by Rachel Toalson | Poetry
The day I lost my job,
the sun did not hide its face
but scorched my cheeks
in rolling waves of fire,
but the day my boyfriend
asked me to spend forever
by his side, the streets were
glistening with water that
dropped in sheets from the sky.
It poured on my wedding day,
but the day my beloved grandmother died
and the whole world moved on
with a giant hole in it,
not a cloud stood
in the winter sky.
The sun beamed as though
this day were full of joy.
It wasn’t.
The night my first son
slid into the world,
the sky held no stars,
only a heavy black sky,
ominous and uneasy,
but the night my daughter died
was a diamond one,
glittery and full.
So, you see, the weather
never quite
gets it right.
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 Nicole Wilcox on Unsplash)
by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
I was walking my sons to school the other day when the woman crossing them said, “I looked up your book yesterday.”
I never know what to say in situations like these, so I just said, “Oh, yeah?”
She said, “Yeah.” She didn’t say anything else about my book (I can’t say I wasn’t glad). She moved on to tell me that she’s been urging her husband to write a book for a while. She said, “I think he would write it well, but he just doesn’t have the time.”
I can empathize with this completely. My first traditionally published book was written in short bursts—half an hour here, fifteen minutes there. Time—or the lack thereof—is one of the largest reasons more people don’t write.
But having found the time, I know, too, that there is another, larger reason that more people don’t ever finish their book, and it’s this: writing demands much of authors.
That “much” includes, of course, time, but even more than that it includes everything a writer gives. What I mean by that is both simple and complicated: a writer gives herself.
There is not a book I have written yet that does not contain large pieces of me. I split open my heart and my soul and my brain and meet the page in the most vulnerable place, disrobing family secrets (even if they are hidden behind fiction or metaphor), examining the darkest places of my mind, telling stories I might rather forget. There are projects that have nearly broken me—a current one is a memoir I’m working on about the first summer I went to see my dad and his new family after my parents divorced. It took me three years to write down a fictional story about a suicidal teenager because within the story are pieces of myself, my teenage years with my brother, and a current ongoing struggle with my pre-teen son. I cried through the final draft of a picture book that just went out on submission—because it contains so much raw, unbridled pain and extravagant hope.
Writing a book is not as simple as choosing an idea, doing research, carving out the time to put words on a page. Writers give themselves, too.
This is partially why, when an author’s book is finally released to the world, there is so much elation mixed up with fear and unease. We are known more fully by our work. And we know that not everyone will be kind to those pieces of us out in the world, threading into our stories or essays or poems. We hope they will be, but we don’t live in an ideal world, and the words of others sometimes sting in our most vulnerable places.
Before I get started on a new project, I always take a deep breath, close my eyes, and repeat to myself these words from Maya Angelou:
“My wish is that you continue. Continue to be who you are, to astonish a mean world with your acts of kindness.”
Though I know it will be difficult to peel off those scabs that have grown over verbal abuse and use the old wounds to tell a story about the pain and confusion of a boy, I know I must—because other children live in a situation exactly like that, and they need to know they are worthy of acceptance and a future and the greatest of love. I enter into the ache, I let it blast through my chest, and I give all of myself to the storytelling, to the examination of difficult things, to the redemption of what has been broken. Tikkun olam.
I give because I love my readers. I give because I desire to see a world in which every person realizes their worth and significance. I give because it is my purpose, because it is the way in which I meet people and leave a part of myself with them. Because I take seriously the words of Fred Rogers: “If you could only sense how important you are to the lives of those you meet; how important you can be to the people you may never even dream of. There is something of yourself that you leave at every meeting with another person.”
I hope I never hold back.
Next time you pick up a book, remember: authors don’t merely give time and money and hope and creativity to the project in your hands. They give, too, themselves.
(Photo by Ewan Robertson on Unsplash)
by Rachel Toalson | Poetry
You are familiar with the ways
some of them think
it’s all in your control
the darkness represents
a failure in your life
you’ve been melodramatic
as long as they’ve known you
there are always worse circumstances
than your own but some people
(meaning you)
cry over spilled milk.
