by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
The holidays are fast approaching. I will be spending time with people I love very much but whose beliefs and ideologies and values and political persuasions don’t always line up with my own. I have tried to ignore to which sides they lean and belong, but some things are more easily hidden than others. I have been downright shocked sometimes at the things that are said and done in the name of “righteous” conviction.
In the past few weeks I’ve found myself backing away from social media, disengaging from the dividing lines that seem to mark us as a contemporary society, shielding myself from the angry news, the dehumanizing words, the conversations that feature more talkers than listeners.
I am, by nature, a peacemaker. I don’t like to step inside conflict, to shake up waters that I’d rather remain tranquil and still. And sometimes that means I haven’t spoken when I really needed to speak, when I felt the words damming up inside, when I noticed that someone was bulldozing another’s identity.
Identity is a shaky thing in the first place; we’re often not entirely sure we’ve really found it. We uncover it, we bury it, we uncover it again. We don’t always live into it perfectly.
When our identity is further shaken for the purpose of corroborating right or wrong in an argument that will prove ridiculous in the grand scheme of things, I balk. Not always publicly, but always privately.
I know what I’m supposed to speak; the words come easily for me. But sometimes I’m too tired to be brave. And, besides, what about peace?
I’ve spent quite a bit of time recently thinking about what it means to be a peacemaker. Thinking about how we preserve dignity and honor in the face of ever-present conflict. Thinking about my own convictions and where they line up with peacemaking.
Sometimes the best way to understand something is to think about what it doesn’t mean.
Peacemaking doesn’t mean compromising on my values. It doesn’t mean leaving behind my ideals. It doesn’t mean pressing pause on my mission, which can be summed up by e.e. cummings’s wise words: “love is the whole and more than all.”
It doesn’t always mean remaining silent.
The other day my husband was standing at his computer, scrolling through Facebook, though I’ve told him it’s not a good time to be on Facebook and we have better things to do and create. He saw a post from a friend that shocked and disappointed him. He said, “How do I keep from spending all my time on social media, helping people look at facts instead of mere opinions?” He was asking, because he wanted to set this friend straight, to present the factual details that could be used to create a more informed opinion—regardless of whether or not that opinion actually changed.
It’s a difficult question to answer, and the answer will be different for everyone, at different times. Some weeks I know I have better things on which to train my focus; some weeks I feel compelled to impress knowledge and compassion onto and into hearts. Sometimes my peacemaking looks like remaining silent; sometimes it looks like bringing a sword (metaphorically speaking, of course).
Sometimes the peacemakers are the people who speak most boldly (in love, remember), let that truth unfold in the hearts of hurting people, and usher in peace that is large and expansive enough to overcome fear and hate and dividing lines. Sometimes our very presence is peace: we show people they are not alone, that they can endure, that we are all the same, deep down. Sometimes we become peacemakers in the things we create.
And we must not neglect to do what is necessary for ourselves, to remain at peace. We cannot be peacemakers if we are not ourselves at peace. For me, that looks like scheduling a time of meditation every morning. It looks like taking frequent Sabbaticals from social media. It looks like culling acquaintances from my friends list. It looks like spending time with the people I love, in person, here, now.
In becoming peacemakers, we must have standards: we cannot compromise who we are, for what we stand, and what we know of love—that it forever endures, no matter what. That is as true for us as it is for “them.”
I hope you have a wonderful holiday season full of peacemaking and gratitude.
For more writings like this, sign up for Rachel’s e-newsletter. You’ll get a some free books and short stories, too. Visit her Reader Library page for more details.
(Photo by Jonathan Meyer on Unsplash)
by Rachel Toalson | Poetry
One might say that I
started out with
all the wrong cards.
Poor parents.
Absent dad.
Little to do in the world
but become the very picture
of my parents before me.
How does one break free
of the cards one has
been dealt?
In sixth grade, my English teacher
told me I had a talent for
dreaming up stories.
In seventh grade, my English teacher
drilled me on proper grammar
and punctuation and spelling,
said I had a gift.
In eighth grade, my English teacher
told me she wanted me to do
some extra writing work,
to develop my emerging skill.
In ninth grade, my English teacher
took my essay on Dickens and
read it to the class while I hid out
in the bathroom, mortified.
He tacked it to the board
as an example of a good critical essay.
In tenth grade, my English teacher
gave me a list of books
I’d need to read
to become a better writer,
said it was optional,
no grade attached.
I read them all.
In eleventh grade, my school counselor
gave me a college application
and said, No pressure.
It requires an essay.
I wrote eight hundred words
that night, used the story
of my parents’ divorce
to prove that all bad deals
could be turned
into good ones.
