It’s Friday evening. My son pops into my room. I’m working on documents – there are papers and folders scattered all over the bed.
“Hey Mom.”
I look up.
“Tomorrow night, I’m going downtown with friends.”
I ask for details, and I tell him it sounds like fun.
“I want to have a few people back here, after.”
I take a breath. I’ve been knee-deep in nasty forms since early morning, and I know the rest of the weekend will be more of the same. I also know the house is a mess again – typical for the end of the week.
I realize we’re nearly out of chips and dip. The necessary fuel for any adolescent gathering. I don’t have time – or energy – to deal with it.
“I’ll clean up around here,” he says. “You won’t have to do anything.”
He’s had another hard week. Of course, so have I.
“Just ten kids,” he adds.
“Okay,” I say, and as soon as I have, I hope I won’t regret it.
Saturday comes, and I rise early to get back to the tasks at hand. I have a dream that is instructive on many levels. I write quickly, then dig back into the process I left off the night before. By mid afternoon, I know I’ll be working into the night. I also know I’m not going to want extra kids in my house all night. I don’t want the worry or the commotion.
I tell my son I’m sorry, but the day isn’t going as planned. The forms I’m working on – for him – are much more complex than I anticipated.
“Do you want me to cancel?” he asks.
I say nothing. I feel guilty. I feel conflicted.
He’s angry. I can hear it in his tone. I can see it on his face.
“I’ll cancel,” he says, and he begins calling friends as I leave the room, in tears.
I have myself a good cry, and I return to the numbers and the forms, trying to make sense of it all, trying to push away the pain that it brings to the surface. Old pain. Present pain.
I should have said no to my son when he asked, on Friday night. Sometimes, you need to say no.
* * *
Ten years ago I dared to say no in a marriage. The first no was so seemingly tiny, but essential to who I am. It was a no about writing, strangely enough – a refusal to stop writing, which felt like asking me to not breathe.
One seemingly small no can end a marriage though at times I view it as a non-marriage, a partial marriage; it was only partial love. I loved; he did not. Besides, love alone is never enough.
* * *
Most of the marriage was a yes – my yes after yes though I am certain he made compromises as well, and marriage isn’t a score card. Still, my yes was required over and over, my yes became the assumption of our rhythm, my yes was the answer to whatever we did, or didn’t do, and never the answer to what he did or didn’t do.
In my yes after yes, I grew smaller. In my yes after yes, I surrendered my ability to say no.
There was my yes to whatever he needed, a yes out of love and out of fear of conflict, a yes out of conditioning in an upbringing about pleasing, a yes out of an archaic view I must have bought into once: my yes to his vacations on his own, my yes to his way of “running” the marriage, my yes to his traveling and me staying home, my yes to bringing in a full-time income while nearly full-time parenting, my yes to his friends, to his projects, to his silence and to my own, complicit in all of it. And these yeses I agreed to without complaint. He seemed happy and I was pleased when he was happy; I told myself they were small concessions – each yes, each time, on its own.
And there were satisfactions for me as well – in parenting, in working, in pleasing. My sense of self in pleasing, out of love, and I only realize now – out of fear of abandonment, fear of anger, a deep-seated fear buried so many years before.
This was the conduct of our marriage and it was quiet and it flowed; these were the lessons of what I saw and what I interpreted in what I did not see. My mother was aggressive and mouthy in her marriage; I had decided that if I ever married, that would never be me.
But I swung the other way. I gave yes after yes and the tacit yes while losing the appropriate balance of no, the requisite no, and when I finally chanced a no, surely the shock of it alone, after a decade, was significant. When I stood by a more important no, the warfare began. From one no, my marriage unraveled. From the second, it imploded.
* * *
There are times we say yes out of love. There are times that yes becomes the habit of love, or the habit of peace-making. There are times we must say no because we need the quiet in which to work, because the no affords us a “self” in some essential way, because the no is the only means of survival.
When we learn to love through pleasing and love through acquiescence, finding no is difficult. But man or woman, we must practice no as a way to retain a viable “us” – in parenting, in partnership, certainly in marriage.
I sometimes lose my no in a desire to please or reward, in a desire to love from a place of generosity, in an old habit of putting myself lower on the priority list than almost anyone else. This is an unhelpful habit. It is one I am still working to break.
It’s good if you can say yes most often – but care needs to be taken that your yes doesn’t create difficulties for you. Sometimes a No is a good thing, and everyone needs to understand that there will be many of those in life. You know that “you can’t please everyone. . .” thing.
Oh, I understand because I lived the “flexible yes(es)” for 23 years…
my mother was a yes person but there was exchange in the marriage and even a rescue of her by him that worked well enough… when she said no for the first time — I was a teen — he looked at her and over about six months switched… and, I was told later, that he said “but, I didn’t know you 1) did not want to do X and 2) that you would rather do Y. ????” AND “tell me what you want.”
They worked something out that was imperfect, human, reasonable, respectfully loving to one another.
So, perhaps I thought this would happen too… add the children — OH THE BABIES, will make you do so much lovingly and willingly to make their nest (the beautiful burdens that give us so much measure and matter and mapping)… and add two chronically ill children including many surgeries and chemo…
and, I said “no” about my personal writing too. As in, no, won’t stop.
@Carol – Right indeed. We cannot please everyone. Especially dangerous when we please others consistently, to the detriment of pleasing ourselves at least occasionally.
