yes and no
When saying no inivites us into another kind of yes
It’s Wednesday, 11AM. I’m zipping home to eat lunch and do housework between academic coaching appointments. Maybe I’ll get a little writing in, too. I leap from car to house, drop my bags, run outside to collect eggs before our cannibal chickens smash and eat them all, and reheat some gummy leftover mac and cheese from dinner last night. While the microwave whirs, I quickly check Instagram to see what all my “friends” are up to and mentally run through a list of chores that need doing. Too many. File that thought for later.
In the midst my frenetic activity, a text pings. It’s from Kaleb’s classroom paraprofessional. “Hey, I might need your help.” Now?
Kaleb wants to keep the fan he and a partner built out of mechanical parts during Maker Space. The problem is, his partner wants it, too. They could ROCK-PAPER-SCISSORS for it, but my eternal optimist is never prepared to lose. I agree with her; it might take a while to recover—and maybe today isn’t the day for this life lesson. She and I need to dream up a situation where Kaleb willingly relinquishes the fan.
I know the answer, but I hesitate. Should I commit to the thing I know will solve this impasse? I type it: “We can build another one at home together.” I look at it. I don’t want to build a fan out of batteries and wire and wood. “One of us would be happy to do it,” I lie. And then I click send.
What have I done?
Committing to building the fan means I also just volunteered Audyn or Mark to help me troubleshoot an engineering project I know nothing about. Committing to building the fan means I won’t do something else—like reseed the bare patches of lawn or plant the empty raised vegetable bed, both of which seem to leer at me with blank, black glares every time I barrel up the driveway from an appointment or activity. Oh my gosh, what if the grass isn’t healthy this summer? What if I don’t have fresh greens for my salads?
This first post-COVID May has felt like a 200-meter dash to a finish line someone keeps moving. If I can only get through Saturday, I pacify my frazzled mind, then we can rest for twenty minutes on Sunday. Won’t that be nice? Should I pencil it in my agenda?
On Monday, a colleague and I waxed nostalgic for the spring of 2020. Really. We did. “Remember when you woke up on a weekday and wondered what you would do? Remember how we said we wouldn’t overcommit ourselves. Ever. Again. What have we done?” We sat in the silence of the high school library for a few minutes, pondering this unanswerable question.
As I fork a bite of sticky mac and cheese, I pause on a fellow writer’s Instagram post. For everything she planned to accomplish this week, she named another thing she wouldn’t have time for.
I like this idea and mentally try it out. I just said yes to building a fan with my son. A fan he will make and probably break within a few hours. A fan whose parts I will have to reassemble repeatedly until he tires of it. A fan whose pieces I will find in strange places for weeks afterwards and then secretly throw away. I know exactly what I said yes to. And I said it anyway. I said yes to a thing I didn’t want to do, and I said no to planting my vegetable garden—the thing I do want to do. Naming the yes and the no, the yin and the yang gives me context. This time, I said yes to my son. Next time, I have permission to say yes to myself. This time I said yes to this good thing and no to that good thing. Both things are good.
It is okay to say no to a good thing.
We can’t go back to unstructured days at home. And maybe, truly, I don’t really want to. Maybe what I’m craving is permission. It is okay to say no to good things. It is okay to let my shoulders drop just a little as I breathe deep and exhale long. I can release the tension between two good things. Release the chores, the articles, the workouts that will not get accomplished because of all the other yesses.
It is okay to slow down.
On Saturday, I said no to attending a track invitational. I missed watching my oldest daughter earn three gold medals. She came home happy as a clam, harboring not a bit of resentment toward me. I also said no to my son’s Cadet sleepover—the one he’d been looking forward to all year. This did not please him one bit.
Instead, I said yes to activities that seemed less essential at face value, but turned out to be just right. On Saturday, I said yes to letting Kaleb and Audyn, who had both been sick that week, rest. I said yes to a front yard picnic, popsicles, chalk drawings, and two lanky bodies stretched out in the grass warming themselves under the sun. I said yes to gardening—pulling up weeds, moving perennials, edging borders. While I said yes, I pushed away worry that we were missing fun, meaningful experiences out in the world.
Two nos became an invitation. Two nos became their own kind of yes. And it all turned out okay. Maybe more than okay.