The trick to life, you see,
is playing a
poor hand 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 Soroush Karimi on Unsplash)
by Rachel Toalson | Crash Test Parents
It’s good to feel needed as human beings. We need to feel needed, at least some of the time. It’s how we recognize our value in our specific worlds.
Kids need parents for practically everything—at least for a while. They need us for crossing the street, even though they’re nine and have done it a thousand times before (they probably just got lucky there were no cars coming all those other times). They need us to tie their shoes, or, if they’re not feeling lazy today, to at least stand there and watch them do it on their own. They need us to watch when they’re flipping over the side of the couch in what looks like a professionally-trained gymnast move, because if no one sees them, did they really just do it?
When kids start growing up and doing things for themselves, it can feel a little disorienting to suddenly have so much more time on your hands in the mornings. You no longer have to make their breakfast because they popped a slice of toast in the toaster oven and spread half the stick of butter on it when it was done. If you’re anything like me, you’ll feel a little sad that they’re not whining about how you’re not pouring their glass of milk fast enough because they just did it for themselves. You might even feel a little sad when they don’t forget their lunch as they’re walking out the door to school because they’ve finally learned the routine, after four years of practicing.
It sounds crazy to think that kids’ independence would cause a parent sadness. Isn’t independence what we crave when our three-year-old follows us around the house scream-crying for the toy his brother took away or our five-year-old bursts into the bathroom because he didn’t “want us to be scared while we were going pee?”
Well, it happens. Trust me. Now that my nine-year-old takes a shower in the morning and I don’t have to check behind his ears to make sure he actually used soap, I feel a little sad that I have three extra seconds on my hands.
But if you ever start feeling too sad about your kids’ emerging independence, all you have to do is get on the phone. This will provide the perfect opportunity for them to engage in a heated argument about the red LEGO piece one of them took from another—because none of the other five billion red LEGO pieces in their collection will work—and, even though you’ve taught them effective methods of conflict resolution, they won’t be able to resolve this argument with anything but a good old-fashioned fist fight. And the person who will most likely be on the other end of the line is a receptionist for your kids’ pediatrician’s office, who will politely try to ignore what’s going on in the background even while you’re asking her to please repeat the confirmation for that appointment, for the fourth time.
You could also press play on an audiobook or a podcast you’ve been meaning to listen to or (bless you) sit down to actually read a book while your boys are outside, entertaining themselves with sidewalk chalk. You can be sure that as soon as your finger hits the play button or your backside hits a chair, one of your children will come screaming into the house because he tried to smash the blue stick of chalk under a giant rock and he accidentally missed and smashed his toe instead and now it’s probably going to fall off and he actually wishes it would, because he can feel his heartbeat in his pinkie toe.
Well. At least you read a whole sentence this time.
You could sit down on the toilet. That’s when your kids will need you to get something down from a cabinet they can’t reach—like a cup, which they’ll use, as soon as you disappear back into the bathroom, to fill with water, submerge twelve LEGO pieces and the house keys (without mentioning this to you), and stick in the freezer just to “see what happens.”
Or you could sit down to eat at the same time everybody else in your family sits down to eat. What a luxury, right? You no longer have to eat cold dinners. Unfortunately, this is probably the time when your kid, who’s been drinking out of a regular cup for three years now, will accidentally knock over a brimming-with-milk Iron Man cup, because he was trying to reach across the table for more spaghetti before he’s even inhaled his first helping. And you’ll have to do what you’ve always done. Hand him the paper towels, watch him mop it up (not much more skillfully than when he was three), and then mop up behind his mopping, because perfection is the name of your game.
Or maybe just start talking to your partner, assuming that, because the kids are capable of caring for themselves now, they won’t need you and you can actually finish a whole conversation in one sitting. But this is when they’ll remember that they forgot to tell you an entire minute-by-minute narrative of how their day went, and even though they’ll politely wait for you to finish before they’ll start their story, they’ll also stare at you the whole time they’re waiting, and you can actually feel that wide-eyed gaze burning holes in your head, stealing your thoughts. You’ll look at your partner, shrug, and listen to the random observations of a six-year-old before trying to remember what it was you needed to say to the other adult in the room (it will take you three days to remember).
Or you could try to go to sleep. And then they’ll knock on your door with such urgency that you think this must surely be an emergency, and you’ll fly out of bed, fling the door open, and see before you no one who is bleeding, passed out, or dying, or any kind of fire anywhere to be found—all emergencies as defined by your Family Playbook. No, sorry, baby, your stuffed animal losing a back leg because you and your brothers were playing tug-of-war with him is not an emergency. Go back to bed.
Get used to your kids doing anything on their own, and actually start missing the times when you were needed, and almost without fail, they will make sure you feel needed again. Think I’m kidding? Start missing changing your baby’s diaper. Someone in your house will wet their pants in no time.