@NoName – I love that you offer an example of another outcome, and I certainly believe it is possible. We must be able to express what we want. Clearly. No one can read another’s mind.
Interesting post, D, because I just posted on the same conundrum but from a different angle. It was a moment where I said yes to my ex when I wanted to say no, and I have never regretted it since. However, I was always a strong driver in my marriage and I felt like this was moment where acquiescing was the right thing to do. And it certainly wasn’t over something as personal and important as writing. It was over hardwood floors.
Nevertheless, our points are similar in that there is always a give and take in a relationship and you have to find that right balance for both you and the marriage. I believe that it is inappropriate for a partner to ask the other to give up something that brings them so much happiness (unless of course it’s a lover).
A workable balance seems to be key, doesn’t it, with “workable” being something that only the couple can ascertain. The situation I found myself in was particularly unthinkable – as I was in my mid-30s when I wed, had been writing all my life, and to be “censored” some 10 years later struck me as absurd. And unthinkable. And that was the “small no.”
As for your final point, Molly, I got a chuckle out of that. Yes, seems like a reasonable request, for most of us!
It is such a tug – to say no when needed, to say yes when needed. I must admit for myself, I often blurt out NO before thinking things through. I try to be aware of it, try to think things over before I speak. There are those times when I want to give in and say yes even though I know the denial is the best/right choice. This parenting thing is tough.
Your comment makes me smile, Cathy. I’ve had to train myself to think before I speak regarding my kids, in order to not say “yes” automatically. When they were younger, “no” was far more automatic. I wonder if some of it has to do with their ability to effectively negotiate as they mature? And the cumulative wearing down of ye olde parental unit? 🙂
Ah, the work in marriage. Saying “yes” when a spouse really wants to say “no” is the essence of this work.
Yet it is not so simplistic and each couple must strive (striving takes even more work!) to seek a reasonable balance.
And to add a further level of complexity, there are certain biologically wired gender behaviors that must be factored in.
The final complication? Social expectations.
I wonder why I even date. 😉
@Zammo – You got a smile out of me on that one! (I guess we all keep dating, even sporadically, because when we hit the jackpot with a good relationship, it makes all the duds worthwhile.)
@Kristina – Yes, to those lingering effects of yes. (I think there are a lot of us former yes-girls out there.) Isn’t it great growing into a better balance? Nice to know I’m in good company!
Well said. I, too, was a yes girl and then like you I finally said no more. I am trying not to feel regretful about all my yeses but the effects of those yeses still linger after many years. It feels good to finally be a grown-up and feel secure in my yeses and noes!
The no after the initial yes that wished it had been a no is never easy, but it sounds like a lot more is built up behind that word, at present and in its earlier history, beyond the unpleasantness or regret in the retraction of yes alone. Hoping tensions ease soon.
Ah CT. Quelle sagesse.
There is always more at play in the background, in any family. Fortunately, generally, things calm down quickly around here. I have the good fortune of two reasonable and understanding sons, despite their youth!
This is one of my favorite posts you have written. It reminds me of me. I always said yes, even when I didn’t want to, and when I finally said no and stood up for myself, that was also when ours unraveled. I think for my ex it was the insecurity of not being able to handle me anymore. But, even though it ended the marriage, it made me feel good. Now, I need to master saying no to the kids…guilt is a large motivator!
There are so many times when I’m tempted to say “yes” because it’s easier in the moment (although not in the long run), and sometimes I’m inwardly cringing as I say “no” out loud. But usually, the kids take it in stride, and if they don’t? All the more reason to say no! (Not that I say no to everything, of course.)
Really powerful thoughts here – that these two small words can define us, both to ourselves and to others, so broadly.
Do you ever think about where you might be today if you hadn’t said No that first time? Do you ever wish you’d answered differently? Did you have to think about your answer before you gave it? Or did you know immediately that you were being asked for something you couldn’t give?
I think a lot about the path not traveled. If I’d chosen the other college; if I’d chickened out of the semester abroad; if I’d moved back home when I lost my job; etc. The older we get the more choices we’ve made and the more alternatives we’ve left behind. Sometimes it’s easy to be haunted by recollection of everything we aren’t.
Interesting point about saying yes. I always kid my wife I’m the only one (kids,siblings, parents, friends) that she has no problem saying no to. Everybody else always gets a yes….
Happy to see you pop by, h0tr0d. Great line! 😉
For me saying yes indicates the need to stoke my people pleasing personality. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve learn to stop saying yes so much because it creates unrealistic expectations.
Great post, thank you. A friend of mine once taught me that you can say yes most of the time, you just have to approach the topic from the right angle. Say it right, and yes becomes yes to the greater good – by implication this is no to the lesser alternative, but by saying yes to the good thing you don’t even need to say no. For example, when a child is about to touch an electricity socket, my friend would say “yes, it is time to move away from here; because…”
That is all well and good, and as a habitual ‘no’-sayer I can learn a lot from it, I acknowledge the importance of saying a big fat NO when no needs to be said.
Nice to have you here, Ophelia. A habitual “no”-sayer. Hmm. That makes me realize that children often perfect no much younger and more readily than yes. No is used to set necessary boundaries – and to test them. I like your idea that as adults, in many circumstances, we can create the yes from what is a no.