if on a summer's day a daughter
if on a summer's day a daughter
on the bluntness of children
On what is now her annual summer trip to Camp Grandma and Grandpa in North Carolina with her cousin for two weeks, our daughter sent multiple text messages each asking for the same thing: money on her debit card. The use of the work asking is done loosely as she neglected to use a question mark nor any other punctuation, did not use capitalization and did not butter me up with cordialities or even a simple hello. My wife received similar messages demanding to know why I hadn't put more money on her debit card. No hellos, no how are yous, no I miss yous. Just direct demands for dough. To have that level of bluntness and boldness at her then 12 is something I envy at my then and now 43.
My wife and I agree that our oldest daughter came out of the womb fighting. For a child who fears much and worries more, she's always had an independent streak. Shakespeare would have something to say about her walking onto the basketball court as a three year old in Harlem in the middle of a game asking - no, demanding - that the young men pass her the ball. Small, but fierce.
We know what kind of mood she's from the second she gets up, which usually involves multiple attempts both at and after the agreed upon time to wake her, which she provided the night before. A typical response is a grunt, a go away, a five more minutes. We avoid asking her questions during this time, or reminding her of certain things, to avoid getting a mood-induced negative response. A morning person, unlike her father, she is not.
On arrival downstairs, we battle over what's for breakfast, her younger sister having been up for the better part of the morning post-sunrise and having already made herself breakfast and both her own and her sister's lunches. Even an offer to make her a bagel or fry up an egg will typically be rebuffed. It takes an act of GOD - Good Old Determination - to get something (semi-)nutritious into her before she gets ready for school.
It’s at this time that the argument over why she can't find any clothes to wear begins. They're either clean but in a pile stuffed into her wardrobe layers deep and seasons wide or dirty in a pile or in piles in her room on the floor beneath her unmade bed, stuffed animals strewn about. We pick our mornings to ask her to make her bed, and adjust the tone of our voice according to the weather that day, the phase of the moon, or how long it's been since we last asked her about whether her homework has been completed.
Once dressed, hair made, teeth brushed and shoes on, things typically start to improve as we walk out the door to drive her the two-thirds of a mile up the hill to get her to school, picking her friend up along the way, who is always in a cheerful mood. Most days, I'm the first to say hello, my daughter delayed in welcoming her friend for the remaining 120 seconds to get to school. I should really make my daughter walk, but those are discussions best left for another school year.
We do have her walk home from school. Upon arrival, a day's worth of school has somehow put our daughter in a better mood than when she left our house. While it's taken some months of convincing, she now settles in, grabs a snack, watches a little TV and then gets to her homework. She even empties her lunch bag before throwing it on the counter (most days). This is, of course, unless the weather was too cold or too hot or too rainy or too snowy (very rare, these past winters too mild) in which case she sends me a text message not too dissimilar from the ones above with a "can you come pick me up" without a question mark followed by a separate message with multiple question marks, followed by a few calls, all of which go ignored by me as I know she'll manage to walk home, eventually coming through the door red faced (too cold or too hot both have that effect) or soaked (both rain and snow will do that), having neglected to take the necessary outerwear to support the weather conditions when she left this morning.
As we approach dinner, the questions begin concerning what we're having to eat. Unless it is exactly what she wants at that moment, she makes it known that she is displeased with the decision. More than one night has transpired where she microwaves a dinner we've left out for her after she stormed off, insulted that her mother - I rarely cook, though she does like my chili - dared to make her a healthy and complete dinner, usually from scratch.
It is around this time we call her a Richard - we use that exact word - to remind her that she's acting like its derivative nickname. The use of humor is known at times to diffuse the situation and get a smile or a laugh out of her.
But oh, how I wish I could be so bold as she is for even a fraction of the day. As a people pleaser, defaulting to a yes while muttering under my breath at the indignity of being asked to do something again when I really don't want to, I've grown fond of the magic of a simple no. When I look back, this fondness didn't arrive until our oldest started to verbalize her distaste for the requests being made. From the mouths of babes.