It’s no easy thing to pass from the I-need-you-all-the-time stage to the I-need-you-sometimes stage and then, inevitably, to the I-don’t-need-you-at-all-anymore stage. It’s also hard not to wish for an easier stage when you seem to be stuck in the I-need-you-all-the-time stage. I’ve been stranded there for almost ten years. I’d like to sit down for five minutes, please.
Also, stop growing up so fast, kids.
Just five minutes where you don’t need me? Five seconds?
But here, let me do that for you, baby.
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.
by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
We’re sitting around the table, talking about our days like we always do, when my husband says, “We got some negative podcast feedback today.”
“Oh, yeah?” I say.
He tells me about this product manager with Facebook, who wrote in to say that as much as he wants to recommend the show to his friends, he just can’t do it because of my husband’s involvement. My husband, according to this man, hasn’t had the kind of success people would expect from a business owner giving business advice.
This exchange comes at the beginning of our meal, just before we get to our thankfuls, and it thoroughly and completely derails me. So it gets to my turn, and I can barely think of anything that deserves my thanks, my whole mood shot through with rips and holes and great big tears. I think about my lost job and our money worries and what might or might not come next in the lineup of success, and my stomach twists, way deep down.
My husband knows, of course, because he’s that kind of man. He smiles and says, “It doesn’t really matter. I know I’m successful.” And I know he’s right and I know he knows, but something about it just won’t let me go.
That word, success, is a dirty one, snaking all through my past.
A man’s hasty criticism sends it striking again.
///
I spent my four years of high school constantly stressed about grades—because, you see, I wanted to go to college, and I knew my mom and stepdad could not afford it. I needed to graduate valedictorian, because it was the only way I would make it to college, since valedictorians in Texas are given free tuition at their college of choice for at least the first year of attendance. So I watched those class rankings, every six weeks, like they were life and death.
I came out on top, and my classmates held an election right before graduation for all the yearly yearbook awards: Most Beautiful, Most Talented, Most Athletic, Most Popular. They voted me Most Likely to Succeed.
“Because you’re smart,” they said. “Because you know so much. Because you always find a way.”
They could never have known the pressure that award carried in its flimsy paper particles and its forever photo buried in a maroon yearbook.
I went off to college, one hundred twenty-six miles from home. I had never been away from home longer than three weeks at a time, and by month two, I wanted so very badly to go home I cried myself to sleep every night. I missed my mom. I missed my whole family. I missed all the familiar. But I could not go back, because that is not something a person who was Most Likely to Succeed would do.
So, on the worst nights, I pulled out the coloring page my fifteen-year-old sister had sent me, the one with Garfield and Odie colored in muted oranges and yellows, the one that said, “Wish you were here” in a little cloud bubble beside Garfield’s scowling face. And I whispered what I could never, ever admit to anyone.
I do, too.
///
Success comes breathing down our necks, and its breath is foul and suffocating and inescapable—because it is everywhere in the world. In magazines profiling the “most successful” people in the world, according to how much they’re worth in a year’s salary. On billboards where famous personalities tell us to watch their shows. In books and on screens and next door to us, where the Joneses live.
Success looks like how big a business you build in the least amount of time or how much money you have in your bank account. It looks like big houses and luxury cars and a name that means something when spoken.
Success, the way the world defines it, carries pressure in its scales. It can hypnotize us into believing its shallow lies. It will tell us what to do and how to live and who we should be.
I can see its venom weaving in and out of all my younger years. I took jobs and turned others away because of it. I bought a two-door silver five-speed car because of it (two doors looks more successful than four, silver is sleeker than blue, five-speed is faster than automatic). I wanted a bigger ring because of it (because the bigger the diamond, the greater the catch, right?). I fell hard into its nest.
And then something happened.
///
As college graduation approached, I did not worry like all my friends. I already had a job at the Houston Chronicle. I had a brand new car and thousands in the bank. I had an engagement ring on my finger.
I was going to be prolific.
For a time, that Most Likely to Succeed award felt just right. I was proving it true.
Money? Check.
Prestigious job? Check.
Husband? Check.
By the end of that year, I would add several writing awards to the list, and later we would start a band and play around town and then the state and then all the way up through the Midwest.
On the road home from a gig in New Mexico, my cell phone rang. It was my mother. My grandmother, she said, was dead.
My grandmother, the one I’d lived with for a year during my childhood, when my parents were divorcing. My grandmother, who had offered her house for six months during that Houston Chronicle job and cried the day I left for San Antonio’s newspaper. My grandmother, beside whom I was too busy to sit those nights she watched the news—instead holing away in a room planning my elaborate Cinderella wedding.
