Green like his
eyes
Green like the grass
where I used to sit
in the shade,
beneath trees,
with a book,
reading away my reality
Green like the car
we called a boat
that didn’t have
working seat belts
in the back.
Green like the magnolias
that bloomed while he
waxed his yellow truck
Green like the air
around us
when he left
Green like his
eyes
I’ve become a big fan of Marcus Sedgwick and his creative young adult novels. Midwinterblood is the second one of his books I’ve read, and it was just as good as the first one (The Ghosts of Heaven).
What I love about Sedgwick is that he’s very experimental with his narrative. This one was incredibly creative and beautifully written—tragic and yet hope-filled. I don’t even know how to categorize it: a young adult sci-fi paranormal about the enduring nature of love. It had all those elements.
Here are 3 things I enjoyed most about it:
Probably the best part of the book were the first lines:
“The sun does not go down.
This is the first thing that Eric Seven notices about Blessed Island. There will be many other strange things that he will notice, before the forgetting takes hold of him, but that will come later.”
Midwinterblood is a fantastic novel full of intrigue, mystery, and philosophical wonderings.
The above is an affiliate link. I only recommend books that I personally enjoy. I actually don’t even talk about the books I don’t enjoy, because I’d rather forget I ever wasted time reading them. But if you’re ever curious whether I’ve read a book and whether I liked or disliked it, don’t hesitate to ask.
It was date night, the first one since having our new baby twelve days before. We’d just finished our dinner and decided to stop by the store to pick up a few baby necessities, since our son was sleeping soundly in his car seat (which we carried into the store, don’t worry. I’m not a completely incompetent parent.) and the other five were at home (hopefully) asleep with a sitter.
We were almost through the checkout line when a woman rolled into the space behind us. She had her grandbaby sitting in the basket, chattering in an unknown baby language. Her husband stood behind her.
And because I’d just pulled up the car seat cover to check on my little one, she noticed him and said, “Oh my goodness! You have a brand new baby!”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said politely as Husband stood paying. I turned to put the bags in the cart.
That’s when her husband said, “Oh, looks like she’s got another one on the way!” all excited and proud of himself for noticing.
And I swear we heard that woman say, “Uh-oh,” while Husband and I tried to hold it together. We made it all the way to the exit doors before we burst out laughing. We laughed all the way home.
The next day, thirteen days postpartum, we stopped to get an oil change at this place Husband frequents, where you can just sit in the car while they do a quick change. No kids need to be unbuckled or entertained or chased away from the parking lot. It’s the best idea ever. There should be more places like this.
The attendant knew Husband, but I’d never met him before. Still, when we were leaving, he assumed familiarity, calling, “See you soon, man,” to Husband and then flippantly remarking, “Not you, I guess. I’ll see you after.”
Husband quickly rolled up the window, and I tried not to laugh while in clear view, until Husband said what I was thinking. “After what?”
Some men are just clueless.
But lest we go easy on females and chalk it up to men not knowing any better, I must tell you the story of a woman we met at a park one week after I gave birth to twins.
Our twins, who collectively weighed ten pounds at the time of delivery, were born six weeks early, so we had to leave them in neonatal intensive care for a while, but because our other boys weren’t allowed in the NICU unit and one of their birthdays was coming up, we decided one day to take them to the park and visit the twins later that evening.
They were playing like children do, making friends with another little boy, and his mother ambled over. We got to talking about how I only have boys, and it wasn’t long before she gestured toward my postpartum belly and said, “Is this one a girl?”
“Oh, no,” I said, laughing, because I knew this was about to get awkward. I really didn’t blame her. My uterus had a lot of shrinking to do after twins. So I kept it nice and gentle. “No, I just had twin boys six days ago. They’re in the NICU right now.”
She nodded and said, “Oh,” like she understood, but clearly she didn’t, because her next words were, “So when are they due?”
I had to explain it all over again, and she apologized profusely and then gathered up her son and hightailed it out of there.
I didn’t mean to make her uncomfortable. But such is life when we’re looking through the lens of assumptions.
