Say your wife has needed to call her insurance company to discuss a claim. Don’t fall asleep on that sentence. Enter: you. You want to help, you need to help, to ask the right questions to get the exact answer. But insert important premise: you didn’t enter the room until 30 minutes into the phone call. So now you want everything rehashed, and the poor insurance lady on the other line, and your poor wife, are both now trying to answer your questions, at the same time, that were already answered. Three people talking over each other and the baby is making additional noises, all convulsing into a pitch resembling an F sharp.
But you’re here now, you’re in. Your problem is you want to hear the answers again from insurance lady, from the horse’s mouth, not through your wife relaying what the horse said. The problem with that of course is that maybe your wife didn’t understand the horse, and only by hearing it from the horse’s mouth can you confirm that wife is getting (a) not only correct information but (b) the information your wife needs to know. If they deny the claim, you want to know why.
Here's the problem with that. It’s like being a passenger in a car and spotting an empty parking space in a busy parking lot. “Ooh Ooh there’s one over there!...oh, you missed it. Go back around.” I do not say anything anymore as a passenger in a car trying to find a parking space in a crowded lot. No one wins. If I spot a spot, it will get taken before we get there anyway, and it took us from another spot that would have surely opened up from whence we came. And then it’s my fault. I don’t want that kind of ownership. I can’t take that kind of blame.
Ditto for phone call with insurance lady. What will I really add to the phone call about benefits? Is it my control issues that want to be in on the call to solve it myself? Probably. I believe I am the smartest guy, and I will ask the exact pointed questions that will obtain the solution, good or bad, that we’ve been needing to know.
But life is not a courtroom trial, and the insurance lady is not a witness. You can’t cross-examine your way through life. You are exhausting! You inevitably cause further stress, and unwanted overlap, and double-work, and now the insurance lady and your wife are both upset, and the baby is crying again.
What to do? Call the insurance on your own time? Good luck with that. Yeah that’s a brilliant idea. No—you let your wife handle it. Good results be damned. Of course your wife can figure it out all on her own, and if she needs your help, and asks for it, then step in. Oh but be careful there, too. Only step in relative to the scope of work in which you were asked to step in, and do not exceed it. Don’t get carried away with more questions. Get in and get out, or don’t go in at all. Tend to the baby, dad.
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