As a stickler for rules and protocols and etiquette, this is a terribly difficult habit to break, this constant people pleasing that I have for decades displayed with gusto. As a boy, I tended to combine my yesses with an appropriate and honest smile, taking joy not only in the request - that I was thought of as capable blew my mind - but in the action I could fulfill my duty as a son, a classmate, a brother to serve another person.
While the yesses remain, my smiles have turned to eye-rolling and sighing to myself, made easier when most requests these days come across via email, text or Slack, and the responses are not inferred as sarcasm, snark or a feeling that I'm being put out. My youth and early adulthood filled with agreement and offers to help were not things I regretted in the moment. Sure, they made me a bit of teacher's pet, a goody two shoes, a mama's boy; a nerd, a knave, a ne'er do anything-but-well; unpopular, uncool, unsure. But they also created a foundation of rightful respect, of mandated morality, of reliable reputation; of the easy comfort other's felt knowing I could be counted on to do what's right with little trouble.
Yet the idea of regret now creeps in like a summer thunderstorm after a mid-July heat wave: it threatens and announces itself through daily 30-50% chances of thunderstorms only to give way to another day's heat and humidity reigning supreme like the King of the Mountain, disappearing before it ever arrives, until it finally crashes through the night sky, a cavalcade of bolted lightning, a cannonade of clapped thunder, a fusillade of felled rain. Regret not because all of these perceptions about me were a reality; not because they were things that all humans should try to do to be of service and in service to others; not because they were honorable and admirable and heartfelt. But because I may have exhausted my lifetime's supply of grace before I really needed it.
In some ways this makes my daughter's blunt behavior not something I should discourage but rather something that I should cherish for she may be like Benjamin Button:1 as she ages perhaps she becomes more like I was as a child; more conciliatory, more open, more helpful, more appreciative. May this be the age when she gets her direct selfishness out of her system before it really starts to matter.
But this is an awful thing to think for it's not the directness that is the problem. It's where and how it's directed. She should always be direct. This is something I never want her to lose and if anything it's something I wish to gain. Reading the book Radical Candor2 was an excruciatingly painful process for me, one that left me conflicted. I hate hurting people's feelings and while some of you may say 'fuck their feelings' it's who I am, it’s how I was built. But I've come to the conclusion that a begrudging yes is worse than an honest no.
I get it from my father. He's someone who has built a solid, stable and substantial life by always doing what others ask of him. While the primary source of requests is my mom, I don't recall growing up with a dad who said no often, other than as a result of some incessant nagging from me and my brother for whatever the latest action figure was, for an ice cream after a soccer game, or an extra thirty minutes of video games. From a young age, I learned to acquiesce, to say yes, to be responsible and do whatever is asked of me. And for that I had a good role model at least when it came to the outcome: getting what needed to get done, done. But as I've written about more times that you could count, it's not always about the outcome. While my father did what was needed, and what would typically be seen initially as being done without complaint, the imposition he was put in became clear in the language he used under his breath in the presence of the asker or at full throat when out of the asker’s earshot. I was typically around to hear both the feigned grace and real ingratitude.
I do the same thing today. My problem isn't that I complete the necessary tasks with annoyance. I do. It's that I don't do so willingly or that I don't say no earnestly. It's that dreaded messy middle that we all run into, like the middling maybe we give to our kids when they ask if we can go to the pool today, or go shopping or go for ice cream. Yet I wish that I could instead play the part of Wesley with a nod of love to The Princess Bride (a book that my wife has rightly pointed out is only liked by boys and men) saying as you wish whenever I'm asked to do something, and truly mean it, than to continue to choose between a path of apathetic annoyance - no, that's not right - pathetic perturbation, or one of resigned reluctance. Pathetic perturbation is a husband saying yes to his wife while sighing and rolling his eyes when asked to do something he doesn't want to do at that point in time and yelling like a madman while driving to the UPS store to drop off Amazon returns; resigned reluctance is a parent giving their child more screen time to shut them up, to keep them docile at dinner, instead of saying no and instead engaging with them. I am that husband; I am not that father.
