of the water. This spot became one of our new fishing spots whenever we went to the lake. As my dad is setting up my brother’s pole, I get to work on my own. After fishing for around four years, at that point my dad had started to let me set up my pole, although I always needed help putting the worm on the hook. “Not this time”, I thought, “I’m going to do everything all by myself, just like a big girl.” Confident as I was in myself, I ended up spearing the worm and my finger on the hook. It hurt, so I went up to my dad crying and asking him to help me. After a little bit of a struggle with the pliers and getting the hook out of my finger, my dad grabs the Neosporin and a band-aid from his tackle box, cleans up my finger, and puts the Neosporin and band-aid on my finger. I say thank you to my dad, and he grabs a new worm from our can of worms and puts it on the hook, then hands me my fishing pole. The rest of the night goes without incident, and I catch a snapping turtle. This is the start of a really funny series of events that my dad goes through, but that’s a story for later.
Another time, my family had gone to a family friend’s cabin for vacation. Just a little ways from the cabin was a great fishing spot with really good spots to sit. My grandfather, Steve, had also come down to fish with my dad, brother, and me. I get myself set up on one of the big flat rocks and cast my line out to the middle of the river. It takes some time until we start to get bites on our lines, but that’s a part of the fun. While we waited, we all talked about our days and how we were doing. As we are talking, I get a really big bite on my line, and so I rush to pick up my pole and start reeling my line in and jerking the rod so that the fish can’t get off the hook. I’m reeling in my line fast, adrenaline is pumping through my veins as I catch one of the biggest rainbow trout I have seen. My dad tells me to kill it, and we will take it back to the cabin and skin and grill it for dinner. So I hit the fish across the rock a couple of times, and my dad put it into the cooler. We spend a little more time fishing before we need to head back to the cabin and start dinner. Before we leave, we say goodbye to Grandpa and make our way back to the cabin.
Back at the cabin, my dad shows me how to skin the trout and pick out the bones. He cuts the fish in half, and while he is skinning and deboning one half, I am doing the other half. Skinning the fish was hard. I had cut myself multiple times, but I didn’t want my dad to finish it; I wanted to show him I could do it without help. So by the time I have finished skinning the trout, my dad is done skinning and deboning his half, so he comes and checks on me. He immediately spots the blood and takes me to the bathroom to clean me up. As a silly ten-year-old old I didn’t want my dad to do it, I wanted to do it by myself. He gives up and watches me clean myself up, while still helping a little when he notices I’m struggling. After we’re finished in the bathroom, we go back to the kitchen, where I start to debone my half. My dad washes the halves of the fish and starts teaching me how to season a trout. At the end of the day, when my mom gets back with my three little brothers, Rj, Dean, and Henry. Everyone compliments my dad and I’s cooking skills with the fish, and the rest of the vacation goes off without a hitch.
At this point, it should be no surprise that I love to fish. I have been fishing most of my life, having started fishing when I was three. Fishing is a form of relaxation, the way you can cast out your line and then just sit and wait in the quiet, it helps me think. One thing that I used to always have trouble with when fishing at first was casting out my line and putting worms on my hooks. When I was little, every summer before we went fishing, my dad always gave my brother and me a refresher on how to cast and hook bait. When I was eight, I thought I remembered how to cast. So I cast the line without my dad refreshing me on how. As I cast, and the line went behind me, the line caught on something. I yanked the line hard, and that was when my dad shouted at me, “Stop yanking the line!” When I turned around, the hook was caught in my dad’s arm. When I saw that, I sheepishly said, “Sorry, Dad.” This happened almost every summer, until my dad started refreshing me first, and then my brother, so that the likelihood of him getting a hook in his body was reduced. The summer I was ten, I had finally learned to ask for help when I was unsure of how to do something with my fishing rod.
Everyone knows that it is okay to ask for help, and deep down I know that too, my brain, however, is against me, so it says that we are not allowed to ask for help. These experiences have helped me to realize that my brain is wrong and that it is okay if I ask for help, no matter what the situation is.