Her death devastated me. I counted back all those married months, forty of them, and I had only seen her three times—once after we returned from our honeymoon and she picked us up from the airport and begged us to stay the night, because it was too late to drive from Houston back to San Antonio and she knew we were tired from the flight, and we said no, because we wanted to get home and get on with our married lives; once for our year anniversary trip to Disney World, when we needed her to drop us by the airport; once when she came down for my firstborn’s baby dedication, the day I watched her hold him from the stage while I cried through singing the lullaby I’d written for him.
How had this happened?
My grandmother was a school accountant of some kind for all her working life. She never made much money, never kept any money in savings because she was too busy buying her grandkids gas so they’d drive to see her or treating her kids to dinner or writing a check for a granddaughter’s wedding dress. She stayed put in a no-promotions job because she enjoyed the summers off and the way she could keep her grandkids for whole weeks at a time.
I learned something the day we all gathered to celebrate her life. I learned, or maybe I always knew, that she was the very definition of success.
///
Success lives in who we are, not what we have.
Success is found in the way we look at our spouse in the middle of an argument. It’s found in the way we talk to our children when they’ve done something wrong. It’s found in the relationships we keep with family and friends and neighbors and strangers. It’s found in the deepest spaces of a heart. The world, the ignorant words of others, the critical eyes of people, can make us forget this.
Sometimes people will look at our choices—having and raising six children, turning down a promotion because it would take too much time away from those children, remaining a one-car family because we don’t want the debt—and stamp us unsuccessful because we don’t look like the ideal. But success can never be measured on the outside. It is held within.
I wish I had realized that sooner in my life. I will never get back the time I spent pursuing a twisted version of success.
But I can redeem it now.
So tonight, in front of my boys who will one day be men with a whole world and its people trying to tell them what success means, I look my husband in the eye and say, “You are successful in all the ways that matter.”
And then I tick them off, all those successful attributes so much a part of who he is.
We may not have a bank full of money we couldn’t spend in a lifetime or two luxury cars sitting out front or a vacation home in that place we always wanted to live. But what we do have, this life full of laughter and presence and joy, is so much better than all that.
The world can take its success definition and cash it in for an empty life.
I’ll take my full one any day.
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 Jungwoo Hong on Unsplash)
by Rachel Toalson | Poetry
Beginnings
It’s the end of one
year and the beginning of
another, fresh start.
Time
I can’t grasp the years,
though the days stretch long; time’s a
shadow left behind.
Years
They say the days are
long but the years are short, and
I understand now.
Endings
We’ll watch a closing
door like it’s the last one—but
one always opens.
These are excerpts from Life: a definition of terms, a book of haiku poetry. For more of Rachel’s poems, visit her Reader Library page, where you can get a couple of volumes for free.
(Photo by Aron on Unsplash)
by Rachel Toalson | Crash Test Parents
I have a favorite child today.
It’s the boy who carried my laptop down the stairs because his mama’s foot is broken and he knows she needs a free hand to hold onto the stair rail so she doesn’t fall again. He carries it so carefully his eyes are opened wide in concentration, and he places it exactly in the right place on the couch where he knows I always sit at this time to feed the baby.
He’s my favorite until it’s nap time and he won’t put away the LEGO pieces he wanted to play with and then, when my back is turned because I’m putting the littlest one down, he smuggles that (quite impressive) creation under the covers and thinks I can’t hear him snapping and unsnapping pieces.
Then my favorite is the one who stacks his books into a neat little pile at the foot of his bed instead of scattered all over the floor like a book carpet, who fell asleep right away and didn’t need any reminders that right now is nap time and not play time.
He’s my favorite until he decides to wake all his napping brothers, because he fell asleep first—which means he’s logically the first one awake again—and he looks at the hangers in his closet and thinks they might be a perfect tool to use in his wake-up plan, so he craftily removes all the clothing from the hangers, arranging shirts and pants and even shoes in what looks like crime scene positions all over the floor and then rains the hangers all over the faces of his sleeping brothers.
Then my favorite is the one who remembers to go potty before we get in the car to go pick up his older brothers from school and isn’t hysterically whining about how badly he needs to go potty and how he really, really, really doesn’t want to go in his pants, which makes panic close off the back of my throat, because I really, really, really don’t want to clean up a toddler’s feces, but there’s a school zone and kids running everywhere and no accessible bathroom that doesn’t require unpacking everyone and at least fifteen minutes of wasted time, judging by the school pick-up line.
He’s my favorite until we get back home and I’m helping his older brother put some things away and he decides he wants a cup instead of a thermos, even though, to date, he’s only ever spilled a cup of anything and we’ve told him he needs to be a little bit older before he drinks from a lidless cup, and he does exactly what he nearly always does: spills it, and two boys slip in the water he didn’t tell anyone was there.
