I say yes a lot.  And I mean a lot.  Actually, I say yes most of the time.  I say yes to most things.  I can’t think of the last thing I said no to.

I can hear you thinking “OMG! She is a push over”.  I can guarantee you I am not that.  I am as far from that as I have ever been in my life.

In the Spring I started asking myself why I was saying no.  The answer was usually “Because I said so” and yes, I said that to myself.  I was saying no because I was the grown up, because I knew better, because I wanted to, because I thought I should.  All sorts of reasons.  Needless to say, I couldn’t support the position with anything other than “because I said so”.

So I started saying yes, unless I had an actual, honest to God, valid reason for saying no.  Sometimes yesterday’s yes, became today’s no (or more likely a different yes) but that was usually because “we tried the snack an hour before dinner and then you weren’t able to eat your dinner so today so a) a snack before dinner is not a great idea or b) a smaller snack”.

I went from saying no because I was the grown up to finding a solution that worked for both of us.  Most of the time, if I was stuck in the middle ground, I would ask myself how I would respond to my brother if he asked me.

If the answer to “What would I say to Fred*?” was “Yes” then the answer to the kids (for the most part) was yes.

It is interesting reading back over that.  Reading it now I realise that I am wrong.  I rarely say yes or no any more.  As in, I rarely say those words.  We talk.  Yes and No are single words.  They usually have a full stop or an exclamation point after them.  They are the end.  They are not open for conversation, they do not invite discussion.  They are the embodiment of disengagement.

We went from

“GIVE ME X” with me reacting with a one word answer
– to –
“GIVE ME X” with me responding with more than one word
– to –
“Can I have X?” with me responding with a question as to why they wanted it
– to –
“Can we talk about me having X?”

That is how we got to him turning to me in Tesco to ask me to have a conversation about a him having a mobile.

I regularly tell him that I don’t understand his question if I think it is something that is open to interpretation.  I don’t speak tween boy.  He doesn’t speak grown woman.  We grew up in different times, we were exposed to different things, but I can flip a bottle, sing along to most of the songs and why yes, I dab like a pro!