Yes, I'll admit that in the end, the requested outcome is the same. The laundry finds the drawers and closets, the dishes finds their place on the kitchen shelves, the cat food finds its bowl, the garbage sits patiently at the curb for the waste managers, the Rent the Runway clothes start on their way to their next temporary home, the misguided Amazon purchases flow back to the warehouse. From the requestor’s perspective, how it gets done or how the requestee acts whether with eye rolls, or sighs, shouldn't matter. But it does.
There's a phrase I've come across - how you do anything is how you do everything - and there is truth to that and it's one I write about often: it's all about the process or the journey, not the outcome or the destination; it's the demeanor, the shifting in thinking from having to do something to getting to do something and better yet, doing it for someone else.
I started this essay with what my daughter has taught me about being more direct. I continued with what my father has taught me about capitulating while complaining. And in the Venn diagram of being more like my daughter and less like my father is the bluntness of a no. I am referring to ways of saying yes but not doing so willingly and not doing so nicely and not doing so fully. My thesis is that my issue isn't that I say yes in a reluctant way but that I don't say no often enough so that I can say yes with sincerity.
No's two letters are like my daughter when she was younger: though she be but small, she is fierce. No is powerful. No is provocative. No removes ambiguity. No is clear. No is easy to pronounce, yet so often still too hard for me to say.
Much ink has been spilled and many vocal chords have vibrated on the concept of gentle parenting by people far more informed than I am but at its base, gentle parenting is the capitulation to the child's every demand. At the same time at the other end of the spectrum is the concept of the tiger mom who demands much from her children. With gentle parenting, the child is the locus of control and with tiger momming, the parent is the locus of control. But in neither case is the best interests of the child and parent the loci of control.
My dad used to call me “Tiger”. He also has a tendency to text as if he is writing a letter. Complete with salutation and signature, my dad as his former English teacher self sends with correct punctuation and capitalization his messages to me. He's always had great handwriting something I've never been able to attain. But correctly written text messages from my dad put me in a state of happiness too silly and profound to describe. I'm a formal texter like he is, with proper spelling and punctuation but without the salutation and signature, though I recently did sign off to a Slack message to some coworkers, complete with a comma, a return and the letter J in a fit of frustration, the formal a way to politely (read: passive aggressively) hide my displeasure.
In a way, my people pleasing is a form of gentle adulting, saying yes, trying not to inconvenience others, being a good, albeit dull, boy placing control in the receiver. By getting frustrated at myself for saying yes, for agreeing to too much, for taking on too much, for not sticking up for myself, in another way I'm tiger momming myself, berating my inner adult for not taking accountability for my own actions. By gentle adulting, I let the other person off the hook; by tiger momming myself, I end up feeling more defeated. Neither one of us wins, just like the child who grows up to expect everything to be easy or the child who grows up to expect everything to be a battle.
I'm a proponent of avoiding the word maybe, as it's a messy middle of gray that removes all the risks associated with commitment. A maybe to a child delays the inevitable no whether by omission - sorry, I forgot you asked, maybe next time - or the resigned yes making the child feel both happy they got their way but upset by the parent's negative attitude. But what if we think of this not as a middle like on a battlefield and instead as a boarder between a field and a forest, between the shore beach and the sea? This is where most life happens.
Instead of saying yes, maybe I can be instead be like Herman Melville's titular character in Bartleby, The Scrivener who uttered some variation of "I prefer not to" droving his manager insane. It could be a hedge in a figurative sense like the hedge sits in the literal sense between the border of two yards, and await for further information from the requestor. Instead of no outright, I can say "I would rather not", and await the response to see how important the task truly is to them. Things may escalate, but that slight pause or pushback, albeit non-confrontationally - and yes, passive aggressively - giving the space needed for someone to rethink their request.
By now you may have noticed I’ve delayed a close to his piece, dillying this way and dallying that. To conclude an essay, one needs to round out the takeaways, to leave the reader pondering a question or to leave them wanting more. But I’m going to take my own advice for once, and to the reader asking for this essay’s full ending, I will provide just a word: No.
Editor’s Note: For those in the literati paying attention, yes, the title for this essay is a reference to Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler, an incredible book if there ever was one.
And yes, I’ve used this reference before, but it works. Again.
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