Helplessness

Having worked a lot within Customer Operations, I find managing people’s expectations, increasing customer satisfaction and decreasing customer contacts is easier to achieve when you can communicate exact time frames i.e. you will receive X on Y date at Z time. Things become a bit harder to manage when you can’t give exact details or the date of expectancy or what is reality is beyond what they would consider reasonable. Functioning during difficult times unfortunately is an art we must all learn to master throughout our adult life.

It is hard to know what to do when difficult situations are out of your control. When you are in the passenger seat of the nightmare of someone close or you are the driver of your own and there’s nothing you can do besides praying to improve the situation. During an extremely difficult year for me my friend lost her mum to cancer, it was sudden, it was brutal, and it was unfair. I cried a river, I prayed, I believed and yet her mama bear still left this world. Typing this now I am crying again, even though it has been a few years and she is doing much better, as her loss was so great and she did not deserve to go through that. She has since gone on to help lots of other people who have experienced the same thing. Through her work she set up a hospice foundation in her Mother’s name. I have no doubt that even though her mama bear has changed her universal postcode/zip code, she is still rooting her on from above and is very proud of her [I am mega of her proud too]. She raised a lil fighter who is going after life with everything she’s got and trying to help others as she goes. There may be lots of narrative we cannot control, but we all have the power to do something positive with the BS we experience when we are strong enough and we feel the time is right. When I say, ‘something positive,’ do what is within your remit. As my mum says, “cut your material according to your cloth.” Surviving and trying to live your life responsibly is a positive.

My friend is not married yet and I have big hopes for what her relationship with her mother-in-law will be like, I am believing she will truly see and treat her like her own daughter. Technically it doesn’t have to be her mother-in-law, anyone could pop into her life that adds an extra special motherly unconditional love cushion [as only good mothers can] and I would be celebrating. Mama+ will never replace her mama, she doesn’t need to, they can create their own unique bond. So this is where I am channelling my prayers and when I pause to think about this, I get genuinely excited. 😊

Photo credit: Kent Pilcher (Unsplash)