Nine years ago, when my first baby was born and those eating disorders and body image issues still stood way too close, these experiences would have really bothered me, but today I know the truth of it. I know that something incredibly amazing happens to a woman’s body when she’s growing a human being. I know that in the days after, her stomach won’t just POOF! back into place.
You see, the uterus has fed and housed a new baby for nine whole months, and it can’t be rushed in its shrinking back to normal. Shrinking takes time. It’s not done in a day or a week or even three. For a time, we will still look just a little bit pregnant, with a bump that could go either way. (And it’s different for every woman, so comparisons aren’t constructive.)
So when is it okay to assume that a woman is pregnant?
Never.
But if you really want to try (God help you), and you’re feeling brave, here are some (mostly) foolproof giveaways:
1. She doesn’t have a newborn baby with her.
2. She tells you she’s expecting.
3. She doesn’t say she just had a baby.
4. She announced a pregnancy on social media but she hasn’t yet announced a birth.
If you’ve checked all the above and answered no, there’s one really important one left:
5. Her stomach looks like it’s housing an oversized basketball, she’s almost doing a standing backbend and she’s waddling significantly. And I mean significantly, because yesterday was her due date.
That’s it. Any other time? Just keep your mouth shut.
Better safe than sorry.
This is an excerpt from Parenthood: Has Anyone Seen My Sanity?, the first book in the Crash Test Parents humor 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 Janko Ferlič on Unsplash)
It’s just a tiny thing, oval and white and smaller than the vitamins I swallow every single day, but I leave it on my desk and stare at it.
It’s not the enemy. The panic-lump in my throat is the enemy, and this pill could help. I know this. But still I can’t bring myself to touch it.
More than a week ago, my doctor called in a prescription for some of the symptoms I rattled off with an apologetic laugh—lump in my throat, difficulty breathing through some of my thoughts, constant worry—and assured me I was not alone, not even close, because so many people have to take these medications at one time or another.
Yes, but this is me, I thought.
This is me, and I don’t take medication to make myself feel better, because I have faith and prayer and meditation and mindfulness and hope and joy and gratitude and love and family and Jesus.
So I let it sit on the pharmacy pick-up shelf long enough for them to restock it, like it didn’t belong to anybody in particular, and then I finally drove to the pharmacy to pick it up and a man said he could have it ready in another twenty-four hours because he’d need to fill the prescription all over again. I waited another three days and then sent my husband to pick it up, because I could not face the eyes that would see, notice, judge this woman who needed a pill to feel normal.
Two days it sat on the dresser in my bedroom, waiting, and then, today, when that lump made it hard to breathe, I took one pill out and turned it over in my hands and then let it clink back down to the bottom of an orange bottle.
I can’t do it. I can’t swallow this pill, because I can find my way out of this. I can. There is nothing wrong with me.
And if there were, what would they all think?
///
When I was eight years old, my teacher noticed I was squinting to read the words on the overhead projector, and then I was squinting at my neighbor’s page to copy her notes instead of bothering with the screen at all, and then I was holding multiplication flashcards and books and worksheets too close to my face for comfort. So she told my mom, who talked to the school nurse, who talked to my teacher and arranged an appointment to check my eyes.
It was a tumultuous time in my life then, because I hadn’t seen my father for a year, and those absences explained by an out-of-state job that paid more money than he could possibly make in our little town stretched longer and longer every time he came home and left again. And somehow, in my little-girl mind, my father’s absences had become tangled around my perfection or imperfection. Somehow it all depended on me.
Somehow I had to be perfect, and that would bring him home and keep him there for good.
But now something was wrong with my eyes. I knew it before they told me, and I didn’t want anyone else to know. I especially didn’t want my father to know.
I cried all the way to the nurse’s office, because I knew what this appointment would show. I cried standing in front of an illuminated screen, with a little plastic spatula over my left eye, not even able to read the one big lone letter at the top. I cried all the way back out, because my eyes had failed me.
I would never be perfect, and, to an 8-year-old, that meant my father would never come home.
///
I looked for all the reasons not to take that pill. I called my doctor to ask if it was really safe, because I’m a person drawn almost obsessively to natural remedies, avoidant of all toxins, and I’ve never had this problem before and I don’t like medication and there has to be another way, and why isn’t this anxiety going away on its own when I’m praying and meditating and working out my salvation and doing everything I’m supposed to do?
