She said no to the job.
Not because it was a bad job. It was a good job, a reasonable job, the kind of job that a practical woman with a mortgage and a student loan and a mother who spent twenty-five years saying yes to every contract offered because the alternative was nothing would have taken without deliberation, would have taken with relief, would have signed on a Thursday and felt grateful on Friday and started the rationalizing by Monday.
She said: it’s not what I actually want.
I held the phone and I felt two things at once. The first was the old fear, my fear, the fear I carry in my body from twenty-five years of knowing that the contract could end, that the no could close a door, that there was always someone younger and more affordable and more willing in the line behind you. I felt the fear on her behalf with the full force of a woman who learned that fear early and has been unlearning it slowly and expensively for years.
And the second thing was something closer to awe.
She is twenty-four years old and she knows what she actually wants and she said so. She said it plainly, without the elaborate hedging I would have used, without the sorry-but and the I-hope-you-understand and the pre-emptive apology for the inconvenience of having needs that do not align with what is being offered. She said: it’s not what I actually want. And she meant it. And she is figuring out what is.
I said: I think you are right to wait for the right thing.
I meant it completely. I also heard myself say it in the voice of someone who wishes she had been told the same thing at twenty-four by someone who believed it, by someone who was not so hollowed out by their own precarity that they could not afford to say: wait for the thing that is actually yours. I am saying it to her. I am saying it to her the way I would say it to my younger self if I could, with all the conviction I have accumulated from having said yes too many times to the wrong things in the hope that the yes would eventually become the right thing.
She is braver than I was.
I think I had something to do with that. I think the watching me finally learn to say no taught her something I could not have taught her in words. I think the years of me figuring out my own worth showed her something about hers. I hope so. I am choosing to believe so. It is the best inheritance I have to offer.
