And why there is no polite way to refuse it.
Do you ever get that sticky feeling when somebody is being nice to your kids, or thinks they are being nice to your kids, and you look at all that generosity and you do not want to say no, but you already know it is going to ruin your next two days?
I spent four hours yesterday at a gathering of Russian expats and came home out of sorts.
We get together about once a week and it is a good opportunity for the kids to spend some time on the beach. But this time was different…
There was a woman there I had not met before. She works in childcare, she was full of energy, and she wanted to play with my children. Then she wanted me to play as well. “Come on, let’s play!”
I did not want to play. I had already been there four hours. And beyond not wanting to, I was not going to, because I am the one who lives with whatever precedent gets set. She can be delighted with my children for twenty minutes and then go home. I do not go home from them.
Then another woman told me the children were fine in an area I could not properly see. “They’re fine. They’re just kids. What’s going to happen?”
And I could not work out how to say at the time that none of this was fine… or free.
You get to feel generous with somebody else’s children. You are not the one who has to say no when it is time to leave. You are not responsible if something breaks or somebody gets hurt. You are not there for the part that comes afterward. You can wind someone else’s children up, take them off their routine, and tire them past the point where the day is recoverable, and then you go and have your evening. What I or any caregiver gets is children who either fall asleep in the car and are then awake until 1am, or who spend the rest of the day angry with me and life itself.
And there is no way to object. Saying no to this looks like refusing joy for your own children. There is no version of “please stop being wonderful with my kids” that does not make you sound like a woman who resents them having a good time. So you say nothing, and you smile, and you drive home, bracing for the sensory meltdown that is most likely to happen.
Everyone could see the children. Being generous with somebody else’s children is easy, it feels lovely, and it costs nothing. So the children were attended to, enthusiastically, all afternoon.
And don’t take me wrong, they wanted me there as well. They liked my company and they liked my children, and this is not a story about being ignored.
What none of them registered is that they can do whatever they feel like and I cannot. They could wander off to the shore because the view was better. They could leave the kiddie pool the second it stopped being interesting. I cannot walk away because I am not responsible only for myself.
One of the women spent a good while trying to get me to come on a walk by the water. “There’s a bit of sand”, she said. There is a bit of sand. The rest of it is rock, wet and slippery, with the waves coming in over it. She is very welcome to enjoy that. What she was actually proposing was that I take three children, two with significant needs (and a complete lack of sense of danger) onto a hazardous shoreline because she was bored and wanted the company.
The risk in that would not have been hers.
All of this put me in a position where I had to advocate for myself, and say no instead of the yes that would be more comfortable for everyone else. Every choice I make nowadays takes the cost of those next two days into account.
And I am not in a position to dream especially big right now. I do not get to go only where I like or do only what I enjoy, and most of what I do is still for my children or with them. That is the actual arrangement and I am not pretending otherwise.
What has changed is that I have stopped treating myself as staff. I was also at that gathering. I started to make decisions about where my energy goes, and I have started making it deliberately. I do not hand it over to guilt about not playing. I do not hand it over to being agreeable about a walk I have no business agreeing to.
That is where Radical Self-Prioritization came from. It did not come out of having a free life. It came out of working out that the person who pays for the afternoon is entitled to a say in how it goes.
Natalya.
P.S. I keep writing about Radical Self-Prioritization and never giving you anything actionable to do with it.
I want to run it as a group. Six weeks, small, everybody working on the same thing each week, a group call where everyone has a place, a chat where everyone’s opinion matters.
It isn’t built yet and I don’t know if anyone would want it. If you would, please reply. If you read that and thought no, then tell me that instead. The no’s are as useful to me right now as the yeses.
If you’d like my letters in your inbox, and to be one of the first to read them, you can join here.
Related from the blogHow I missed my own recovery · Radical Self-Prioritization