What is the source of your anxiety? she said.
So much sits like five-ton weights on my neck and chest and head and feet that drag slow steps through the halls of my home and hands that hold too tightly to control whatever I can control.
I name all the things that flash at random. Work. Kids. Home. Chores. Life.
That’s as far as I get, even though I could name money and bills and single-car family and my appearance and my sons, particularly the one struggling with his own depression, and sleep and marriage, too. She interrupts my list and says, Sometimes we just need help.
Right before we hang up, she says, Take care of yourself.
OK, I say, even though what I really mean is, I’ll try, because I don’t know if taking care of myself is popping a pill or letting it sit with the other 59 of them in a bottle that tells me to swallow one twice a day.
It’s another mark of imperfection, this failure of my mind and emotions.
And I don’t want anyone to know.
///
My junior high school was eleven miles from the house I grew up in, so I had to ride a bus for an hour every day to get there and back.
In seventh grade I played volleyball and basketball and ran track and sat first-chair clarinet, and every afternoon one or all of these activities had practices I attended, and at the end of those practices, all of us who lived too far away to walk a highway home packed up into a bus and rode it to a drop-off spot where parents waited for pick-up.
There was an evening when I stepped off the bus at 6:30 p.m., just like I did every other weeknight, and I did not see my mom’s gray Ford Escort.
The drop-off point was an old post office, where, years before, when we’d lived in another house just down the way, we’d been walking our dog to check the mail and a car going too fast hit our dog, named Chance for his good luck thus far, so hard he spun circles in the middle of the road running between our house and the post office that closed every day at 4.
This particular evening, I sat staring at that same highway, thinking of all the things that could have happened to my mom. Seeing my spinning dog in the middle of the highway, replaced by her tail-spinning car.
I tried to shake off the fears, but what if she’d had an accident coming here to pick me up? What if she was dead? What if it was my fault? Who would the three of us, my brother and sister and me, live with, since we hadn’t heard from or seen our dad in three years?
I finally decided I’d walk the eight miles home when my mom pulled into the drive, fifteen-minutes-that-felt-like-fifteen-hours late. The gravel spun under the tires as she came to a stop, and I coughed on the dust, or maybe the emotion, and got in.
I stared out the car window, all the way home, trying not to cry as my leftover fears tripped down the highway behind us.
///
I stare out another car window now, trying not to cry, because I don’t want my husband or my sons to see just how fragile I feel.
We’re on our way to lead worship to a group of teenagers, and I feel like a fraud. We will sing about not being afraid and walking on deep waters with faith ready to be stretched, and here I am sinking in the rip tide of anxiety and fear.
I try to work out some of my feelings with my husband on the way. He tells me I should attempt to put our problems in perspective by considering others’ problems. At least we’re not homeless, he says. At least we have healthy food in our refrigerator. At least none of our children are terminally ill.
The rock of anxiety shifts and grows and hardens. No, I say. That’s not how anxiety works. I feel more anxious now, because what if? What if those things happened? “What if” is the tripwire of an anxious mind. The future is the playground of an anxious mind. Imagining the endless possibilities of what can and might happen are the hazardous snares of an anxious mind. Stop making it worse, I want to say, but of course I don’t.
He tries another tactic. Try spinning things in a positive light, he says, try nipping my negative thoughts in the bud, try practicing positivity, but, no, this is also futile for an anxious mind. Every try and subsequent fail simply makes me feel like more of a failure, because I can’t do it on my own, and God why can’t I? Why can’t I just be happy? Why can’t I let it go? Why do these worries and fears circle round and round in an unstoppable dance of fury and fate?
I have a good life. I have a husband who loves me, kids who mean the world to me, a career I would never, ever trade for another.
Why can’t I just be happy?
What is it, then? my husband says. What specifically is it?
This is the question I can’t answer, so I start crying instead. I can’t talk about this right now, I say, because we’ve pulled into the parking lot and it’s time to unload the kids and go plug in our instruments and do a sound check and then sing like the words and melodies wipe away all our troubles.
And because it’s everything.