Then my favorite is the boy who goes outside to play and comes back in with a wildflower he found in the yard that reminds him of me because it’s so beautiful and he just had to pick it so I could put it in my hair and match beauty with beauty.
He’s my favorite until he comes back downstairs in his third new outfit since he got home from school half an hour ago and proudly tells me he put both the previously worn shirts and shorts—worn for a collective ten minutes—in the dirty clothes hamper and not on his floor, and, also, he’s wearing twelve pairs of socks.
Then my favorite is the one who lopes downstairs to ask if I want to listen to an audio book with him, because he knows I love reading while I’m cooking dinner and setting out plates, so I say, yes, of course, and we share a story while he sits at the table building LEGO creations and I brown some meat for tacos.
He’s my favorite until he mentions casually over dinner that I might have thought he was doing homework in his room after school but what he was really doing was drawing his new comic book and he’ll have to do his homework tomorrow morning (which will never happen. He and I both know this.).
When I was a kid, I was convinced that my mother had a favorite child. Now I understand that her favorite was always changing. Each one of my children can be my favorite in these snapshots of time when they do something or say something unexpectedly sweet or when they follow instructions to the letter or do what was asked without arguing or sassing.
Parents do have favorites. It’s just that the favorite is always changing, constantly rotating through the inventory.
Except the baby, of course. He’ll always be my favorite. At least until he hits age 3.
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
I recently had the privilege and pleasure of returning to the library I visited every Saturday as a kid. My mom is the library director there, and she asked me to do an author event. I readily agreed. With a crowd of old school friends, old teachers, and strangers, I talked about my journey from small-town girl to published author.
I came from humble beginnings, but I always knew I wanted to be an author. I soon learned that people like me—the poor—weren’t supposed to be authors; we were supposed to be workers, not creators. We were supposed to try harder to pull ourselves from the cycle of poverty, and creative work wasn’t real work. We were supposed to accept our lot in life and go about our business if not happily, then at least diligently.
Though she didn’t divorce my father until I was eleven, my mother spent most of my childhood as a single mom, while my dad was away working a job that didn’t provide her any money. Money was tight. She was creative and stretched it as far as she could. She worked two jobs to do it. But she always seemed able to provide me with an endless supply of stapled-together white paper and sharpened pencils. I ran through these blank “books” rapidly, writing and illustrating stories very similar to Little House on the Prairie, (though the drawings were nowhere near the quality of Garth Williams’s illustrations).
In middle school my English and Reading teachers recognized something me. They told me I was good at writing, and that made me think maybe I could do it. In high school my teachers affirmed that gift, inviting me to enter writing competitions, publish in small magazines, and develop my skill in big and small ways. I got a full scholarship to college on the strength of my entrance essay, which my high school counselor encouraged me to write.
I speak out often on behalf of the poor—about their need for support, the complicated circumstances that keep them stranded in lack, the way we are all different even while we share the same seams of a story. And any time I speak about it, old high school friends come out to say, “Yes, but you made it out. Why can’t they?”
I made it out; why can’t they?
It’s a difficult question to answer, and, of course, there are never simple answers to any questions. I made it out because I hailed from different circumstances—I had a mother who believed in me and told me every chance she got. I made it out because I had the right personality; I’ve always been tenacious, even while carrying a good measure of self-doubt, and that helped me climb from the pit (not without a few falls, but I’ve never been one to stay down for long). I made it out because all along my way I had someone calling me higher—people who loved me and wanted the best for me and believed I could actually accomplish it.
My making it out was a group effort; I am not who I am—did not become who I am—alone. I am who I am because of the people in my life.
Every situation is different, which means I can’t say for certain why someone can’t climb out of their own poverty pit. Poverty is a cycle for a reason; many don’t have the support or fortune to pull themselves up by the bootstraps, as the saying goes. Many don’t have bootstraps at all; they fell off a long time ago.
I often tell people that I feel as though I was swept along in a tide that I could not control and could not stop, as if there was something invisible carrying me to where I am now. For me, that tide is God; for others it is, perhaps, a coincidence. A lucky streak. A fortunate turn of events. I am not here to argue; I only know that I have become because of a long line of people believing in, supporting, and encouraging me to become.
And today, as any other day, I feel incredibly grateful that I never walked alone. And I think, as I so often do, about those who are alone. I hope we can find them and give them what my helpers gave me: hope, identity, and a way out.
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 Matt Howard on Unsplash)
by Rachel Toalson | Poetry
i
Spindly legs running
brown eyes flashing in anger,
hope, love. He is Gift.
ii
Words, valor, life, they’re
his strong suit. He’s unafraid.
