‘How I learned to say no’

Janice Turner on what prompted her to stop saying ‘yes’ – and start saying ‘do it yourself ’...

FOR YEARS MY most hated task was sorting out socks. Not my own socks, which I’d just scoop into a drawer, but the extensive male sockage of a husband and two teenage boys. Football socks, Simpsons socks, Christmas socks, school socks, patterned, coloured, black…

Every Sunday evening, while multitasking a phone call to my elderly parents, I’d kneel in the spare room balling socks. An approximate match – same colour, different lengths – wasn’t good enough. Only a perfect pair would do. Oddments were sent to the sock singles club in the airing cupboard.

Until one Sunday, facing a particularly huge backlog, I suddenly thought: ‘Sod the socks!’ and tipped the whole lot into an old blanket chest. Next morning, I unveiled what is now known as The Box of Sox. ‘But Mum,’ said my elder son, horrified at the polyester-cotton chaos, ‘This isn’t a system!’ ‘No,’ I said. ‘But it’s no longer my problem.’

This was the moment when I learned to say no. Not to shopping, cooking, laundry and the other ever-spinning hamster-wheel tasks of running a household. But to a martyred perfectionism, a micro-managing responsibility for making everything OK for everyone all the time.

Feminism has emboldened women to rise through the professions, to address the gender pay gap and cry #Metoo. But at home, we are still spellbound by messages hammered into us as little girls: be kind, patient, selfless, thoughtful, put yourself last, pre-empt others needs, oil the social wheels, avoid conflict. Otherwise people might not like us, we fear. They might think – the horror! – we are not very nice.

For many years, I bought all the Christmas presents, not just for my own relatives, but for my husband’s side too. I remembered all the nieces’ and nephews’ birthdays, wrote the thank-you cards, sent invites, arranged our weekends and play dates, bought gifts for teachers, signed the chits for school trips…

Since I was working full-time, my brain became an air traffic control tower, ever-vigilant for incoming problems. Instead of being chill about a child kicking a football indoors, I’d think: if he breaks that bloody window it will be ME finding and staying in for an emergency glazier and I have a big interview on Monday! It makes you a fun-sucking bore.

My husband – like most men – didn’t demand I took on these thankless responsibilities. I assumed them myself. Whatever feminism’s gains, men still lag behind women in how much domestic labour they perform. Mainly, I’d say, because men never feel guilty or judged for doing bugger all. A study I came across about assisting elderly parents revealed that daughters invariably help as much as they can, while sons do as little as they can get away with, often off-loading their own parents’ needs to their wives.

In part, I wanted to be the sitcom mum who made the special lasagne, bought everyone’s favourite yogurts and found the lost car keys with her maternal super-powers. Making people you love happy swells the soul. The trouble starts when your standards are so high you never say no, because someone else might do it wrong or think less of you as a woman.

But the unappreciated upside of getting older is that progesterone, the nurturing, people-pleasing hormone, starts to deplete. This is the seldom-discussed reason so many women end their marriages at perimenopause: wives who have always previously said, ‘Yes,’ suddenly start saying, ‘Do it yourself.’ Women who previously beat themselves up about what other people think, suddenly become chemically, physically incapable of giving a damn.

For the rest of their school days, my sons wore odd socks. And I didn’t even care.