Sometimes you accidentally
let their voices too far
inside.
This is how
you forget it’s not your fault.
This is an excerpt from This is How You Live. For more of Rachel’s poems, visit her Reader Library page, where you can get a few volumes for free.
(Photo by Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash)
by Rachel Toalson | Crash Test Parents
Before Husband and I were married, he used to do all sorts of things to romance me. He would bring me flowers and put them in beautiful vases all over my apartment so I’d remember, when I looked at them, that I was beautiful. He once gave me eleven roses instead of the full dozen and wrote me a note that said, “If you’re wondering where the other rose is, just look in the mirror.” I know. I’m a lucky woman.
For our first date, he showed up at my door with a handful of wildflowers, and we spent the morning at this epic mountain in Wimberley, Texas. You had to climb up five hundred sixty-three precariously wooden stairs to get all the way to the top. It was wonderful once we made it, as long as we didn’t look over the side, which would make me dizzy and, because I’m one of the most graceful people on the planet, likely plummet to my death. That day he brought his guitar and we sang together, and then we kissed and then we pretended we watched the sun rise, even though the sky was covered in a cloudy haze that did not allow any sort of beauty through. The only reason we knew the sun had risen at all was that a small yellow eye hung in the clouds, and we assumed it was the muted sun.
The night he proposed to me, he went to great lengths to arrange a production with a ballet theatre that had come to town. He wanted to take me backstage and stand there, drop to one knee, and pop the question. He got all dressed up in a tux, and I wore a long and strapless red dress, and, after fighting a bit about my not wanting to go backstage because I was so incredibly hungry, he won and pulled me up on stage in front of five hundred people, dropped to a knee and, indeed, popped the question.
His romance has always been a disaster waiting to happen, but it’s sweet and wonderful and so very missed.
It’s a running joke in the contemporary world that once you get married—once the guy gets the girl—he stops romancing. It’s not true in my case. Husband kept up his romancing for years—he crafted a life-sized card for our first anniversary, wrote a song for me on our second anniversary, and left me alone for our third anniversary.
That was the anniversary when I was eight months pregnant with our first son.
When we had children, all romancing screeched to a halt—not because he didn’t want to romance me but because kids make it practically impossible to do anything special for one another.
There was the year when he tried to make me a video with the kids telling me what a great mother I was, and they just kept staring at the video camera and laughing, because they didn’t know what to say and they were more interested in goofing around. There was the time when he arranged a little art project wherein they drew pictures and colored in letters and he put it all in a frame that was broken two months later by the same kids who had colored it. There was the time he tried to write me a song and then record it, and you could hear kids calling his name in the background.
No more sweet and thoughtful gifts, when you have obstacles at every turn.
He used to whisper sweet things in my ear, but it’s hard to whisper anything sweet when there’s a kid pulling on your arm, trying to demand your attention. Most days, our sweet whisperings sound like any of these phrases:
“Hey, do you want me to wash the dishes tonight? I know you have book club.”
“I made the bed today, and I put a load of laundry in the wash. Just thought you should know.”
“How about I take the kids to the pool for the evening and you stay here and…clean up?”
Once, on a Mother’s Day after I’d just had twins, Husband left me a note and said, “I thought you might enjoy a day off from church.” He’d left all the kids home with me, because he also thought I’d like to spend Mother’s Day with them.
Well, he had good intentions, at least.
“Why don’t you go to the grocery store by yourself, honey?” is also a frequent romancing technique, even though going to the grocery store is probably the last thing I’d like to do, because it requires too much thinking, since I nearly always leave my list at home. I usually take him up on it, though, because at least I’m getting out of the house. Sometimes I’m so tired I can hardly move, and a vegetative state without kids jumping on me every five minutes is preferable to going out to the grocery store, but I’ll still do it, because “a vegetative state without kids jumping on me every five minutes” is not an actual possibility in our house.
As you can imagine, Husband and I also don’t get very many date nights out. It’s not easy to find a sitter for six kids, especially when you’re calling at the last minute. So our romancing looks like sharing a bowl of popcorn in our bed while we catch up on Netflix shows.
