No!

They Might Be Giants wrote a 90-second song about the word "no." This is about the three different no's I learned as a kid and which one turned out to be the only one that mattered.

The album cover, for No! from They Might Be Giants: four cartoon kids, one speech bubble

I’m using voice-to-text while driving to work with a headache from bad air quality drifting over to Tacoma from the Spokane fires. You won’t be able to tell but every other word is followed by coughing. I was never a smoker but I have cigars sometimes, and I know that burning-garbage taste the morning after.

That’s what I woke up with after falling asleep with a fan in my window while the poisonous air came to town overnight. I mention this only because it’s the condition I was in when I started thinking about today’s song, which feels appropriate for a song called No! That’s the exact word that came out of my ash-tasting mouth when I woke up today.

No! sits fourth on the album that shares its name. Track four of seventeen, right after Robot Parade, giving listeners three songs' worth of runway before the title track shows up and makes its whole argument in ninety seconds.

This might be the first album I’ve covered in this project where the album title is also a song on the album. Doing a quick internal fact check; there’s no song called Lincoln. The self-titled album doesn’t have a song called They Might Be Giants (although the Flood album does but that doesn’t count). No! is the first time the John Linnell and John Flansburgh just named the record after one of the songs sitting on it, and I think that’s worth pausing on, because if you’re going to do that exactly once in a three-decade catalog, “No” (the word every kid on Earth hears roughly four thousand times before they turn 5) is a pretty interesting choice to build a whole children’s album name around.

no.

Because think about being a kid. Unless you were the rare spoiled, entitled kind of kid whose parents never told them no (a whole other problem), you heard this word constantly. I was always being marketed to before I could even read: Saturday morning cartoons, the late-afternoon block, toys I didn’t know existed until forty-five seconds ago and now cannot live without. There was always a new thing I felt that I wanted or needed.

But the “no” I remember most isn’t the toy-store no. It’s the way my mom used the word “no.”

can i go?

I realized pretty early that my mom’s no was arbitrary. It was less an answer than a mood. If she was in a good mood, the no could flip to a yes with almost no additional effort on my part. If she wasn’t, the no was just going to be no, and asking why was a waste of breath. I was the kind of kid who asked “why not?” I’d done my chores, I’d cleaned my room, nothing else was going on, the friend’s house was down the street, I’d ridden my bike there a hundred times before. And the answer would still be no.

Just because.

And eventually I figured out that “just because” actually meant something closer to: I’m not in the mood for you to have something that makes you happy, because I’m not happy.

finger pointing, eyebrows low

I figured out fast that if I could get her mood up, the whole atmosphere of the house changed. Happy, laughing mom versus withdrawn, brooding mom. And I don’t think it’s an accident that managing that gap might be some of the earliest groundwork for me becoming a comedian. Get the mood right, and the rules bent. That’s a lot of pressure to put on a kid’s sense of humor, but I didn’t know that at the time. I just knew it worked.

When I became a parent, I told my kids no plenty of times. But I tried to make it a no with a reason attached instead of a no with a mood attached. We already bought something this week. I didn’t budget for this one. Here’s how we could save for it. I wanted “yes” and “no” to be a set of rules they could actually learn, not a barometer they had to read.

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do this - no!

It didn’t always work either. Once while in a Target, I had to let my autistic 6 year old down when I denied him buying a complete Minecraft encyclopedia. He let me know that if I did buy him that book, he was going to yell “fuck” so loud that everyone would hear it. Including: all the people, God, and Santa Clause.”

I would tell that story on stage to audiences and end it with me saying that I’d read plenty of parenting books by then and knew that I needed to respond in a way that was appropriate not only for his age and intelligence level. So I’d get down on one knee (so that I could be at his same level), place my hand on his shoulder and while speaking kindly, say to him, “Buddy, there is no Santa Clause.” Boom. Power dynamic restored.

The other parent in that dynamic ran closer to my mom’s model, the splurge-then-resent-it version, buying something to fix a mood and then bringing it up later as a debt. But that’s a different essay.

red means stop; do not go

Full credit to mom though for the one “no” she got right and wasn’t tied to her mood at all. She taught me, early and clearly, that there are people who are and are not allowed to touch me or see certain parts of me, parent or doctor only, and only with another parent present. And that even inside those allowed situations, I could still say no if I wasn’t comfortable. If someone didn’t listen, I needed to go get help. That no was not negotiable. It wasn’t mood-dependent. It didn’t flip if she was having a good day. It was MY No.

I applied that everywhere, automatically, the way you do with anything you’re taught early enough that it just becomes part of how you see the world. Everyone gets that no. Nobody gets to override it. Not just that but that everyone else has parts of them that nobody else gets to see or touch without that person’s permission. This simple lesson on that kind of particular “no” taught me about a person’s autonomy.

It’s probably a real reason I turned into the kind of adult who understands consent as a floor, not a suggestion. The reason I gravitated away from those who I could see did not have that same view. So even though my mom’s version of “no” was, most of the time, a weather report on her own mood, that one “no” was the real thing. Unconditional. And it’s the one that actually shaped me. LIke the song lyric says:

No is no. No is always no. If they say “no,” it means a thousand times no.

all no's lead to

I think about that sometimes, still, as a grown adult who has not lived with either of my parents in a very long time: how much of who you become gets decided by which no’s you got. Not whether you were told no. Everyone is, constantly, it’s the most common word in parenting, but which kind. The kind that’s a weather report on someone else’s mood, or the kind that’s just true, all the way down, no matter who’s asking or how good a day anyone’s having. I got both. I’m still sorting out which lessons came from which things.

My mom would probably be surprised to hear that the no she meant as protection is the one that stuck, and the no she meant as control is the one I had to work the hardest to unlearn.

(Mostly she’d be surprised to hear from me at all. It’s been decades.)

Ironically, she taught me a no that doesn’t bend and when that same no eventually got pointed back at her, she couldn’t honor it either. She handed me the one rule she was worst at following, and it turned out to be the one that mattered most. That tracks with most things kids take from their parents: you rarely get to pick which lessons land, or why, or which ones the person teaching you actually meant to be permanent.

QUESTION: What’s a “no” from your childhood that stuck with you? Or even a recent “no” that had a significant impact?

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