by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
He languished by the lamp, head drooping, book in his hand. I sat beside him. “You feeling okay?” I said. I already knew the answer, but I wanted to hear it from him.
He didn’t even speak; he only shook his head. I could feel the heat radiating from his skin; he had all the outward signs of the flu.
I took him in my arms, let him rest his head against me. The possibility of contagion doesn’t bother a mama whose son is battling sickness. So though I was the only one in my house who hadn’t gotten a flu shot this year, I rocked my son because he needed me.
I read stories. I rubbed oils on his chest. I let him sleep in my arms—because he is getting bigger and he will not always allow me to do this. I held him as long as I could, as long as he needed.
And though I am glad my son does not suffer from sickness often, or sickness that is terminal, I enjoyed the time I had with a four-year-old who didn’t feel like bouncing out of my arms before I was ready.
I soaked up the moment, which lasted only two days.
Today he is racing in and out of rooms, flinging flowers at me, trying to find where he put his shoes so he can go out back and sword fight with sticks.
The smell of him clinging to my shirt.
by Rachel Toalson | Poetry
you stare at the blank page
the words are
gone
vanished
nonexistent
you don’t even have
a desire to write
and you’ve never not had
a desire to write
you take every moment
you can to write
now you have a moment and
you can’t write
this is how
you know it will be bad
This is an excerpt from the book of poetry, this is how you live, available in both ebook and paperback form.
(Photo by Peter Lewicki on Unsplash)
by Rachel Toalson | Crash Test Parents
Some of my friends have jokingly told me in recent days, “We hardly ever see you anymore.”
And they’re right.
There’s a reason for this, and the reason is: kids.
I’m not one to use my kids as an excuse, but I will say that they make going anywhere difficult. If we want to meet up with some friends at a park when the first rays of light splash across the horizon (which is when my kids wake on any given Saturday), we will pay for it on the way home. If we want to go grab lunch or coffee with some college friends while our kids play on a playground, skipping right past their nap time, we’ll pay for it on the way home. If we want to have dinner out with old (metaphorically speaking) double-date couples and keep the boys out past their bed time, we’ll pay for it on the way home.
You might notice a recurring theme here.
Most days, it’s just easier to stay home.
People often wonder why parents disappear for a time, usually that time period when their kids are young and incompetent and helpless to do anything but dress themselves, put on their shoes, and race out the door—and even that’s stretching it in my house. If I want to leave to go anywhere it’s almost certain that someone doesn’t have underwear on, someone can’t find their shoes, or someone is going to trip over the threshold of our front door and skin his chin.
Every Wednesday afternoon, we travel about forty-five minutes down a highway to get to a church and lead worship for a handful of teenagers. It’s late by the time we’re finished, and the kids have been cooped up in a church nursery for five hours, watching movies and eating unhealthy snacks and having everything at their disposal that they could possibly need to entertain them, besides nature.
This is a big besides.
By the time we get in the car, it’s way past their bedtime, and they’re so delirious they don’t even know how to act. This is how that trip back home typically goes:
Boys in the rear seats: Screaming their heads off, because they’re playing together. This means it’s mostly happy screaming, but I still wish we had volume control.
Boys in the middle seats: Trying to talk to Mama and Daddy, even though Mama and Daddy are trying to talk to each other. Talking soon progresses to whining, which progresses to very loud crying. One of them, the baby, is asleep, a small mercy.
Mama and Daddy in the front seat: Trying to have a conversation about the church service and what’s next on the week’s schedule. We’re not usually successful.
Over the course of the two years we’ve been conducting this excruciating experiment, I’ve captured countless conversations, taken copious notes on what boys do when they’re done talking (fart and sing is about it), and calculated, on average, how long it takes before a parent feels certifiably crazy in a car with children (only about 12.8 minutes, as it happens).
Here’s a typical sampling, collected this week:
9-year-old: You’re a skunk.
6-year-old: Okay, did you smell that toot?
9-year-old: Yeah, that’s why I called you a skunk.
6-year-old: Oh, I thought you were just calling me that.