Romancing looks a lot different now that we have kids. It looks more like completely tidying the house before I come down from a long day at work. It looks like playing a game of trampoline dodgeball with the boys out back so I can have a few minutes to myself while I wash the dishes. It looks like distracting kids with a story while I squeeze in a five-minute shower.
But you know what? All of that is romantic, too, because these are acts of sacrifice. Maybe there isn’t a whole lot I can show for it—there’s not a love song I can sing in the shower or a video I can share with all my family or a card that I can keep in my dresser forever. But that does not diminish the romance of these small and thoughtful acts.
Romance is all how you look at it.
And, if I’m being honest, the small and thoughtful acts mean more to me. Sure, it was fun to get all dolled up so I could stand on a theatre stage and cry my yes to his question. Sure, it was exciting to see him show up at my door with a bouquet of random flowers hiding his face and then follow him out to watch the sunrise. Sure, it was wonderful to be called a beautiful rose.
But we get to do interesting things now, too. We get to curl up in a blanket on a winter morning and watch the sunrise from the back porch while the kids are still (hopefully) sleeping. We get to drink hot chocolate in the late hours of the night and eat popcorn and watch old episodes of “How I Met Your Mother.” We get to share our lives with children and watch them enrich it with beauty and meaning.
The other day Husband brought me flowers for the first time in years. He put them on a table and all the boys exclaimed over them, pointing out their colors and their shapes and the water that would keep them alive, at least for a few days. The whole kitchen seemed brighter, and I smiled.
It’s still possible to romance after children. You just have to know what you’re looking for.
This is an excerpt from This Life With Boys, the third 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
We are talking of the future and business plans and all these topics that beckon anxiety from its hiding place, because we’re in such a precarious position with so many unknowns. He is asking for hope and trust and certainty, and I can’t give it in light of all those years when plans didn’t work out like we thought they would and disappointment came loping in like a stray dog. What if this new plan ends the same way all the others did?
His eyes, wild and furious, tell me I’ve said exactly the wrong words at exactly the wrong time in exactly the wrong way.
But there are children in the car, so he bites his lip and stares out the front window, and he will not be able to say what he wants to say until we get home and feed kids and put them down for their naps, because there is not a moment alone until we do.
We let the silence speak for us.
My head starts turning it over and over, how maybe I shouldn’t have said what I did, but, God, I’m so tired of arguing about the same old things and having the same old conversations about the same old dilemma. All those years adding up to tired brought words to my mouth without so much as a second thought. That’s not an excuse. Simply a reality. A confession, maybe.
You can’t take back words. So these words sit and fester in both our hearts, waiting for boys to sleep so we can fight the ugly wrinkles back into smooth.
///
It took him a while to convince me to spend the rest of my life with him. There were two other possibilities, a boy destined for politics and another for professional baseball, when he came along. My future husband came crashing through both their plans with his black curls and blue eyes and a voice that could soothe me into love when he talked, but especially when he sang.
The problem wasn’t that he was the tiniest bit dorky or that he wasn’t very good with money or that he wasn’t even sure what he wanted to be when he grew up. The problem was mostly that when he looked at me, he really looked at me. He really saw. He really knew in the deepest ways a person could know. It unsettled me. I was so good at hiding feelings and pretending that life’s hard punches hadn’t even winded me and constructing this identity of a laid-back girl who had her whole life figured out. I worked so hard to lock away those secret places. And here was a boy-man dismantling all the walls and staring into the bare places and shouting that what he saw—all the ugliness curled inside a little girl’s heart—was actually beautiful.
I wasn’t ready for that, and I wasn’t sure he was The One, and I couldn’t really tell if this was love or a timid kind of hope.
Mostly, though, I was afraid of the greatness he saw in me.
I held him at arms’ length for as long as I could, and then I crumbled. He slipped a ring on my finger, and we stepped into forever.