I call him Wonder.
iii
Daring, wild one
who risks at every turn, yet
won’t quit. He’s Courage.
iv
Attitude, he shows
it at every turn, strong-willed,
secure. He is Love.
v
Friends found in every
stranger, he shines his light of
words. He is Kindness.
vi
Open grin, wide eyes,
contagious laughter, smiles,
dancing. He is Joy.
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 This is Now Photography)
by Rachel Toalson | Crash Test Parents
How about I let you in on a secret that will save you so much time: When we take on a tidying, throwing-out project, we cannot—I repeat, cannot—let our children know about it, or, worse, witness it.
You probably already know this, but in case you don’t, you’ve been warned.
The problem, you see, is that when kids notice you’re cleaning out a room, stacking up all those “beloved” stuffed animals they don’t use anymore or clearing out space in their closet for the next year’s clothes or setting all those toys they never play with anymore in the pile labeled “garage sale” (Wait. I don’t do that anymore. I get rid of it.) or throwing away the puzzles missing half their pieces that will, by all accurate estimations, never be found, they freak out. And I mean FREAK OUT.
But then, if you take heed of the danger that is letting kids know you’re on a tidying rampage and keep it a secret operation, the problem then becomes, how is this possible?
Kids are like ninjas, breaking into a locked and barricaded room to look through and dismantle a discard pile you don’t even remember leaving there. They sneak into your bedroom at night while you’re already sleeping, as if they can sense what’s in that trash bag stashed in your closet, and they’ll pull out all those books with missing pages and torn covers. They can slip into a room while you’re looking the other direction and undo your we’re-throwing-all-this-away work in 2.5 seconds, and the whole room will look like a crayon volcano exploded.
It’s impossible to keep kids from seeing and sensing. In fact, I’m convinced they have a sixth sense called “What my parents are throwing away today.”
They can sense when a parent gets a wild hair and convinces herself that she could probably organize this whole room in a morning, while they’re drawing happily at the table (never happens. It’s just wishful thinking.). Kids inherently know when something of theirs is being discussed, even if it’s silently in your own head. They will barge into a room that you were sure you locked behind you, at the least opportune moment, when you’re standing in the middle of the room with that “art piece” they did at the kitchen table without asking to use paper, and they will see the trash bag open and ready in front of your feet, and they will ask you, quite frankly, what you’re doing. And you will either have to lie, or you will have to tell them you’re keeping this forever and ever (and they will remember).
Kids will do everything they can to thwart your discarding efforts.
Even when you think you’ve got it figured out, they will beat you to the winner’s line (disheartening, yes. But at least you’re not the only parent to be beaten by your kids).
This one time we put all kinds of papers in a trash bag, and I cleared out all the old toothbrushes I caught one of the boys using to plunge a toilet with a present in it, and Husband took it directly out to the trash bin in front of the house, where it waited for the trash man to come by first thing in the morning, and when we woke up, those nasty toothbrushes magically reappeared in the cup designated to hold them, waiting for half-asleep children to paint their teeth with sewage.
Another night the 8-year-old was tasked with taking out the trash, and he found the little baby socks that are for a baby younger than three months (his youngest brother was five months old already). He pulled them out, of course, asking, “Why are these here? Why did you throw them away instead of donating them?” The answer is because I know what kind of socks they are. Crappy. They wouldn’t stay on our baby’s feet, and so I didn’t want to give them to any other parents who would feel just as frustrated as I do about socks that don’t work. Then he challenged me to think about how they could be reused. I taped them over his mouth. Perfect.
It doesn’t matter how many locks a door has on it. It doesn’t matter how dark it is inside a room. It doesn’t matter how immediate that trash pick-up is, kids will know.
Trust me. They know everything.
But here are some things you can do, if you can’t possibly keep your discarding project from your kids:
1. When one of your child’s friends comes over, send something you want to discard home with them. It’s like a hostess gift, but in reverse. “Please, take these old socks. You’ll probably throw them in your own trash, because they don’t work at all, but it’s the thought that counts, right?” Encourage your kids to give things away (just not to my kids). Then it’s someone else’s problem. And, bonus, it develops a giving heart in your kid, and gets them used to parting with things they love, like nasty toothbrushes that apparently still really mean a lot to them.
2. Wrap a grandparent’s gift with the art paper that only has one squiggly line on it. That way you can tell your kids you’re just using their works of art to bring joy to another person. You’re not throwing it away. Grandma is.
3. Tell them you will save those tennis shoes they wore in kindergarten with the soles flapping off for their firstborn son, and then, when they have their firstborn son and he asks where those old tennis shoes are (because he’ll remember), pretend there was a fire he never knew about.
