Champagne and Socks

When you’re home all day every day, it’s inevitable that every so often you will get someone door knocking to sell you something you don’t want. Yesterday, a very nice young woman knocked on my door and tried to sell me roller shutters. “Not just roller shutters,” she said when I quite clearly articulated I was not interested, “but to be a display home.” Long time readers/followers of me on social media might remember last year some time when we got a similar offer, by the same parent company, for solar panels right before the election and the end of subsidies/and increases in our state electricity for a bunch of other reasons. My husband researched this company after our interactions and found the deal not quite as good, shall we say?, as they claimed. In fact it was a total hustle.

Now, normally, I feel a need to be polite and I let solicitors go through their full spiel before I say I’m not interested. And you won’t be surprised if I tell you that this allows a lot of them to push me into things I actually didn’t want. My husband likes to remember the time I changed internet providers when they weren’t even offering the promised ADSL2 down my street as claimed in the upsell. Or the time on our honeymoon when I okayed a not-actual-taxi-driver to give us a lift from the airport even though I felt bad and wrong about it and there were signs saying not to. It’s not that I’m stupid or that I fall for the scam, it’s that I feel rude saying no. I feel obliged to engage when sales people cat call to me in shopping centres or in malls. I participate in annoying phone surveys even when I don’t have time and am in the middle of my dinner.

I’ve noticed, though, that my husband, who is actually very polite, has no such reservations about such things. He investigated the solar panel business quite thoroughly after deciding on the spot that he wouldn’t be pushed into a deal that was only available whilst the salesperson was at our house. He headed off at the pass the non-taxi-driver at the airport business. And the other day, when a survey person asked to speak to the oldest male in our house for a survey, I handed the phone to him and he hung up, without even speaking to the person! He said, “I don’t have time for this,” as he shoved more laundry into the machine.

Lately, I’ve noticed I have a lot less time and a lot less patience. I’m annoyed when people step in my way, ignore me and bash into my pram as I walk keeping to the lefthand side of the footpath. I’m tired and I don’t have time to fill in surveys or competitions or whatever it is someone is selling that I don’t want. And I’m sick of every charity in the state calling me exactly when my baby is finally asleep for her midmorning nap asking me for money. I found myself telling the door knocker yesterday that we weren’t interested in dealing with her company. Shocked, she pushed to ask why – when I’m fully reformed, I will just shut the door afterf saying I’m not interested – I told her that her company rips people off.

It’s not that I’m not a giving person. I donate money all the time to charities that I seek out to support. And when I want to change phone plans, as an educated female adult, I realise I want to and do my research before making my own decisions about what plans I want from what phone company. But lately I’ve realised that I want to be left alone, not seen as a constant stupid buyer to be sold crap I don’t want. And I want to choose who I let into my personal space.

I’ve had to start to unlearn something in order to be able to do this – that I’m not a bad person for not doing or going along with what someone else wants me to do.

I’ve been doing some reading on how to raise your children to protect themselves from harm – to learn how to establish their own boundaries and that what is private is private and not for anyone else to take or touch or use etc. This is also what I was taught as  a child about sexual predators/stranger danger. It didn’t, by the way, stop me from having my boundaries violated. And I think that’s because of this other thing that we teach girls, in all kinds of ways, that to be a polite and nice girl, you must go along with what other people want you to do.

Ignoring people in high school (or later in life on the bus or train or in a line at a nightclub) – bullies, annoying boys, girls being bitchy – didn’t make them go away. It made them angrier and meaner. And they made it about you being rude for ignoring them. Once, when I was standing with a group of girls at a school camp, a male teacher wanted us to move and do something he wanted us to do but noone in my group moved. So he came up behind me, grabbed me to lift me (and touched my breasts in the process) and shoved me to make me do what he wanted me to do. When a person in authority does that to a teenage girl, they are teaching you that you don’t even get the right to choose to defy them. He taught me that I don’t get to determine my personal boundaries. I don’t get to decide who could and could not touch me. He taught me that someone bigger and angrier than me can make me do what he wants me to do, even if I try and stand my ground. It’s pure biology, isn’t that what they say? Isn’t that why patriarchy?

In all kinds of ways, in all kinds of roles, I’ve been groomed to be polite – that’s what nice, good girls are. So when someone in a public space puts their hand out to shake mine in greeting, I can not just walk past them. Even when they are quite clearly selling me something I don’t want. Last year, I was pregnant and walking from the supermarket with a bunch of flowers and one such salesperson called out to me flirtily, “Oh are they for me?” I’m sure I said something witty back to diffuse the situation but it made me angry. Of course they weren’t for him and he was only trying to engage me to sell me something. At the time, I wished so hard that I could have walked past and not replied. I didn’t invite conversation with him, why should I feel obliged to be in one? Why should I feel *obliged* to diffuse it? Last week, some sales guy stretched his  hand out to shake my hand and called, “Hi Mummy!” – ew! I’m not your mummy!

A few years ago, a friend of mine made me feel uncomfortable and I pulled back from interacting with them. Instead of having a conversation with me about it, they spent about 2 years making digs. As though they could make me feel bad enough that they felt bad and I would acquiesce and put myself back into a situation that I was clearly giving signals about not being comfortable being in. When people do that, they are telling you that you don’t get to make decisions about your boundaries. They also like to pretend that they didn’t know that that was harassment … And many many many men I have known in my life, men most people think are good and nice men,  have pushed and bullied and wheedled and cajoled to move those boundaries in all kinds of ways. I have been in more situations where I feel uncomfortable and thus hate myself for being pushed into being in than I care to recall. And it’s because I feel bad telling someone something that they don’t want to hear. Being honest when it involves telling them no. That I don’t like them.  Because actually, good girls don’t say no. They don’t make waves. They don’t make trouble. They aren’t difficult. Or impolite. They liked everyone. They play by the rules, even if the rules get to bent for other people. They don’t make you feel bad about whatever it is that you are doing.

Screw that. I’m angry that I found it weird when I met my husband and he would ask me to define my boundaries. When he would ask me what it is that *I* wanted – for all kinds of things from what movie to see, to what restaurant I wanted to go to, whatever. I found it *difficult* to make decisions like that without knowing what “the right answer” was. With the right person, there is no “right answer”, there’s only, “your answer.”

I don’t want my daughter to think that being polite and a good girl means doing what other people want her to do. Or not telling them what they don’t want to hear. I want my daughter to choose any and all of her personal boundaries – physical, emotional, financial and intellectual. I want her to know that for “no to mean no” – to *really* mean no – it can’t just be about situations where a stranger jumps out at you in a dark alleyway at midnight, it has to mean no all the time. It has to be ok to say that you don’t want to move when someone (even in authority) tells you to, or that you don’t want to hear about a product you don’t want to buy or be friends with someone who makes you feel uncomfortable or bad or stupid. It has to be ok, polite even, to say no when you feel like saying it. In all situations.

So I’m working on this. Model the behaviour you want to teach, right? Right now, I’ve got it to when people shout out greetings at me in the shops ,I smile and say “Hi, but I’m not stopping.” I’m going to keep working on this so that I’m ok with walking past without even acknowledging them and not feeling bad about it. Baby steps.