It’s everything, all piled and tangled and curled into those weights with barbs and spikes that puncture me every time something else goes wrong or could go wrong or might possibly go wrong in the next twenty or fifty years.
And sure, I can tick off those gratitude lists and I can try to take every thought captive and I can post those one hundred happy days pictures, but what happens when none of it works, when seemingly simple practices can’t and don’t save a mind or a heart?
Sometimes we have walked so far down the dark and winding road of not-fine, not-okay, not in a good place, that we need help crawling back to equilibrium.
///
I grew up in two Southern Baptist churches. They were full of grace and hope and people who knew how to love a fatherless kid, or three of them. Southern Baptist, though, is a religion full of rules.
I’d set rules all my life for myself, a personality quirk that served me mostly well, and here, in the middle of religion, were more rules that held a greater purpose, and, yes, of course, please sign me up, because keeping all these rules would finally, finally, finally make me perfect in one domain, even though my eyes were bad and I’d busted up my knee in high school volleyball and I’d broken a pinkie finger in softball that never healed straight.
I could be spiritually perfect. That would have to do.
I constructed my perfect little life, keeping all those potential friends in my youth group at arms’ length, because if they came too close they would see all the hidden holes in my perfection, and I could not let them see. And then I graduated at the top of my class and rode a full scholarship to university, where, even though all those religion rules had begun weighing me down years ago, I signed up to continue in the Southern Baptist tradition on my own, away from the influence of my mom.
I led worship at the Baptist Student Ministry and attended the Baptist church they told me to attend so I could be a leader, and I sat under all those male preachers who said God was always enough and we had a Healer for all our sickness and that when we know Love we will not know fear.
And I tried to make it true for me.
No one ever told me in those churches that there might be a chance my Healer wouldn’t heal the kind of sickness that stuck in the back of a throat and the corner of a mind and froze around the edges of a heart. They only told me to have faith enough to move mountains.
The problem was: this mountain wouldn’t move.
///
We are back home and the kids are in bed, and once again I’m sitting here staring at a pill they said I shouldn’t need if I believed enough; staring at a piece of science they said proves my faith needs drastic, fundamental improvement; staring at a tiny little thing they said tells a definitive story of my spirituality.
I have learned much in the years that roll between then and now. I have learned that there is a fear that can be known in Love, and it is called anxiety. I have learned that there is a place where joy doesn’t come in the morning, and it is called depression. I have learned that taking every thought captive or praying unceasingly or believing that a mountain can move sometimes isn’t enough.
I have learned that we don’t get to choose our disorders, and no amount of faith or joy lists or gratitude tries can change the hold our disorders keep on us. I have learned that seeking help of any kind for the disorders that rob our lives of joy and hope and peace does not mean our faith or our God or our own hearts and minds have failed us. I have learned that we will not overcome by hiding in a dark room and pretending depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, suicide, do not exist for the religiously pious.
I have learned that courage doesn’t always look like jumping out of a war-plane into enemy territory or rushing into a burning house or opening a heart to fix a vessel block. Sometimes it looks like staring at the precipice of ending things and then facing one more day and then another and then another after that, because this is jumping from a war-plane into enemy territory. Sometimes it looks like braving the truth of our disorder and all the opinions and condemnation and misunderstandings that come with it, because this is rushing into a burning house and living to tell about it. Sometimes it looks like popping a pill and letting it work its magic in our mind, because this is our open-heart surgery.
I have learned that there is no shame in inviting medication into our journey toward healing. The world can make us feel like there is, but the world is not telling the truth. There is no shame here. There is only courage. The Healer sends healing, and sometimes it looks like a miraculous mind makeover, but sometimes it looks like a no-less-miraculous tiny white oval.
So I swallow the pill, and I close my eyes, and I thank God for the help finding my way back to an even road, maybe for the first time in my life.
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 Riley Briggs on Unsplash)
New Year
The new year begins
with fanfare, but the quiet
moments pave its way.
Happiness
We play a game of
Uno, laughing till we cry
It’s all in good fun
Advice
The whole world’s working
against you. You might lose. Fight
damn hard anyway.