4. Wrap a teacher gift with old worksheets. If your kids are anything like mine, they get offended when you try to recycle their school worksheets, even though every day they bring home fifty each (I have three in school. That’s one hundred fifty worksheets every single day). But if you reuse that worksheet to wrap a gift inside, it won’t look cheap. It will look artsy (just consult Pinterest if you don’t believe me). And then it will be on the teacher for throwing away their worksheet. (This isn’t foolproof, of course. If you have a persistently creative child like my 8-year-old, he will come back home with the worksheets, because he wants to “keep them for himself,” which means he wants me to keep them for him. I promise, baby, you’re not going to miss this Reading Comprehension sheet about green toads when you’re 18.)
5. Try to make an art piece out of all those scribble drawings, and massively fail. That’s okay. You can always give it away to a grandparent, who is probably responsible for giving them all those art supplies that are coming out your ears anyway. Pay them back the best way you know how: with paper.
6. Have a stuffed-animal-burying service. For the ones that are looking really bad and aren’t the least bit fixable, dig a hole in the backyard and put them in it (just don’t dig a deep hole, because of what comes later). Have a memorial service, where you talk about what the stuffed animal meant to you. When the kid is sleeping, dig the stuffed animal back up and immediately take it to your friend’s trash bin down the road. They’ll never think to look there (or so we like to tell ourselves). When they try to dig the stuffed animal back up because they “just want to check on him” let them. And then explain about dust to dust and ashes to ashes. It would make a great science lesson on decomposition.
If all else fails, just sell your house and tell your kids you promised the new owners all the toys would come with it. I know it’s not entirely true…or maybe it is. There’s a new revolutionary idea. You’re welcome.
This is an excerpt from The Life-Changing Madness of Tidying Up After Children, the second 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 Ricardo Viana on Unsplash)
by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
In a few days some of my favorite people will gather around my living room table, and we will talk over turkey and heap a plate with mashed potatoes and gravy and pretend we’re trying to decide between apple or chocolate pie when we know we’ve already planned to take a slice of both. Some of us will be missing this year because of in-law dinners and lives too many states away, but a small group will sit and celebrate the sacred family tradition that is Thanksgiving.
We will start that meal with a prayer, like we always do, and the four-year-old will grin into my face, because he’s so excited his Nonny and Poppy are here; and the five-year-old will try hard to close his eyes but won’t be able to help that roving gaze, because he’s always loved a food spread like this; and the eight-year-old will shift from foot to foot, because his daddy sometimes prays a little too long.
And we will give thanks in our hearts for all we have seen and done in the year stretching between this moment and the last time we all met around a table and a turkey and two pans of green bean casserole.
Love and hope and awe and wonder meet us here.
///
It’s hard to know when those first memories of Thanksgiving began. There are flashes of days down through the years, one at a great-uncle’s house with woods looming behind it and a long wooden swing hanging from the trees that shadowed his yard and pine needles thick like a spiky carpet on the ground.
There is a great-great grandmother’s house, all of us squeezed in the tiny square footage her husband built, where legend had it she slept with a gun under her pillow because she lived alone and the neighborhood had turned a little dangerous for an old woman and she wasn’t the least afraid to use it, and I remember the way the kids would sit out on her cement porch and swing or drop pieces of paper or leaves through the little mail slot so it would fall in the middle of her living room, reminding the adults we were still waiting on that food-call.
There is a great-grandmother’s house, after the great-great and the great-uncle were gone, and this gathering looked and felt smaller because so many of the older ones had died, and others had drifted away with the dying, and it was only a handful of kids who went out front to play kickball while the adults and my Nana watched a game on her living room television. All the kids missed the false teeth flying out when a referee made a bad call and Nana screeched at the screen, but we heard the laughter of all the adults who witnessed it.
These early memories are raucous and full of children running in and out of houses, trying not to stick fingers in the pies, and I can still smell that turkey and the fresh bread and those vegetables we didn’t even know the names of.
I couldn’t explain it then, not in words, but I could feel the thanks that burst from the first bite of food, all the way to the last bite of pie, when we all felt like we might pop and surely wouldn’t eat again after this.
There was something simple and special and sacred about those shared days. They courted joy.
///
Thanksgiving Day has lost some of its magic now.
Maybe it’s because a job demands work until the very day of thanks. Maybe it’s because kids go to school and homework still comes home and schedules still remain the same until Thursday rolls around. Maybe it’s because of all who are missing now.
When all those greats were alive we had so many families gathering around so many tables, and now, this year, we have two. There are no more greats around for the little children. Those children’s parents are the ones hosting dinners now. There aren’t even always aunts and uncles who join in the festivities anymore, because we all have our own lives and our own plans and our own families.
Gone are the days of great aunts and uncles all under the same roof for the same day breaking bread and eating their fill and trying not to notice how everyone looks older this year.
