by Rachel Toalson | Uncategorized
Words have power. I know this as a writer. I know it, too, as a vulnerable, thinking, feeling person.
Words have stilled my pen—words that confuse, condemn, scratch fear down the length of my back. How is it that I can be, one day, so sure and the next so shaken by words?
The words followed me home. You write things that seem like you’re relying on your own power. You exalt yourself. You don’t have enough of the name of Jesus in your writing.
For a week I can’t write at all, the voices of my evangelical past rising from the oceans in which I cast them long ago when I was given a vision so sharp, so clear, I realized I didn’t need the approval—or understanding—of people anymore. I had a purpose, a plan, a talent that would be poured out on a world full of people in need of remembering who they are: significant, worthy, beloved.
All week I thought instead. I thought of all the people over the years who have tried to tell me who I need to be—some of them because I’m a woman, and in the evangelical church tradition in which I grew up that means I do not have authority to exercise my voice if it means I am placed in leadership over a man; some of them because I came from the wrong side of the tracks, so to speak; some of them merely because some enjoy presuming to know more about another’s life than the life-liver does.
I thought and thought and thought—about the man who said I’d never be a poet because he hated any poem that mentioned religion (or so I’d presumed my sophomore year of college; my ego could not construct another explanation at the time); the best friend who betrayed me and later told me it was because she didn’t want people to think I was perfect, oh, and also I was marrying the wrong person (I’ve been married to the “wrong” person for fifteen years and counting); the college advisor who told me I should choose a major besides “English with an emphasis on creative writing and Shakespeare studies” because what were the odds I’d find a viable job with a specialty like that and how many writers actually made a living off their writing—but hey, journalists did!; the pastor who told my husband he could not serve as a worship pastor at his church if I were a singer on the team because his church was the big leagues and I didn’t make the cut.
People have been trying to tell me what I’m supposed to do with my life for most of my life. Be a journalist—you have the writing chops. Serve the children’s ministry—you certainly have enough children. Speak more of Jesus’s name in your writings—it’s your purpose and mandate, right here in this Bible you claim to follow.
What people who presume to know what I am supposed to do with my life and my work and my family and my self always seem to forget about me is that I have never operated out of a deficiency of vision or purpose. I have known, for a very long time, what I am supposed to do and how I am supposed to do it. I don’t always get it right, of course, because I am not perfect, but I do always try to err on the side of love, least harm, most tikkun olam—the restoration of what has been broken.
We don’t all have the same vision, the same purpose; we are very different people, all of us needed in our different ways. We share some edges of purpose—to love, to shine light and hope into darkness and despair, to leave the world better and more just than it was before—but the specifics of our purpose are as different as we are. It would be a boring world, I think, if that were not true. As I use my pointed poetry to illuminate injustice, so another uses an allegorical story to address discrimination. As one uses dance to remind an audience there is beauty in the world, so another uses documentary photography. As one uses melody to sing a song of love, so another uses art to flood the senses with truth, which leads to understanding, which leads to worth and significance. Who can say that one is better than the other?
Some will, in fact, say one is better than the other.
I lost a week of writing because I am only human, because though I try to convince myself that I don’t care what other people think, that I only care about my mission and purpose, which I believe was given to me by God but which others might dismiss as anything but, I always find, at times like this, that I do care. But I also know that what comes between me and my vision and purpose—to love others as wholly as I can, to remind them who they are, to restore what has been broken in the hearts and lives of real, breathing people—deserves no place of power in my field of vision.
So I cast it away.
Tonight, for the first time in seven days—longer than I think I have ever gone without writing—I pick up my pen, the scratching sounds filling my silent bedroom like a sudden rush of water.
Beside me, I see the ghost of a smile graze the corners of my husband’s lips.
(Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash)
by Rachel Toalson | Crash Test Parents
I had just picked up my sons from school, and we were trying to get everybody loaded in the car. I was in the middle of strapping the baby in his seat, when my second son, who stood behind me, made an innocent observation: “Mama, there’s a spider on you.”
For you to fully understand the significance and weight of this innocent observation, I must tell you that I am the daughter of a woman who used to beat spiders to death with a broom when she found them crawling anywhere—all while shrieking hysterically. I am a woman whose son once dropped a spider on my lap because he picked it up and thought it was cool, and I ran away screaming in the middle of a worship set at church. I am also a woman who has had a spider drop into my lap while I’m driving, and I nearly drove off a cliff.