5-year-old: Well, you are, kinda. You have white skin.
6-year-old: A skunk doesn’t have white skin. It has black fur with a white stripe.
5-year-old: Well, you have a black fur right there.
[He points to the chin of my 6-year-old, which I can assure you does not have fur on it yet.]
They all dissolved into hysterical laughter, as only boys who are brothers can.
Next they started telling jokes, which was excruciating.
Knock knock.
Who’s there?
Interrupting chicken.
Interrupting chicken—
[Very loud chicken noise.]
Knock knock.
Who’s there?
Interrupting cow.
Interrupting cow—
[Even louder cow noise]
Knock knock.
Who’s there?
Interrupting dog.
Interrupting dog—
[Dog noise that could shatter the windows.]
I thought it couldn’t get any worse.
And then they started singing.
My boys are actually really good at singing. This isn’t surprising; Husband and I used to be in a folk rock band before so many of them came along. We have three CDs in the archives and released a single a couple of years ago, because now that we have so many children it takes us four years to record one song. We’ll be ancient by the time the next CD releases.
So the singing doesn’t become a problem until the boys start fighting about which song they want to sing (as if they’ll ever agree) and who actually gets to sing it (as if they can’t all sing it at the same time). We suggested they sing their own songs, quietly, but the nine-year-old can’t stand this sort of thing. He likes order, not chaos, and truth be told, I do too.
But, hallelujah, it was time to turn off the interior lights, which meant they’d stop fighting with each other about who was going to pick the song they sing and would start fighting, instead, with Husband and me about how they just want to finish this one thing before the lights go out.
“It’s past bedtime,” Husband and I said. A thousand times, a billion times. By the time our boys settled down about the lights out, we sounded like robots. And I almost wished we were.
“I only had a couple more pages!” The nine-year-old tried one more time to get us to see his way.
“You can finish it tomorrow,” I said.
Actually, he finished it when we got home. He spent half an hour on the toilet reading.
By the time we get home from this weekly trip, Husband and I are usually all done with family togetherness, but still we’ll have to wrestle our twins into bed, put the baby down, and remind the three older ones that it’s bedtime, it’s bedtime, it’s bedtime.
Now it’s an hour past my bedtime, and I’m a little grouchy.
All that work is simply not worth it. Drop by my house anytime you want. You might have to brush some spiky blocks off the couches or step over the minefield of LEGO pieces carpeting our floor, and you might want to use the bathroom before you come, but you’ll always be welcome.
Just don’t ask me to go anywhere with these delightful little human beings.
This is an excerpt from Hills I’ll Probably Lie Down On, the fourth book in the Crash Test Parents series.
(Photo by This is Now Photography.)
by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
After my traditionally published book released last September, once the dust settled, I was feeling depressed and out of sorts. Part of it could be explained away by the demands on my time and the fact that I am an introvert who gets somewhat annoyed when my schedule is interrupted with out-of-the-ordinary activity. When my calendar gets crammed, as it tends to get during book launch season, I feel stressed and overwhelmed (which is also why my sons have not yet joined sports, though I have one in orchestra this year).
At the same time, lists began to greet me at every turn—favorite books, best books for the holidays, best-of 2018, awards lists. There is a book list for practically everything. And comparison loves lists. I fell hard into the sticky web of I guess I’m just not good enough.
But it was, of course, more than that.
The writing life isn’t an easy one. It’s especially not easy when you’re the mother of young children. At the same time I was recuperating from the busy launch season I had a son struggling with middle school, another upset about the necessity of speech lessons, and two others who were having behavioral issues at school.
When there are crises in my home, my first now-predictable response, as a mother, is to question whether I am doing the right thing to pursue a career and work outside the home (even though I technically work from home). Maybe it’s because of the pressures that exist in modern motherhood, but when my sons struggle, I feels as though it’s a direct reflection on the time I spend doing anything other than caring for my family.
I know I was made for writing. When I write, I feel as though I am doing exactly what I was brought into this world to do. I feel free and hopeful and alive. When I’m talking about writing or new projects or ideas I feel shaky with the bound-up energy of this knowing.
