Have You Ever Needed Help and Talked Yourself Out of Asking?

Have you ever needed help with something and then talked yourself out of asking?

I have, more times than I care to admit. Sometimes it’s because I think I should already know the answer, sometimes because I am worried the question is embarrassingly basic, and sometimes because I have convinced myself I can figure it out on my own. That last one is how I end up spending forty-five minutes doing something the hard way because apparently asking another human being one sentence was too much to bear. Very Gen X of me.

A lot of us were raised with some version of “figure it out,” and, to be fair, we usually did. We figured out how to get ourselves home from school, how to make food out of whatever was in the kitchen, how to navigate entire afternoons with very little adult supervision, and how to solve problems with a landline, a paper map, and an unreasonable amount of confidence. Resourcefulness became part of our identity. So did the habit of hiding the moments when we had absolutely no idea what we were doing.

That habit gets complicated once you become a parent, because parenting has a way of placing the most important person in your life directly in front of you with a need you were never taught how to meet. Maybe your child comes out to you. Maybe they are questioning their gender. Maybe they are overwhelmed by something that looks small from where you are standing and enormous from where they are. Maybe they need an accommodation at school, or they tell you that something you have always believed makes them feel unsafe. Suddenly, you have questions. Real ones. Questions about language, faith, school, mental health, family boundaries, and whether the thing you said yesterday landed the way you intended.

Then comes the strange adult problem of deciding whether you are allowed to ask.

We can be remarkably inventive when we are trying to avoid embarrassment. We Google things at two in the morning, read half of a Reddit thread and declare our research complete, ask questions sideways so nobody realizes they are really about our own family, or tell ourselves we are “still processing” long after processing has quietly become avoidance. Sometimes we are afraid that asking the wrong question will make us look ignorant.

It might. You might be ignorant about something. But that is generally why people ask questions.

Ignorance is a description of what you do not know yet. It does not have to become your permanent address. Once you learn something, though, the situation changes. You may still need time to process it. You may have more questions. You may even wish the answer were different. But you are no longer standing in the same place you were before.

This is where curiosity gets tested. Sometimes we go looking for information because we genuinely want to understand. Sometimes we go looking because we want somebody, somewhere, to tell us that the thing we already believe is correct.

Parents do this all the time. We have all searched for the second opinion that mysteriously agrees with us. Sleep schedules, screen time, food, schools, doctors, discipline, sports, homework; give us enough time and enough browser tabs and we can probably find one person on the internet who confirms whatever we wanted to hear. Usually, the consequences are fairly ordinary. But the stakes become much higher when the subject is whether your child gets to feel safe being who they are.

If you look something up, discover that the answer challenges your assumptions, and then keep searching until you find a source that lets you dismiss what you just learned, you are doing something different from asking a question. You are protecting a conclusion and confirming your bias. There is a point where ignorance becomes avoidance. There is also a point where avoidance becomes a choice.

That does not mean every difficult answer should be accepted without thought. Parents should ask follow-up questions. We should consider sources, seek qualified guidance, compare information, and think carefully about decisions that affect our children. Discernment matters. So does noticing when “I’m doing my research” has become an endless scavenger hunt for permission to stay exactly where we started.

That is the question I think is worth asking ourselves: Are you looking for information, or are you looking for permission?

I think one reason parents stay quiet is that adults have very few places where they feel comfortable admitting they are behind. The internet is especially terrible at this. Ask the wrong question in the wrong place and you can be corrected by twelve strangers, screenshotted by three more, and somehow find yourself arguing with an account named PatriotDad1776 before you’ve even finished your coffee. That does not leave much room for curiosity.

At the same time, I understand why LGBTQ+ people get tired of answering introductory questions about their own existence. Your queer child should not have to become your personal help desk every time you encounter something unfamiliar. They are trying to live their life. They should not also have to build the curriculum for your education.

That is part of why Rainbow Roots exists.

I want parents to have somewhere they can say, “I do not understand this yet,” and actually mean the “yet.” I want there to be room for sincere questions, uncomfortable answers, and the possibility that you may have to rethink something you have believed for a very long time. Questions can open doors, but they can also become hiding places if we keep asking them without ever allowing the answers to change us.

There are some questions we avoid because we already suspect the answer is going to require something from us. Maybe learning means changing the language we use. Maybe it means confronting a family member. Maybe it means realizing that something we thought was harmless was not harmless to our child. Maybe it means apologizing and trying again. Those are harder questions because they move us from curiosity into responsibility.

That is where the real work begins.

You are allowed to need help. You are allowed to realize at 45, 55, 65, or 85 that there is an entire part of human experience you never learned much about. You are allowed to discover that the world changed while you were busy paying the mortgage, getting somebody to practice on time, and wondering whether anyone remembered to move the laundry to the dryer.

There is no shame in starting with a question. There is responsibility in what you do after you get an answer.

Once you know something matters to your child, you have somewhere to go from there. You can read, listen, talk to another parent, find a resource, sit with an answer you do not particularly like, and come back with a better question. You are not racing a clock to become the world’s most informed parent by Friday. You are accumulating new knowledge, and there is no expiration date on when you are allowed to begin doing that.

There is, however, a child living alongside your learning. That is why it matters.

So if you have ever typed out a question and deleted it, hovered over “send,” closed the tab, or thought, “I should probably know this already,” I hope Rainbow Roots can become one of the places where you ask anyway. You might hear something that challenges you. You might realize you have been looking at something the wrong way. You might have to change your mind.

You can survive that. Your relationship with your child may be stronger because you did.

Families are absurd, parenting is humbling, and none of us received a complete instruction manual. Some of us barely got the warranty card. Ask the question. Then stay long enough to hear the answer.

Thank you for making room for this conversation.