So when my son said this, I immediately felt the fear make my legs grow warm and soft. Heat rushed over my chest.
“Get it off,” I said rather calmly. I was quite proud of my calm.
My son merely stood there looking at my back, so I thought maybe he was kidding. Boys are pranksters, after all. I shook my head, tried to still my fluttering heart, and said, “You shouldn’t joke like that.”
My third son, who was already in the back seat of our van, leaned over at that moment to look. “Oh, my goodness,” he said. “It’s white. It’s almost in your hair.”
Something about the way he said it told me he wasn’t kidding. This was not a joke.
It was not my finest moment. Imagine, if you will, a woman flailing in the middle of a sidewalk near an elementary school, trying desperately to swat the spider off her back—and then add about twenty percent more hilarity and ridiculousness. That was me. I finally slammed my back up against my van, bruised my shoulder blades, and finished off the spider—or so I hoped. My sons couldn’t tell me one way or another, and I felt it crawling up the back of my neck all the way home.
Husband checked to see if it was gone when I walked in the house. He didn’t see anything, and I’m hoping that’s enough.
Some people, when they see me out and about with all my sons, will occasionally say something to the effect of “You’re a lucky mom to have all these boys protecting you.” This is usually when I’m walking into Target with Batman, Spider-Man, and Yoda beside me because they didn’t want to take off their costumes and I didn’t have the energy for a fight. But you get used to hearing things like that when you’re the mom of boys.
The problem, however, is that my sons are just as afraid of creepy crawly things as I am. They see a bug they can’t identify, and they high-tail it out of there. A scorpion moves toward them on the floor, and, rather than smash it with the shoe that’s on their foot, they skedaddle. A bee once chased one of them, and he nearly ran through a wall trying to get away.
When you become the mom of a son, you imagine your sons standing by your side, swatting away things like spiders and scorpions and bees without even batting an eye. These are the boys who forget to drain the tub and leave the toilet seat up and don’t want to hang up their clothes. This protection is supposed to make all that worth it. I’m not supposed to even think about insects or arachnids or whatever might come crawling my way.
When we got home, there was another spider on the floor, large and black and heading straight for the ten-year-old’s stinky feet (though I can’t fathom why). He refused to kill it, saying it needed to be relocated—and yet, when we all wondered aloud who might do the relocating, he pointed right at me.
We argued about it until we looked again and the spider was gone.
The worst kind of spider, in my opinion, is the one you know is there but can’t see.
This is an excerpt from Hills I’ll Probably Lie Down On, the fourth book of humor essays in the Crash Test Parents series.
(Photo by Nicolas Picard on Unsplash)
by Rachel Toalson | Uncategorized
The photos were alarming.
My mother, a librarian, had signed up for a deep tissue massage and ended up with two arms full of bruises. During the session, she’d voiced her discomfort. Was it supposed to be this painful? The masseuse told her that deep tissue massages are different than regular massages; they got down to the deeper knots and ironed them out.
And perhaps that’s true; I don’t know much about massage beyond the fact that I once dated a guy who was a masseuse (I was probably the most relaxed I’d ever been during the few months we dated).
My mother’s massage had gone wrong—one had only to look at her blue and purple arms to see that.
For the last several years I have been working on a memoir about the first summer I visited my father and new stepmother and half-siblings after my parents’ divorce. I have written and rewritten this story, over and over again, never completely satisfied and never, honestly, sure I want to go on. It is not an easy story. Those memories are not exactly comfortable to examine or even sit with for an extended period of time.
But writing is often like that deep tissue massage—the good kind. Of course we can go too far—press too deeply before we’re ready—but if we are careful, writing, whether it’s fiction, nonfiction, or poetry, can be like a gentle yet deep massage. Writing helps me come to terms with my past and the way it has shaped my present (and sometimes this piece alone is undeniably enlightening), and clarifies, too, what I will carry into my future. It may seem trite to some, but writing is, for me, a prayer—a prayer for healing, a prayer for tikkun olam (repairing what has been broken), a prayer of hope and love for the ones who read my work.
Because of this, I don’t ever deny myself access to difficult memories. I write essays about what terrifies me, humiliates me, pains me. Sometimes I have to wait months or even years to set that story down on paper, and sometimes the words will go no farther than my current writing journal, but the act of writing alone—my prayer—is the deep tissue massage I need to come to terms with, accept, and even flourish in spite of whatever has happened.