What would happen if I were to give that up?
I know myself. I know what would happen. I know I would not be the best version of myself that I could be. I would not fulfill my full purpose. I would waste potential and talent and opportunity. I would lament and resent.
Around this time, my husband and I were about to visit New York for the first time, a late fifteen-year anniversary celebration of sorts. He had a work conference, I was set to meet both my agent and my editor in real life, and we had planned a day to ourselves, for pleasure and touristy things. I didn’t even know if we could afford the trip in terms of both money and absence from our children, but there it was, already booked.
So I went. I had a lovely visit with my editor, who told me she absolutely loves my work and wants as much from me as she can possibly get. And the hope began to peer in at the edges.
At all junctures of my life I can feel hope peering in, no matter how bad things got. My parents divorced—there was hope. My father left in totality—there was hope. My sons and I are struggling with anxiety and depression—there is hope.
Hope is a powerful force, the kind of force that can lift our heads and whisper, Get up, you’re still alive, you were made for more than this.
You were made for more than this burden you carry, this disappointing setback, this scary circumstance. There is still hope.
There are so many people in our world who think and feel that they are without hope. It is up to us—the hope-filled ones (at least today)—to find them and tell them: Life’s an unpredictable thing. It can change in a moment. The night never lasts forever.
Go out into the world and shine your light of hope.
(Photo by Daniele Salutari on Unsplash)
by Rachel Toalson | Poetry
you see her
at the monthly meeting
she’s wasting away
but instead of feeling alarmed
you feel jealous
you would like that wasting-away body
instead of this
large and disappointing one
so you make your plan
steel your courage
take a breath as though it can
sustain you through the starving
and you pass on
supper
this is how
you let anorexia reclaim you
This is an excerpt from the book of poetry, this is how you live, available in both ebook and paperback form.
(Photo by Joshua Newton on Unsplash)
by Rachel Toalson | Crash Test Parents
It’s been a rainy year. I know better than to complain, considering that most years in Texas feature more brown burned-to-a-crisp grass than the lush green kind on which you can walk comfortably with bare feet, but really. My kids are at each other’s throats, they’re tearing up the house, they’re longing to go outside—and when they do, they come back in with gobs of mud caked to their shoes and between their toes if they couldn’t find their shoes (which is highly likely). They will happily track this around the just-cleaned house. It’s art, so to speak—with footprints (and they can hide nothing; they went to the pantry for an unauthorized snack? No, they say. Well, there are footprints to prove it).
With so many rainy days and so many kids cooped up inside, I start arguing with myself about whether or not it would be a good idea to enforce my daily mandatory play-outside time.
It wouldn’t be that bad.
Have you seen the floor?
They’d have something to do.
They’d get all wet and muddy.
You’d have peace.
And that statement, in the end, gives me pause and necessitates one of the things I do best: an analysis of pros and cons, this one called: Pros and Cons of Kids Playing Outside.
Pro: They get a shower.
For some of them, that’s more than they got last week (what can I say? Preteens are tough). Letting them play outside means that I can skip wrestling them into baths and, instead, save my energy for wrestling them back inside.
Con: They’ll come back in dripping.
Rain is cold, which means my sons will refuse to put on their swimsuits; this kind of wet is different from pool-wet. They’ll need to wear layers for this, and all of those layers will get soaked. They will not think to take off those layers before coming back in—remember? It’s cold!
Pro: They won’t be constantly underfoot to trip me.
Particularly during the dinner hour, when tripping becomes exponentially more dangerous.
Con: But now I’ll likely slip in their wet footprints.
This is what’s called a no-win situation. Either way I’m going down. But baby, I’m going down swinging. Maybe. On second thought, I might need my hands to keep myself from dying. Falling’s not as easy anymore.
Pro: You don’t have to hear their fighting.
Research shows that kids fight every 2.5 minutes or so, and I’m pretty sure my kids are overachievers on this estimation. At least when they’re outside I won’t have to hear the ridiculous fights they start every other minute.
Con:
Is there a con to this point? I’m not convinced there is.