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 Ian Schneider on Unsplash)
I am a super-fan of Jason Reynolds and read pretty much every book he comes out with—whether it’s middle grade or young adult. So it was with great anticipation that I picked up his newest book, Patina, the second in a semi-series about kids who run on a special community track team.
This book was just like any of Reynolds’s other books: sweet, engaging, thought-provoking, and necessary.
Patina (Patty) is a girl who feels she has to take on the responsibility of caring for her family, since her mother lost her legs to diabetes (she doesn’t like that diabetes has the word “die” in it, either), and she runs to get away from all those responsibilities.
Here are three things I enjoyed most about this book:
The character. Patty was an engaging character who reminded me of myself when I was 11, because she took on a lot of responsibility and stepped into the holes with her little sister. She was also a fighter and I loved that about her; she had opinions and grew into herself and those opinions as the book progressed.
2. The track element. I loved reading about track and Patty’s experience on a relay team and especially loved that she had to simultaneously learn how to be part of a team on the track and in her home. She had to learn how to trust that other people would take care of things, and she had to rely on them, too, to do what she needed to do.
3. The frame. Every chapter was framed by a to-do list; this depeened Patty’s personality and also was further evidence of how she changed as she began to grow into herself.
One of my favorite to-do lists was the very first one, which showcases Patty’s view of life at the beginning of the book:
“To do: Everything (forgetting about the race and braiding my sister’s hair.)”
This was followed by the first line, which further showcased Patty’s personality:
“Ain’t no such thing as a false start. Because false means fake, and ain’t no fake starts in track. Either you start or you don’t. Either you run or you don’t. No in-between. Now, there can be a wrong start. That makes more sense to me. Means you just start at the wrong time. Just jump early and break out running with no one there running with you. No competition except for your own brain that swears there’s other people on your heels. But ain’t nobody there. Not for real. Ain’t no chaser. That’s what they really mean when they say false start. A real start at the wrong time.”
Patina was another solid book from Reynolds. I can’t wait for my boys to read it.
*The above is an affiliate link. I only recommend books that I personally enjoy. I actually don’t even talk about the books I don’t enjoy, because I’d rather forget I ever wasted time reading them. But if you’re ever curious whether I’ve read a book and whether I liked or disliked it, don’t hesitate to ask.
The other night we were just settling down for dinner, and the 3-year-old sat in his chair, looking at us all, waiting for his turn to speak.
It’s not often that the 3-year-old twins are given a chance to speak in our house, because there are a lot of people talking all the time—about school and Minecraft and Pokémon cards—but this time we could clearly see that he had something important to say, so we let him. And what he had to say was as profound and wonderful as you’d expect from a 3-year-old:
“I’m going to toot on the table,” he said and then giggled.
Okay. So it wasn’t at all profound and wonderful. But it did shed some light on circulating smells that were more potent than the actual salmon sprinkled with lemon on the table before us. It’s not like this is something new, however. Boys bring with them many smells in a typical day.
I live in South Texas. That means that, for ten months out of the year, when boys go play outside, they will most definitely come back in smelling like a wet dog. They don’t notice the smell, of course, because they don’t really know what it means to smell bad. But I notice. I’m in the middle of cooking dinner, and it smells like a sheepdog that waded through a pool of sewage just stepped inside my kitchen. When I turn around, I see that it’s not a sheepdog at all, it’s the 5-year-old coming in for a drink of water before he races right back out into the sauna to sweat some more while flailing on the trampoline.
If we spend a day out on the town, where we walk around the historical streets of our city, visiting the Alamo and the Riverwalk and a local park and admiring all the horses pulling carriages, we will have to roll down the van windows on our way home, because the smell of our boys is much stronger than a horse pasture. The one who should be wearing deodorant doesn’t see much use in it, so add to that horse-pasture smell a distinct and mighty body odor.
“What’s that smell?” they’ll say, and Husband and I will just laugh, because if there’s anything that’s impossible in the world, it’s convincing boys that the smell that makes them wrinkle their noses is actually coming from them.
It’s not just the smells they bring back in from outside, either. It’s also the smells that happen throughout the course of a day. Ask any of them to take off their shoes, and you will pass out cold from the fumes that radiate from their socks. I know, because every laundry day I encounter those smelly socks and I have to wear a gas mask if I don’t want to pass out and leave the fort to my 3-year-old twins.
