How to have help

I came across this great post by Rebecca Woolf on her awesome blog Girl's Gone Child, explaining how much she relies on help to get the job done. Her job, I mean. She works from home and somehow manages to care for four small children (including a set of year-old twins). So, it got me thinking about help, and wanting help, and asking for help, when help is a hard thing to admit you need. 

At our house, Jules helps a lot. Right now, he's out grocery shopping so that I can get some work done, and later on he'll take the baby out so that I can scrape a little more brain-time together. We share the chores, we've both made the decision to work less so we can share the childcare (we would, quite frankly, not be able to afford it otherwise), and together we're keeping the ship afloat. But we could use a hand. And so could you, and so could everyone. We're doing it all ourselves right now, and while that's good for our family, it's also exhausting. I dream of the day when I can do a client call without having the phone on mute because somebody might shout they need to go to the potty; or to have a couple of hours to rub together in order to actually THINK about some of the work I put out there into the world, but at the moment, it's not happening. We live for nap-time, and after school clubs, and the bedtimes that seem to get earlier and earlier. So if you're reading and feel like commenting, I'd be interested to know how you're managing to be a supermom? Why do you think help is a hard thing to ask for, harder still to get? How do you manage life as a working parent? A work-at-home parent? A full-time-stay-at-home parent? And how are you doing it without going crazy in the coconut? Believe me, I'm listening.