///
He still knows in the deepest ways a person can know. When I say there’s nothing wrong in that specific tone of voice, he knows it means there really is; I’m just not ready to talk about it yet. When I say I had a hard time writing today, he knows it’s because it’s the last day of the month and tomorrow I’ll have to sit in front of a computer and try to reconcile our budget. When I say I need to go to Wednesday night church, he knows it’s because I need time to myself, without anyone bothering me or trying to get my attention or asking me for something. He just knows.
He knows how I’ll respond or react before I do. He knows what I’m feeling before I can even articulate the words. He knows my motivations and my fears and my shaky hope and my annoying realism and the way I tie my shoes with two bunny ears and how I’ll feel about my son’s playground experience today and the words I’ll say about the one who won’t leave us alone at bedtime and what I think about the book I’ll pull open tonight.
Living together, scraping against each other’s edges, sharpening the iron strength of another for as long as we have, means that you really, really know someone in the deepest places. You know how they’re feeling and how they see the world today and what they need at just the right times. It can feel scary to be known this way. When we are known, we have no place to hide. When we are known, we are vulnerable.
When we know, we see all their vulnerable. This knowing can turn cruel, and sometimes it does, taking its anger-shot at the exact place it will hurt the most.
That’s all a part of the marriage story.
///
I had never met anyone quite like him before. When I was sick, he stayed by my side, holding my hair as I bent over the toilet or lying beside me while I burned up with fever or carrying me down fifteen stairs after I broke my foot.
When I spoke, he listened and heard. When I dreamed, he believed those dreams were possible. When I cried, he did not run away. When I raged, he met the fire.
For the early years of our marriage, I lived with a ball of black in my heart. It spoke of abandonment and fear and a bottomless well of insecurity. Sometimes that ball flew out of my mouth and wrapped around words. Sometimes it took off the screen door of my heart and nailed up a cedar one instead. Sometimes it aimed its arrow and sent hurt into my husband’s heart.
Every single time he forgave. He never held grudges or threatened leaving or wondered if he might do better for himself somewhere else. Instead, he stood solid against all those years until I began to soften. And then he loved me more tenderly, more profoundly, more wholly.
I have still never met anyone quite like him.
///
A fight like this one is not the first in the nearly twelve years we’ve been married. Of course it isn’t. Because we’re human. We’re imperfect. We’re selfish. We speak without thinking. And when you’ve been married this long, you know what all the words say, but you also learn what the silences between the words say.
In every marriage there come seasons of waking up on a different page in a different book, feeling more like strangers who fight than friends who talk. We have had days, weeks, months of tension and push-and-pull and butting heads and asking forgiveness, and every single time—every single time—we have walked out of that shaky season stronger than we walked in.
Every single time.
We fought and we disliked and we raged and we cried and we opened our umbrellas and we hid in ditches during the storms that sometimes only dumped rain but sometimes felt like a Category 5 tornado, and through it all we fought for love.
We all say words we don’t mean to the ones we love. And then we all have the privilege of stepping outside ourselves and meeting the other person’s hurt with humility and remorse.
The secret to saving a marriage is not avoiding all the conflicts. The secret is letting go of our pride. Saying we’re sorry. Choosing love over winning. Forgiving.
Sometimes, when we are entrenched in those days and weeks and months of conflict, when it feels like we can get nothing right and we can’t say a word without arguing, it can feel like conflict tells the whole story of our marriage. But if we look closely enough, we’ll see.
Forgiveness after forgiveness, this is the whole story of a marriage.
And so, today, while boys eat their lunch, I follow my husband up the stairs and I wrap my arms around him and speak my apology into his ear. Tears mix on both our cheeks, but that salty water is really sweet. So sweet.
Because it tells the real story of a marriage. The real story of partnership. The real story of love.
This is an excerpt from We Count it All Joy, a book of essays. For more of Rachel’s writings, visit her Reader Library page, where you can get a couple of books for free.
(Photo by Zoriana Stakhniv on Unsplash)
by Rachel Toalson | Poetry
What about the silences?
It was an odd question,
what about the silences,
and I wasn’t entirely sure
how to answer.
The silences are long.
The silences are still.
The silences are…
silent.
Yes, but are they
comfortable? she said,
and this time I understood—
because I’d been in
uncomfortable silences before,
and they were awkward, uneasy,
frightening at times.