Take a walk in their room, and you will think you are walking in an animal graveyard that didn’t quite get the bodies buried before they started decomposing. This is likely because boys like to leave their dirty clothes—and especially their damp, dirty socks—under their beds.
Pass by their bathroom and you’d swear you were walking in a sewage dump. That’s because boys hardly ever remember to flush the toilet and just let the yellow mellow into a distinctive and disgusting brown.
And then there’s the massive amount of gas that’s balled up inside their little frames. The volume of it is quite remarkable. It’s not unusual for me to be reading a story and taking a deep and adequate breath so that I can properly mimic a man’s voice, but, instead of breathing in clean air, I get a great big whiff of fart, and my nose hairs burn and the back of my throat closes up and I’m coughing it all out, because the invisible fumes that leaked out someone’s cheeks are not air at all, they’re poison to my lungs. The boys, naturally, are very proud of owning up to the fart, so we always know exactly who it was who let loose that SBD (Silent But Deadly), but when I tell them they need to hold it for another time and place, preferably when I’m nowhere around, their daddy will interject a comment about how it’s really bad for you to hold farts and it could cause all sorts of problems later. To which I’ll respond, “That’s fine, but make your bathroom the gas chamber, not this library. I would like to live.” To which they then reply that it would be impossible to make it to the bathroom before the gas slipped out.
It’s hilariously funny for them to let loose an SBD when we’re in the car with all the windows up and the air conditioning turned on high and suddenly we’re all choking and waving our hands in front of our faces because something crawled up inside someone and died and then crawled back out their fart flappers. They bust out laughing every time one of these farts makes a noise other than what is typical—like “pat” or “pop” or the whine kind, and then they’ll keep trying to do it until they have to run off to the bathroom because they tried a little too hard.
The other night I was coming in to check on my 9-year-old in the bath tub, because it was about time for him to dry off and get out so we could start story time, and I knew he wouldn’t want to miss the chapter book we’re reading. I got to my room, which is where he bathes, since we only have two bathtubs and when you have six kids you have to stagger the bathing, and I could have sworn there was a motorboat in the water. When I poked my head in, he was laughing to himself, and the first thing he said, upon seeing me, was “Do you smell it?” I hightailed it out of there, because not only did I not want to smell it, but it was also my bathroom he was making his mark in. I came back a few minutes later to tell him it was time to get out, for real, and he was passed out in the tub.
Not really. But it probably could have happened if the bathroom door had been closed instead of wide open, because the smell, thankfully, dissipated into my room. I know, because when I pulled back the covers of my bed, there was a great rush of heat that smelled like someone had dissected a bunghole and put the pile of whatever was inside it beneath my covers, especially for me. The smell was trapped in the fibers, I think.
Husband says I’m wrong about that. He says it was actually me.
Well, I don’t like to argue about technicalities. I don’t find it necessary to always be right, like some people do.
The smells that boys bring to a home can be an inconvenience when you have guests coming over to visit, but they’re, right now, easily hidden by the spritz of essential oil and a little strategic positioning of the diffusers. I realize that when they get older, my house will probably smell like a locker room, but we’ve got a little time between now and then. I’m confident that I’ll figure out a solution.
Or maybe I’ll just have to get used to it, because this is life with boys.
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.
A couple of weeks ago, a kindergarten teacher at my boys’ elementary school died tragically in a fire during the early morning hours before school. We received a note from the principal in the late afternoon hours letting us know what had happened and how it would be addressed the next day at school.
This was a first for all of us in our school community. Nothing like this has ever happened in this safe bubble in which we live. We have, up until now, been spared these hard conversations.
The morning after receiving this news, I walked my boys to school the same as I always do. We had told them about the tragedy the night before, leaving out the details that had come out in the morning papers and choosing only to tell them that a teacher they knew had died in a fire. My first grader stuck by me the whole walk to school, instead of running ahead like he usually does, and when we were almost at the schoolyard, he said, “Did she really die?”
“Yes, she did,” I said. I tried to grasp for something else to say, but there are moments that simply have no words.