I feel a little sad about this. We used to pack a house on this traditional holiday, and now that holiday demands work and dangles big sales and asks families to cut short the one day a year when they might fall asleep on a couch after eating too much turkey and no one would mind their snoring.
I miss that magic.
///
There is a Thanksgiving that stands out as scary and new and somewhat disappointing. I was nine years old, and we had just moved to Ohio because it was the only way my mom thought we would ever be a family again, since my dad worked in Ohio and our home state of Texas was a long way off. She told us the news a month before summer ended and listened to us cry about leaving our friends, and then she packed us up and we moved into a two-story house in Mansfield, six or so rundown blocks from an elementary school.
We didn’t have the money that year to go back home (Texas would always be home) and spend the holiday with my mom’s family, who held all my memories of Thanksgiving to date. So we spent the day with my dad’s family instead.
My paternal grandmother was a saintly woman. It wasn’t her fault that she and my grandfather were the only two I really knew in that group of thirty or so. It wasn’t her fault that I had never felt more like an outsider than I did that year. That day.
Cousins who had grown up together, whose names we didn’t even know and I can’t recall today, played hide and seek in Grandma’s travel trailer, and my brother and sister and I stayed out under the trees, raking leaves, because we didn’t know them and they didn’t know us, and raking leaves at least gave us something to do. So we raked and waited for that screen door to open and let us know it was time to eat and we could finally blame our silence on food.
When they called, we all trampled inside a house that smelled like cabbage.
It was the first time I ever threw up after a Thanksgiving meal.
///
I wonder what my boys will remember of Thanksgiving, this holiday that is not so wild and noisy and crowded as it was in my girlhood because there is only them and a grandma and grandpa and, every other year, an aunt and uncle or two who bring a handful of cousins.
Will they remember these Thanksgiving days as thrilling, with a haze of laughter blurring them into gold? Will they remember adults playing board games and talking until the sun goes down and the whole sky turns dark? Will they remember how eagerly they waited to sit at the “adult” table, wondering every year if this one might be the year they move up past all the babies?
The spread at our Thanksgiving is nothing like it was for me as a kid, with rows and rows of homemade pies and sweet tea like syrup and a whole table full of steaming food in too-hot-to-touch bowls, but does it still look magical to my sons? Do they feel the people who are missing, all those family members who have come and long gone, or do they see a room-for-more house as full?
Do they notice the lost pieces like I do?
///
Then there was the first Thanksgiving without my maternal grandmother.
She had been there for all of the holidays I could remember but one, short and regal with black and white curls, always quiet in a corner chair so she could observe her family, because she was content simply to be in the same room with all of them.
She died in early February the year I only had one baby, and no one was thinking of Thanksgiving the day we gathered inside a church and mourned our great loss in gushing sobs until we had headaches and swollen eyes and a whole pile of crumpled tissues stuffed in the bottom of our purses.
No one thought of Thanksgiving when it came around, either. It came and went, without my aunts and uncles or any of the people left who might have carried on this sacred tradition of Thanksgiving Dinner. We didn’t carry on.
That year I hosted a small family gathering at my house, where my brother and sister and mom and stepdad and husband and only one baby boy sat down at a table set for six, with a highchair hanging on the end. It was the smallest family gathering we’d ever seen for Thanksgiving, because the one who held all the rest of us together was gone.
I didn’t know then that it would become the new standard for a family with a missing piece.
///
How much do we lose in this place of smaller family gatherings? I don’t really know.
As much as I grieve my family’s loss of larger gatherings, I cannot separate myself from something else I have learned in my adult years, something I never had to know as a child. In our world, there exist those with no family left and those who can’t physically travel to their family and those who have long been rejected by their family, and what about these on a day like this?
There are those who don’t eat half as well as we do on Thanksgiving, or any other day, and what about them? How do we even celebrate family around the abundant spread of a table when there are those who are lost and hungry and alone?
Maybe the answer to those spaces left in our home by the ones who are gone waits right outside our doors, at the house beside ours or the one behind the park or the street corner down the way, where the man selling newspapers works just another day of his life. Maybe we become family for those who have none.
My table will be full for Thanksgiving this year, but there is room still for more. I want to find them. I want to know them. I want to bring them home, into the fold of light and love and laughter like I have known.
It’s Thanksgiving, and we will eat and we will reminisce and we will give thanks for all we have and the people we love and the whole last year’s beauty. But that is not The End of Thanksgiving. Because true Thanksgiving becomes thanks-living, and thanks-living means thanks-giving to the world, to all those who need what we have, be it food or presence or simply an invitation.
So this Thanksgiving, I see the hollows and the spaces, and I thank God for them, because, even now, they are waiting to be filled.
Someone is waiting to be filled.
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 Hannah Busing on Unsplash)