No, I said,
the silences are
lovely pockets of time
when I can hear myself think
and he can hear himself not think
and we are separate yet connected.
Then you know, she said.
Silences tell you
everything about
a relationship.
So measure them
well.
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 rawpixel on Unsplash)
by Rachel Toalson | Crash Test Parents
Any time I’ve asked my children why they love me, I’m always surprised by their answers. I mistakenly think they’ll tie my love to the things I give them or the places I take them or the time I spend with them doing complicated things (like crafting with glitter).
But it’s really much simpler than that.
1. I cook.
Because they love to eat so much, boys can feel love through food. While I don’t always cook and, when I do, it’s not always wonderful, they know I do the grocery shopping and the meal planning and that I provide or cook the most important part: dessert.
2. I read to them.
My sons have grown up on stories, and while they may not yet be able to recognize how important this is for them, they do know the joy of sharing novels, poetry, and true stories with their parents.
Last year I gifted my 9-year-old with a kid’s literary magazine for his birthday. He thought it was the greatest gift ever and tells me so every time a new issue comes in the mail.
I know him—and he knows that knowing equals love.
3. I let them play outside.
I think they mean I make them play outside, but who’s splitting hairs over unimportant things? They know they have the freedom to sword fight with sticks, build forts out of lumber, and dig holes for…well, who knows what (we gave up asking a long time ago).
4. I sign their school folders.
Most of the time—at least until the second semester of school starts and/or my pen disappears, whichever comes first.
(This year we made it to the second semester.)
5. I’m an author.
My sons are still too young to be embarrassed by my status as an author. I’ve visited two of their schools already this year, and they are still proud enough to come up to me and give me a hug in front of their friends, to say, “This is my mom.” I like to think they’ll never stop loving this about me, but I know adolescence takes its toll.
My sons are remarkable kids, and I am amazed, always, by their graciousness and caring ways and their extravagant love. Even on their less-than-stellar days, when they call me the worst mom ever for telling them it’s time to put their technological devices away, they can recognize, deep down, the way I love them in the limits I set.
Stability spells love to children—even if they can’t yet name it but can only feel it.
(Photo by This is Now Photography)
by Rachel Toalson | Poetry
It’s hard to say what inspires.
Sometimes it is the gentle light
of a morning, a pale glowing
in the east that makes the fog
in the air, left over
from the night,
shimmer.
Sometimes it is the curve
of a tiny cheek, turned toward
the sleepy light,
marked with fluttering lashes.
Sometimes it is a word,
a picture, wisdom someone
shared a hundred years ago.
They all open
the cascade of creativity,
marrying a pen to a page
so another story is born.
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 Art Lasovsky on Unsplash)
by Rachel Toalson | Crash Test Parents
There are many things you don’t ever think about before you become a parent—things no one will find it necessary to mention to you, either (even though there are many things they will mention to you unnecessarily).
I read so many books before I became a parent, but I was still ill-prepared for all the things I would have to give up.
You give up so much. You give up things like:
Long phone calls.
Every time I start to dial the number of a doctor or someone I need to talk to (because I hardly ever call the people I actually want to talk to), it doesn’t take my children long to realize what’s happening. In fact, I usually have to tell the hold music to hold on—because one of my twins has taken out the rake from his daddy’s shed and is running toward the other twin with said rake raised above his head and a guttural yell straight from the pages of Lord of the Flies tripping along ahead of him. It’s always my luck that the hold music stops and a person actually answers the phone when I’m in mid-yell—“Cut it out, or you’ll have to come sit with me for the duration of this call!” I don’t apologize. Instead, I usually pretend they didn’t hear anything.
They probably didn’t. Their “How can I help you?” didn’t sound worried at all. It was my imagination.
Real dates.
If you have as many kids as I have, a date can seem like a luxury. Husband and I haven’t had a real date in four months—and by real date, I mean a date that actually gets you out of the house. It’s not because there are no babysitters willing to sit on a Friday night and watch my kids sleep but because we’d have no money left, after paying a sitter (or two), to actually have a date. I suppose we could ride around in the car looking at Christmas lights (for a three-week span during the year) or walk through a park (the temperate climate of South Texas is limited to the same three-week span; who wants to sweat on a date or freeze half to death?) or recline the van seats and take a long, uninterrupted nap.