All things considered, playing in the rain doesn’t seem all that bad. It’s good for kids to be out in nature while nature is nourishing itself.
You might even decide to join them.
by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
He said, “For someone who knows so clearly what you want, it’s annoying to me—someone who doesn’t have as clear of an idea—that you have a hard time asking for it.’
Maybe I’m too careful. Maybe there are times I need to step out of my accommodating, forgiving nature and assert myself.
“What’s the worst that can happen?” he says.
I’ve never liked answering that question.
•
Being the owner of an overactive imagination, there are plenty of worst things that can happen. They all come creeping in at the slightest invitation—like the question, “What’s the worst that can happen?”
I don’t want to look any one of them in the eye, lest I lose my nerve.
•
I’ve typed the email a dozen times, and it still doesn’t feel right. Have I really asked for what I want, or is it just another soft, kind, accommodating note that doesn’t really say much?
I send it off to a writer friend.
She sends it right back with confirmation: It’s just another soft, kind, accommodating note that doesn’t really say much.
•
My sons are young, and my husband and I have tried to raise them in an environment that values good communication skills. “Use your words” is something we say often when they feel upset or angry or sad. They are learning in ways their father and I—a generation that was taught to hide more than it revealed, to suck it up, get over it, life’s got a lot of hard knocks, kid, take what’s handed out without complaining—never did.
Maybe in their future, they will be able to use their words to ask for what they want.
Maybe they will be better than I have been.
•
I’m standing at my computer again. I sort through the questions: What do I want? What do I expect? What is the problem that keeps me from getting what I want or expect?
It all makes sense in my head, but when I get ready to write it down, my fingers feel stiff and uncooperative.
But I flex them, and the words, clunky and patchy at first, spill, stain, solidify.
•
We ask for what we want, because if we don’t, the person on the other side of our asking won’t know what we want. We ask to clarify, to make aware, to say that my needs and goals and desires are important, too, and we should work together to make sure we’re both happy and reaching our full potential and doing what must be done.
We ask because we are important enough, too, to have our needs and goals and desires met.
•
I’m a woman. I’ve been told, in one way or another, my whole life, that I shouldn’t have needs or goals or desires. I’ve been tricked into believing, by immersion in a patriarchal society and faith or simply by an encounter with another individual, that my needs are not as important as others’ needs. I’ve been shamed for my aspirations, my expectations, my dreams.
It’s not an easy legacy to discard.
•
I send the email this time. Who knows if it will make a difference or if anything will change, but at least I know I’ve tried. At least I know that the next time I must ask for what I need I will be marginally better at it. At least I know I have said what needs saying, bared a small piece of myself, moved toward becoming something more than a passive spectator to my life and career.
And the whisper grows, if only by a hair: I matter, too.
(Photo by Dan Gold on Unsplash)
by Rachel Toalson | Poetry
It bobs on water,
far beyond the realm
of imagination and yet
we see it when our eyes
flutter closed.
This ship.
It is well traveled,
well worn, perhaps,
having been tossed
amidst the stormy waters.
It is strong and quick,
slicing through calm,
carrying the hope of
every man who has
looked on it from a distance.
There they stand,
on a crowded shore,
and this ship, with its
knobby masts and
its pitching deck and
its ghost crew worn out
from the imaginary journey,
creeps closer and yet
not close enough to know
that the promises standing on deck
are nothing more than mist.
Perhaps it will get better,
perhaps it will come easier,
perhaps there are riches at the
end of the rainbow after all,
but this is not a ship
that will ever come in
and moving toward its sails
will not change its trajectory.
And so, what this ship tells us,
what it is speaking on the wind
that smacks its canvas across wood,
is do for yourselves
what a ship could never
do for you.
This is an excerpt from Textbook of an Ordinary Life: poems. For more of Rachel’s poems, visit her Reader Library page, where you can get a few volumes for free.