“In a fire?” he said.
“Yes,” I said.
“How did she die in a fire?” he said. I could tell that he wanted a bit of reassurance that it would never happen to him, but this was something I couldn’t give him.
“Sometimes fires start and people don’t know it until it’s too late,” I said.
“So she died before the fire got her?” he said.
“Maybe,” I said. “We don’t really know.”
That was the end of his questioning at the time, but I knew he would have more for whomever would be talking to his classroom.
This boy’s classroom shares a hallway with all the kindergarten classrooms, and every morning I walk him down the length of it to his door. This morning the everything about that walk felt different—the air, the smell, the silence. The heaviness waiting for us was almost suffocating. Every single 5- and 6-year-old waiting in the hallways for school to start were quiet for the first time in history, probably. Teachers were trying to hold it together. Parents were hovering by their children. I could not look anywhere without tears burning the back of my nose.
None of my three boys who are in school had this particular teacher. I only passed her in the hallways. I didn’t really feel like I was entitled to feel as sad as I did. But I’m the kind of person who can feel the heaviness and the overwhelming sorrow and see it on the faces of others and feel it as if it’s my own. I turned away many times during that walk, because I did not want people to see me cry even though I had not known this teacher personally.
But on the walk home that day, I started thinking about sadness. We live in a world where the proper thing to do is hide our sadness. That’s why there are so many people struggling with depression, which is just anger and sadness turned inward. We don’t talk about these hard places in life, even though they’re everywhere.
The truth is, this isn’t the first hard place my boys have come up against. Maybe it’s the first tragic death they’ve had to sort through when they’re actually old enough to understand death. But they lost a sister five years ago. They know what this feels like. I know what this feels like. It feels like hurry up and get over it and then we’ll talk.
We are taught to believe that strength and perseverance and hope do not include brokenness. But that’s simply not true. Our brokenness, our sadness—they are the precursors to becoming strong and mighty. We step into our cracks and we kneel down and we pour our attention on them, and that is what becomes the superglue that puts us back together.
We do this alone and we do it together.
[Tweet “Our brokenness & sadness are not weaknesses. They are how we become strong & mighty.”]
When we turn away and hide our sadness or our mess or the hard places in our lives, apologizing that we can’t get it together, what we’re doing is denying others the opportunity to step into our cracks with us. To come alongside us and say, Hey, you’re not alone. To take our broken pieces and and glue them back into place.
The opposite of turning away is turning toward. I know that sounds obvious. But what exactly is turning toward in a situation like this one?
It’s acknowledging our sadness, however deep it goes. It’s talking about our sorrow, however founded or unfounded it may be. It’s sharing our pain, our sickness, our burdens with one another and healing together—whether that together is with friends, family or people you just met who share your own pain or sickness or the kind of burdens you carry.
Maybe some won’t always take our brokenness the right way. Maybe sometimes they’ll call us names or shame us or make us feel like we’ve done the exact thing we should never have done. But the only way to survive the hard places is to open them to the light. The only way back to strength is to acknowledge how this thing has weakened us. The only way out is through the cracks.
[Tweet “The only way to survive life’s hard places: let them shatter us & then open them to the light.”]
I hope you’ve enjoyed this inside look at my life and my perspective on clutter. Every Friday, I publish a short personal essay that includes a valuable takeaway. For more of my essays and memoir writings, visit Wing Chair Musings.
In this episode of On My Shelf, I’m talking about one of my favorite ways to laugh (hint: The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon).
This year I made it my goal to write 2 million words. I made this goal back in January, when I was struggling to find time at all to write, because of all the responsibilities that it takes to run a house of eight, manage healthy relationships and balance a fledgling business.
Honestly, I did not think it was possible to reach 2 million words, because of kids and time and so many responsibilities and the fact that I don’t have a clone. I just thought that this goal would set me firmly on my way to writing consistently and, I hoped, unceasingly.
Not only that, but I wanted this goal to frame my year, because I had decided beforehand that this was going to be a content year. I would create as much content as I possibly could so that it could be turned into books or blog posts or social media content or something that remained private, only for me and my family.
