187. Queen Of No

“Will you please help us pass out fliers next Saturday?”
“We need a volunteer for Room Mom, can you do it?”
“Wow, that last party you hosted was fabulous—can you host a gathering for our local political candidate?”

No. No. Nope.

It has gotten to the point where people have stopped asking me (and thank God for that).

Why do so many moms suffer from that pesky and debilitating disease, Must-Please-Everyone-Itis? The most common symptoms are as follows:

• The vile head nod. You go around nodding all the time, people think you are saying yes.
• The brief pause. For the uninitiated, a brief pause shows doubt. Doubt means you’ll do it even though you don’t want to.
• The quick hello (just to be friendly) at the drycleaners. This will be interpreted as, “she has time to pick up the dry cleaning, therefore she has time to be a Cub Scout Leader.”
• The “let me just check my call-waiting”. That is (clearly) the kiss of death. It means that every phone call is important, every person trying to get your attention is important (hint: they’re not).

To combat the above, I force myself to be rude on a daily basis. Watch and learn:

(Running into acquaintance at Starbucks)
Acquaintance: MOV! Great to see you! Hey, I was thinking you could chair that art committee project………
Me: No.
A: But….. but….. you don’t even know what the project is?
Me: No.
A: “No,” as in, you don’t know what it is, or “no,” as in you don’t want to do it?
Me: Both. Bye!

See? So what, she has a bad opinion of me? who cares? I don’t even know her name. (Bonus: all my Tuesday afternoons that would have been gobbled up by the art committee project remain blissfully free.)

The Husband is even in on the act now. We don’t always answer the door. Could be a salesperson trying to sell us Jesus. Or, the phone rings, and sometimes we don’t answer it. This drives my sons, Tall and Short, positively batty.

“Mom! That’s the phone! You’d better get it—it could be Important!”

Guess what? No one has ever called to tell me I won a million dollars. Voicemail was invented for a reason, and that reason is so I can finish watching my precious TiVo’d episode of TopChef. On a Tuesday afternoon, natch.

MOV