It’s been proven, time and time again, that writing is a therapeutic process. It mends painful memories, reduces stress, even helps pull the struggling out of depression (science proves this, but I have seen circumstantial evidence of it in my own life). It rids the body of toxins—as long as you don’t press too hard or get stuck in the wrong places.
In my writing, my prayers, my deep tissue massage, I can rewrite my past into something hopeful; something that proves I was never a victim, I was always loved, held, and worthy; something that can tell my readers the same.
I don’t know what I’ll do with that memoir I’ve been writing and rewriting. It will likely end up as a fiction story, since I’m not entirely sure I want it out in the world as nonfiction. But regardless of what happens from here, the simple act of writing it has already done its deep work.
It has written over the painful past in giant permanent-marker letters: redeemed.
(Photo by Álvaro Serrano on Unsplash)
by Rachel Toalson | Poetry
for so long
they’ve told you who to be:
don’t take it too personally
don’t cry too much
don’t dwell on it
don’t worry be happy
keep it all inside under cover
don’t talk about it
stop crying
be quiet
go outside and play
put down that book
put down that pen
get out of your head
listen to me
maybe lose some weight
today you shrug off those expectations
like a fleece coat you’ve been wearing
for too many summers
this is how
you shed the weight of expectation
This is an excerpt from the book of poetry, this is how you live, available in both ebook and paperback form.
(Photo by Brian Ceccato on Unsplash)
by Rachel Toalson | Crash Test Parents
Husband and I have been trying, since the beginning of the year, to not only make our house and habits more environmentally friendly but also embrace the concept of minimalism.
Owning fewer things is a much simpler, more environmentally friendly way to live, because the fewer things we own, the fewer precious resources it takes to make them. We want our sons to know and understand that every possession they bring into their lives has an impact on others and the state of the earth.
This particular part of environmentalism—the minimalism part—is an ideal that has had our hearts for quite some time; I am the kind of person who feels anxious when surrounded by too much stuff. And kids come with so much stuff.
But now that my sons are out of their infant and toddler stage, which is one of the most crowded (as far as things, time, and, well, everything else), Husband and I thought this would be a good season to focus on minimizing even more.
My original plan was to finish minimizing the house within the year, but since we’re still only on the first room, I think that goal might be a little idealistic.
The problem is kids.
They want to be a part of this process—and they should be; this is their home, too. But they are also really terrible at getting rid of things.
I recently spent an entire day going through every bookshelf in our house—and there are many; we have a designated home library, a library in husband’s and my office area and at least two bookshelves in each kid’s room. It’s no wonder this process took all day. I was proud of my efforts when, at the end of the day, I’d cleared off the equivalent of four entire shelves and stacked books with broken bindings and missing pages in one pile and books we’d outgrown or never really enjoyed reading in another.
I was all ready to congratulate myself for minimizing one of the most difficult things for me to minimize—books—when my 12-year-old walked in the room.
“Oh, wow!” he said. “I love this book!” He picked up a book from the discard pile that was flapping from the first few pages because it long ago lost its cover. He started to leave.
“Uh . . . What are you doing?” I said, perhaps a little too aggressively.
“Taking this to my shelf,” he said.
“No, you’re not,” I said. I proceeded to explain to him what the piles were and why they were necessary—which was a huge mistake. He dropped down to his knees and started rifling through the discard pile and the donation pile, rendering them no longer piles at all, as kids do so well. I went to fetch Husband for help.
Husband was much more reasonable than I was; he let our son choose three books from whatever pile he wanted, so long as there was room on his personal bookshelves and the books didn’t end up on the floor.
It’s been story after story of this same kind of thing. And I understand how difficult it is for kids to get rid of anything. They don’t have the experience we have to say that ridding ourselves of one thing makes way for something better—or simply opens up space to breathe. But they will. They’ll notice the difference, and while they may not learn from the first thousand experiences of this kind, eventually they will learn. And they’ll remember it when they grow up and have homes and families of their own.
So I guess I’ll keep chipping away at the reduction, letting them exercise their negotiation skills, and enjoying the wide open space of owning fewer things—however fleeting it is.
(Photo by Samantha Gades on Unsplash)
