“I’ll just come sleep on your sofa.”
Imagine you’re 9 months pregnant (a bit of a stretch if you’re a man, but give it a try), you’ve got two kids, been in labor for a day or two, and the baby’s not coming. This is where Julie found herself 15 years ago in the middle of a cold January. Women from the neighborhood were coming over throughout the day to drop off food. One of those women decides to stay and wait to see if Julie and her two other children eat the food she brought, all the while giving advice to Julie about how to speed up here labor. Chaos, right? She’d had enough.
Knowing that this labor, like those of her other children, would not likely start on its own, Julie called the doctor to talk about getting induced. They told her to come in. The only problem was there was no one available to watch her other two children, ages 5 and 3, who weren’t old enough to spend the night alone. “I needed to go to the hospital and there was nobody to stay there with the kids…we were desperate.” With the only near relative unable to come and spend the night, Julie reached out to her next door neighbor, a woman she knew, who, without hesitation, agreed.
Of this, Julie expressed: “I was just amazed that my neighbor would just be like, ‘Yeah, I’ll come sleep on your sofa. No big deal.’
It was a BIG DEAL…I was just amazed….Really?! You would do this for me?!
We took her up on it, because we didn’t have any other options. We didn’t have anywhere else to go….So we were like, ‘Ok! Thank you. We will never be able to repay you.”
Offering to sleep on the couch allowed Julie and her husband to go to the hospital knowing that their other children would be looked after. Something that may not have seemed like a big deal to the woman that offered — its just one night, right? — made all the difference for Julie and her family. In the middle of all that was going on, it was the one thing Julie needed that she couldn’t do herself , she couldn’t be in two places at once.
Julie’s neighbor may never have known how much of an impact her sacrifice of time and sleep meant, but, to Julie, it made all the difference in the world. It gave her the peace of mind she needed to focus on bringing her youngest child into the world.
