I keep thinking I'm making progress but I'm falling behind - or things are getting ahead of me, or something. Going sideways?

You know about my new mattress and what I learned about asking for help . Now I have to learn how to sleep - on a new mattress. It's not the first time, of course. The rough rule is that you should change, that is, replace your mattress every 20 years or so. I never had to think about replacement. We had just bought our new mattress as a twentieth anniversary milestone when Bill died. After almost twenty years in Toronto I moved to Muskoka. Eighteen years later I moved back to Toronto. Each move involved a new mattress: a futon bed in the cottage, my first IKEA bed back in Toronto, which I have just replaced. I don't remember suffering any adjustment (read: pain). I'm older now. Who's counting?

It's a week since I have made my bed and lain in it. I am sleeping better, I think, slightly longer, until last night. But I also have had worse lower back pain and aching hips. I don't take pills. I swim and walk and do leg exercises. I'll go back to the gym and start pedalling and stretching - when it gets a little cooler. But I'm going to have to do something about my mind. My thoughts woke me and kept me awake from 4 to 6 a.m. I'm used to that and I believe in the two-sleeps theory, also in naps. But I like it best when I go to sleep without delay. You may remember I do Jack Reacher's three or four deep breaths and I'm OUT. I don't like it when I keep thinking.

It's my mind not the mattress. I have to beat it into submission - my mind not the mattress.

A recent article in the NYT called me to myself and my my misplaced self-pity. The writer, Alina Tugend, of this particular piece cites a number of other writers who recommend asking for help and who give various reasons for not asking (not wanting to admit defeat, embarrassed to seem incompetent, feeling like an outsider or a stranger not well enough acquainted to beg). No one mentions pride or need or the hope for an unsolicited gift. In my book about women's diaries I introduced Martha Ballard, (1735-1812) a remarkable American midwife, most remarkable because she kept a very long diary (edited briliiantly by Laura Thatcher Ulrich who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1990 for her book, A Midwife's Tale ). It's a good read and I recommend it. This is from memory; I think the emotion is sound.

Ballard's husband was in jail - I think it was for debt - and she was left alone to run their home as winter was coming on. She needed wood for the fires -cooking and heating - and that involved skill and strength beyond her capacity: cutting and hauling and stacking, and so on. I know what that's about; I lived on a lake in Muskoka for 16 years and though I had the electric wire to power my baseboard heaters, I needed the extra warmth that my fireplace provided. I couldn't cut or haul - I paid for that - but i did a lot of stacking and carrying. Ballard had pride and no money and an able-bodied son who she expected to help her without being asked. Darned if she was going to beg. She didn't ask and he didn't help.

I thought of her before I read the NYT piece. I needed a new mattress. I can do most things by myself but I was paralyzed over this. I had to measure and test and arrange delivery (I don't have a car). I didn't know where to start. I have asked my able-bodied son for help before, too subtly, I guess, because he always just recommends that I go on-llne. I buy my books online but not much else; I seem to have trouble/complications that involve time and effort to correct. Anyway, subtly was getting me nowhere and my back hurt. I remembered Martha Ballard and I wrote my son an e-mail. For Subject I wrote "please help me". He did.

I have a new mattress and my back has stopped hurting (almost. I am old, you know. )