(Photo by Vidar Nordli-Mathisen on Unsplash)
by Rachel Toalson | Crash Test Parents
You’d think that, at a certain point, when you’ve been a parent for a certain number of years or you’re the parent of a certain number of kids, there would come a time when you actually knew what you were doing. But we had our sixth baby a little more than a year ago, and while some things are easier this time around, I can still say, with certain certainty, that even on the sixth kid, I have no idea what I’m doing.
See, the thing about parenting is that a whole lot of it comes down to the children. There’s not one single thing that’s going to work for every parent and every child, because there’s no one archetype of “child” to point the way. I know. Our home is like a controlled experiment, a laboratory for testing out parenting practices. There’s the strong-willed nine-year-old, who will challenge every single thing out of each parent’s mouth, because he always sees things differently; there is the seven-year-old, who can’t possibly stay out of candy if it’s anywhere in the house, even if he’s been told not to touch it; there is the six-year-old, who shuts down whenever anyone tells him he did something wrong and needs to make reparations, clamps so tight we can’t see his hurt or his fear or his anger; there are the four-year-olds who care nothing at all for consequences, only care for their curious impulses that lead them to discover what a yard might look like if they emptied the entire recycling container while their mama was doing her workout inside and probably, arguably, should have checked on them but really thought they’d learned their lesson the last time when they had to sit in their seats at the table without playing for an hour because they’d emptied the trash receptacle in the same exact way; and there is the fifteen-month-old who is perfect—at least until he turns three.
All of these children are different. We teach them all the same things, but we do it differently. We have no idea what we’re doing. We do what our gut tells us to do. When the nine-year-old comes up with some different point of view about how we should handle bedtime, because he doesn’t think he’s allowed to stay up late enough, because all his friends get to stay up this late and why can’t he, we don’t ever know what to do or say the first time (besides the old, maddening, “If your friends were jumping off a cliff…”). We find our way into it.
Sometimes we can put too much pressure on ourselves as parents to know the exact right thing to do in every challenging moment, even though we’ve never had a moment where we opened a door and the eighteen-month-old is sitting in a room of painted poop—which happened for an excruciating forty days when my twins were eighteen months old.
We can let our not knowing what to do make us feel like maybe we shouldn’t have been parents in the first place. We feel incompetent, broken, not enough—not intelligent enough, patient enough, strategic enough, energetic enough, kind enough, brave enough—for this task before us.
But let me just tell you something: even on the sixth kid, I don’t really know what I’m doing. Sure, I know why the baby’s crying right now, because I’ve had a lot of practice in reading cues and being attuned to an infant. I know that right now he’s hungry but a few minutes ago he was uncomfortable because he had a wet diaper. And, yes, I know that if I tell the nine-year-old that it’s time for bed and he didn’t have any kind of advanced warning, he’s going to flip out. I know that if I try to forbid the four-year-olds from the LEGO station and the LEGOs are left out, they’re not going to have enough impulse control to keep from putting their hands all over their brothers’ creations every other minute.
I know that if I tell my seven-year-old he doesn’t need another snack, because it’s almost time for dinner, he will still find himself wandering over to the refrigerator to see what’s inside—not because he’s defying the rules but because it’s habit; he’s always, always hungry. I know that if the six-year-old is asked to find anything, even if it’s right in front of his face, it’s going to be gone forever and ever and ever and he will need my help to find what’s almost touching his head as he lies on the floor and pontificates in a whiny voice about how everything he loves always disappears and why can’t he have anything that is just his?
I know all of these things. I know my children. I know myself. But there are some things that can completely blindside me as a parent. I know that when my sons’ school called last year and the nine-year-old (who was then eight) was making threats about hurting himself, I didn’t know how to possibly handle it. I know that when the six-year-old told me there was a boy in his class who made fun of him on the playground and liked to knock him down, I didn’t know what to do about it. I know that when the seven-year-old said he wanted to play soccer and Husband and I are musicians, writers, and artists, I didn’t even have a clue about the first thing I could do.
My kids, after all these years of being a parent, still surprise me. Like the day Twin 1, who was three at the time, took out a bunch of Halloween tattoos someone had given us and decided to put them all over his face so his skin looked like a patterned sheet of ghosts and werewolves and “Happy Halloween” in orange and black. Like the day Twin 2, also three at the time, put on two different shoes, one green and one white, and announced that he was ready to go and then argued for ten minutes about whether or not these shoes belonged together.