When I reached the month of November, which happens to be National Novel Writing Month (you might have participated), I only had about 30,000 words to go to achieve my goal. So I decided to smash it, and the way I would smash it was to make it my goal to write 150,000 words on a series project in the month of November, including a whole week of Sabbatical where I would not write at all—or, if I did, not toward this particular project.
I wrote 180,000 words on my project in November.
Okay, that’s great for me, but why am I telling you this? Because I believe you can do it, too.
Every year, as the old year is closing down and the new year is just beginning, I make a very comprehensive list of my goals for the next year. I do this with two-year goals and three-year-goals and five-year goals, although they’re not quite as intricate as the yearly goals are. But what these goals do for me is they frame an entire year and help me remember what it is I need to do to reach those goals.
I keep my goals on cork boards that sit on my desk. Every day, before I start work, I review them. I have them broken down into year goals, quarter goals, month goals, week goals, and everything I do is framed by these note cards.
My goals have changed a little over the course of this year, and that’s okay. What’s important is to start somewhere. Goals set us along the path to accomplishing what it is we really want to accomplish. They show us a starting place by providing a temporary ending place. They make the ridiculously impossible possible.
If you’re in this to be a career writer, the first place to start is a goal.
[Tweet “Goals make the ridiculously impossible possible. To accomplish anything, you must first have a goal.”]
So here are my best tips for making and accomplishing goals:
This one’s really important. The first year I set goals, I set some really ridiculous ones, sort of like this word count goal. That’s not bad, but if you’re the kind of person who is very goal-motivated, it’s probably not the best thing to do. I tend to shift and shape my goals throughout the year, but if you’re the kind who dies hard to those goals you set six months ago, then you’ll want to asses what is first realistically possible.
How do you do this when you’re a writer? Well, you have to keep pretty extensive notes on how much you can write in a certain amount of time. I know that if I’m writing a rough draft, I can write between 5,000 and 6,000 words in an hour. Which means if I only have an hour every day five days a week, what is realistically possible is 25,000 words a week or 1.3 million words a year. Add 20 percent, and you have 1.6 million words for the year.
I know that if I’m writing a final draft, that number falls to about 2500 to 3,000 words in an hour.
So the first thing you’ll have to do in order to find what’s realistic is assess your own writing speed and what you’ll be writing. You can do this by keeping a log of your word count in a particular amount of time.
It’s also really important that you make your goals really concrete rather than abstract. “Write on novel 1 for one hour every day” is a much better goal than “Write sometime every day.” “Write 4,000 words on novel 1 for one hour every day” is even better than the first.
Once you’ve written down all your goals for the year, focus in on either the largest goal that will take the most amount of time or the goal that’s farthest away.
If you start with the largest goal, break it down into manageable steps, and assign those steps to a month or a week or even a day if you want to get really detailed. Schedule it on your calendar, but don’t forget to break that really big goal into smaller steps. This is one of the most important things you can do.
If you decide start with the goal that’s farthest away, say, at the end of next year, work your way backward and set smaller goals for each month. My goal document has a “look ahead” section where I can see what’s coming in the next month and plan for that a month in advance. Planning is key to accomplishing goals. Do something every day toward your goal, and those small steps will get you there.
[Tweet “Do something every day toward your goal, and those small steps will get you there.”]
Each week, Husband and I have about an hour-long conversation about our goals for the quarter, our goals for the month, our goals for the next week. We ask each other questions about how we did in the last week working toward our goals and what we can do differently in the coming week that will make us more efficient or focused. It helps to bounce all of this off each other and also have a partner in accountability.
Which leads me to the last point:
It’s really helpful to have someone help you refine your goals. It could be a partner, a parent, a friend, whoever you want it to be. When you’ve jotted down some goals, set a meeting with someone else and offer to listen to their goals if they’ll listen to yours. Sometimes the most creative things come out of meetings like this.
Goals are one of the most important tools for a writer’s business, so I hope you’ll attempt to make your own ridiculous goal for the next year. And when you achieve it, be sure and let me know.
A picture is one of my favorite ways to generate inspiration. Look at the picture below. Write whatever you want for as long as you can.
Photo by Anthony Delanoix.