But I’d like, for once, to have a restaurant-cooked dinner where kids weren’t hanging around outside the door, peering through the crack between the bottom of the door and the floor, whispering that they’d like to have some French fries once in a while, too. A dinner out would be nice now and then.
Extended conversations.
We try really hard to teach our children not to interrupt, unless there’s an emergency. The problem is that kids have a very hard time defining “emergency.” They will interrupt us to tell us the computer froze while they were playing Minecraft (this was unauthorized play, an observation that will come with a whole half hour of argument). They’ll interrupt us to ask why rain tastes like dirt mixed with sky mixed with musty fart (they’re the kids of a poet; what do you expect?). They’ll interrupt us to tell us all about the cut they just got on their finger—the middle one, of course—that you’d need a microscope to see but for which they need a Band-Aid—maybe two. Seriously, they do. They’re bleeding! All this while unintentionally flipping us off.
Husband and I have gotten really good at leaving sentences unfinished and assuming the other knows what we were going to say. We have been married thirteen years, after all.
I won’t go into all the trouble this can cause. Arguments are good for marriages.
Trips to the store together.
The last time we all went to the store together, two kids fought over who was going to push the cart and nearly tore off my toe in the process, another kid slipped three packages of chocolate chips into the basket when we weren’t looking, another kid flattened himself on the bottom of the cart so he could fly and ended up smashing his finger (which I told him would likely happen), and another kid disappeared for half an hour while all the frozen fruit and vegetables defrosted because of a very hastily-organized search party. We almost left without the last kid, who was charged with watching the defrost process so he could report about it later, keeping the secret about the chocolate chips, and not moving the cart. (I dare you to guess which one of those instructions was mine.)
Never again.
Confidence.
Kids will say anything—and everything—to other people. They will tell another person how old you are (and be way off), how much you weigh (and also be way off), and how hard you cried while watching Pete’s Dragon last Friday. They’ll tell all your secrets, especially to their favorite teacher.
Good luck keeping a healthy sense of confidence with a kid who hugs you, hugs you again, and then asks you if you’re having another baby because your belly sure is poking out.
The most basic form of self-care.
I’m an introvert living with six wild, loud, rambunctious boys, which means I need a daily moment—or a hundred of them—to care for myself. Reading is my favorite way to do this.
Not that I have the opportunity to do it often. When I try to put my feet up for any amount of time, someone decides it’s time to open up the game closet and take out all the games that have no less than ten thousand pieces; someone else decides it’s the perfect opportunity to steal into my room, where all the devices are stashed in hiding places (we’re running out of unknown places, apparently), and spend some extra minutes doing the forbidden: playing with tech; and still another takes a pair of scissors to his shoelaces, his shirt, his underwear (he wants us to believe he blew out that hole with a massive fart), and, regrettably, his hair.
A nice and tidy home.
It doesn’t matter how many times you remind them where hampers are, where shoe baskets are, where their school things go, kids will walk out of their clothes, kick off their shoes, and drop their school things in the hall and forget all about the after-school procedures they’ve done for the last four years (ironically, the oldest is the most consistently forgetful).
And by the time you’ve solved this problem, they’ve decided it’s time to examine all the pencils in the pencil holder—and by examine, they mean dump them out—because anything’s better than mental math.
Scissors, glue, permanent markers, paints.
Do you know what can happen if you leave a child unattended with any of the fun art supplies listed above? You will end up with a four-year-old who looks like he has mange, another four-year-old who’s no longer hungry because his snack was Elmer’s glue, a four-year-old (previously mentioned—yes, the same one) with permanent whiskers on his face, and another four-year-old (also previously mentioned) with an acrylic mural on his shirt (he didn’t like the one that was already there.).
It’s easier to get rid of them. The supplies, I mean.
Stylish clothes.