Like the afternoon the oldest, eight years old then, stormed up the stairs because he had finished his technology time and he wanted a few more minutes, but, because we’re very rigid on how much time our kids spend with technology, the answer was no, and he said in this low, growling voice, “Yooouuuu meeeaaaannnn Daddddddyyyyyy” and then disappeared from our view, thankfully. Like the morning our third son was only three and announced that duck rhymed with “f*ck” and a bunch of other words we didn’t hear because we only heard the one he’d never encountered in his life because no one in our house ever says it. Like the day the second son ate an entire two pounds of grapes while we weren’t looking (we didn’t even know that was possible. Apparently, his body didn’t either, and he was glued to the toilet the rest of the day. Natural consequences.).
Sometimes I don’t know whether to laugh or to cry.
There are still times when I feel way in over my head, unsure if I’m the person for this job. Like when the nine-year-old decided to express his anxiety by wrapping a scarf I’d knitted him around his neck and pulling, like he was going to choke himself. Like when the six-year-old scribbled that he hated his brother because he wouldn’t let him play. Like when the seven-year-old, who is normally a very encouraging and easy child, said he wished he was in a different family.
Just because I have six children doesn’t mean I know what I’m doing all the time, every day. That’s okay.
These are the things we learn as we go. We don’t have to know everything about parenting when we take our first wobbling steps as a parent. The point of parenting is not to know everything there is to know when we first begin. I read so many parenting books before becoming a parent—I still do!—so I could equip myself with all the knowledge I could possibly gather. Still, I have to find my own way.
We grow, just like our children grow. We make our mistakes, we make our reparations, we make our transformation.
How do we grow? We spend time getting to know our kids—all their hilarious inconsistencies, their maddening behavioral issues (that make for humorous tales), their dreams and disappointments and hurts and joys. We embrace their fragile, lovely hearts. We love.
And that’s always enough.
This is an excerpt from Hills I’ll Probably Lie Down On, the fourth book in the Crash Test Parents series. To get access to some all-new, never-before-published humor essays in two hilarious Crash Test Parents guides, visit the Crash Test Parents Reader Library page.
(Photo by This is Now Photography.)
by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
He is late.
He usually calls or texts when he’s going to be late, but lately we’ve been more strangers than lovers, passing each other in the hallways, smiling, dropping quick kisses, breezing out the door.
He didn’t even tell me where he was going today.
I’ve been working on a memoir about meeting the woman who broke up my parents’ marriage, along with her two kids—my half-brother and half-sister—who were kept a secret from my mother during my parents’ marriage, except for the answering machine message I still remember, forever imprinted on my 9-year-old brain.
I’ve been dreaming about my mother, feeling her humiliation, sweating drops of regret. Today I could be her for the worry and fear that wraps around my throat and squeezes.
My thoughts seesaw between the two: What if he’s with someone else? What if something happened to him?
Both are equally irrational; this has happened before when he’s going to be late and he forgets to call and I work myself up into an agitated state and call him a few times, text him a few times, look up every highway he might have taken today to see if there were any fatal accidents reported, and if there were, I panic and make lists of police department numbers I can call if it gets too late and he’s still not home.
And then the door opens and it’s him. Standing. Smiling. Bending to kiss me. My tears are embarrassing then, as are the messages I’ve left on his cell to call me, I’m worried, is he still alive? As though he could answer if he weren’t.
He’s also never given me any reason to believe he would be unfaithful, but when you grow up with the trauma of learning your dad—the man you trusted to love you—has a whole secret family you didn’t know about, you grow up knowing anyone in the world can let you down. Anyone.
Even him.
I search for his location on my “locate iPhone” map. He’s right down the road. I remember now, about the business lunch, the workout. It’s a good sign that he’s late.
I breathe. I survive. I overcome.
One more victory against the past that stretches on.
(Photo by Anton Belashov on Unsplash)
