Quitting as Self Care

Learning to say yes to myself

I quit my part-time nanny job yesterday, which means I am now officially a full-time freelancer.

I wasn’t allowed to say no…

as a child. Like many kids who grew up before 1985, my mom wasn’t the kind of parent who gave me options. But beyond that, she taught me that expressing my opinions and needs elicited guilt trips, shaming, and sometimes violence. I learned from a very young age that, in order to protect my safety, I needed to fawn. Not simply to acquiesce, but to lay belly-up. When I was young, an only child living with my mom, I monitored her moods vigilantly. I thought I controlled them, because she often blamed her outbursts on me. I learned to read her body language, detect subtle shifts in her tone of voice, and deconstruct her facial expressions. Her ominous baritone terrified me, as did her two lips pressed together in a flat line. Before she’d come after me her movements transformed from fluid to jerky. As she descended into anger, my voice rose higher in pitch. My strate…