My closet has not been updated since 2006, which coincides with the year I became a mother. I am constantly buying clothes—but not for me. No, I buy clothes for the kids who walk on their kneecaps and blow out their jeans within a month of receiving them. I buy clothes for the kids who use the toes of their tennis shoes as makeshift brakes—even when they’re running. I buy clothes for the kids who think “shirt” is synonymous with “napkin.”
The only thing even remotely consistent about my children (besides their complaining about what’s for dinner before we’ve sat down to eat it) is that they will require our entire clothes budget for themselves.
I’m down to my last pair of jeans. Not because they’ve worn out (I hardly ever wear them, to tell the truth), but because, well, things are expanding. If you know what I mean.
Sleeping in.
The beginning of parenthood had me fooled. When Husband and I only had one kid, he slept so late we could wake at a decent hour and still get things done. As the years passed and the kid-count increased, that rise-and-shine time became earlier and earlier and earlier. Now, on a school day, my kids sleep until 6:30 a.m. On weekends they sleep until 5:30 a.m., if we’re lucky. We’re usually not.
Sleeping in is overrated anyway.
We may give up a lot to have kids, but on our best days, we’ll agree that it’s worth it. On the worst days, we’ll still agree it’s worth it—hard but worth it. Because what we get in return—sweet kisses that miss their mark but hit the bull’s-eye, hugs that hold on, a voice that whispers in your ear how much they love you—is what dreams are made of.
At least until you get on the phone with your health insurance and realize it’s going to be a long afternoon in more ways than one.
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
At the close of every year, I always find myself turning my gaze to the new year—sometimes even before it’s time.
There are certainly times in which to begin anew—the beginning of a summer, a birthday, an anniversary, the start of a school year. But there is no time that lends itself to new beginnings quite like a new year. It’s a wide open opportunity that meets each of us with a clean slate, a schedule that hasn’t yet filled with activities (unless you have school children). We aren’t on the hook for projects to deliver or goals we’ve set and still need to meet. Everything is expansive and rich with potential.
If you want to make a drastic change in direction, a new year is the perfect time to do it.
Sometimes that can be an unsettling thing, like a writer facing a blank page for the first time, which is pretty much any time, because there is no formula for writing. So much space and possibility can feel intimidating to some.
I get giddy with anticipation. I evaluate and schedule and write down goals and revise goals and decide on publication dates for self-published books and mark dates for traditionally published books and plan for the projects on which I’d like to focus for the coming year and try to anticipate the bumps I might meet in the road (though I can’t always predict those with any accuracy.). I analyze daily writing expectations, manage those expectations, strip everything away and add it back. I brainstorm new ideas and white board and think, think, think. I evaluate my schedule and see if it still works for me.
People who know me well know that I also, at the end of every year, choose a word with which to frame my new year—in both family and in business. Our family word for 2019 is “optimize”: we’ll be looking at processes and rules around our house and reevaluating and streamlining them. We’ll be working, mostly, on relationships and optimizing the time we have together.
I had trouble settling on a word to frame my business. But after much thought and consideration, I chose the word “assert.”
Assertion is not one of my strengths. When faced with a decision to assert my needs that come in conflict with another’s needs, I will generally default to that person’s needs. This could be the result of residual trauma from my past, or it could simply be a weakness of mine cultivated in my childhood quest to demand the least attention, step on the fewest toes, be the “easiest” child. But what I have learned of weakness is that when we recognize it, examine it, and intentionally practice strengthening it, it will not remain a weakness for long.
This last year I encountered several instances in which I needed to assert myself in order to make sure my needs were met in a timely and efficient manner. Instead, I chose the least resistant path—that of acquiescence and accommodation.
Assertion is an important part of communication when you work for yourself and you depend on other people for your ultimate success. Asking for what you want and need is necessary for healthy relationships, successful careers, and even enduring marriages.
I don’t yet know for what I will ask in this new year, at least not completely. But I do know that when I stumble into a situation that calls for assertion, I will be (mostly) ready to stumble through it (we all start somewhere) and, by the end of the year, walk through it with my head held high.
What word will you choose to frame your year?
(Photo by NordWood Themes on Unsplash)
