by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
Dear new mama,
Here you are, sitting in the dark, waiting for your husband to get home and relieve you, wondering if you can really do this, because it’s only been three days and you’re so worn out you can barely think straight, and just today you found yourself wishing you could go back to the way it was before, when you didn’t have a baby who woke up screaming in the middle of the night, when you didn’t have to worry about counting those wet and dirty diapers, when your body belonged to you and not someone else.
Yours is a great, big, scary world right now, because those nurses released this tiny little piece of you back to you, to take home and keep, and they did not ask if you were qualified at all, just put him in your arms and waved you on down the hall.
It isn’t easy, since nothing worth doing ever is, but these first days and weeks and months will unfold and so will your love.
You’ve thought a lot, these last few days, about the mess your body has become, and I know you want to change it right now, this minute. But it takes time. Don’t rush this weight-losing, this getting a body back, this fitting into old, pre-pregnancy clothes. It’s not a race, so stop worrying about what all those other mamas will think of your post-baby body. So what if your ankles are still swollen from the hospital fluids and your eyes are still puffy from the trauma of pushing for three hours and none of your clothes come close to fitting anymore, at least not yet (maybe not ever)?
You are beautiful anyway. You are. You have done magnificent and profound work, and you are beautiful beyond compare.
No one ever tells you that there will be days when your husband comes home from work and the house is pitch dark and the baby has finally, finally, finally fallen asleep in his swing after screaming in your arms for the last two hours; when you accidentally say out loud those words beating your brain: “Can we just give him back?”; when you’ll wonder how in the world you can be a good mother now, after thinking that way. So let me be the first to tell you: these days will come. But you are still a good mother, because they come for every mother. A baby is hard work all the years of his life, and you will not enjoy every single minute of every single day, so don’t expect to. You will not outrun the guilt that comes with those expectations, so just let them go. Let them go.
There are moments that make mothering worth it, but they are not all moments.
Stop comparing yourself to others. When your son will not sit docilely in a classroom when he’s 2, listening attentively to instruction like those other perfectly-behaved children, instead of running circles around chairs, it is not your failures as a parent. I know they can make you feel like it is, but this is who he is as a person, and the world will not be served by breaking him into a box.
When you choose to go back to work instead of staying home, this is not your love-lack as a mother. They can sometimes make you feel like it is, but I know the way your heart burns for your baby when you are away from him and how it burns for your work when you are away from work. Walking with a divided heart is not easy, but you will do it, year after year after year, because you love and you care and you dream.
In just a few days, you will rush your baby to the hospital for dehydration, because your milk never let down, and I want to tell you it is not your fault. You will carry it like it is, pumping every hour and feeding in between, because those lactation consultants said it could be done, and you will feel it every time those people lined up behind you at the store surreptitiously shake their heads at your choosing formula over breast milk. Those people who shame you, they don’t understand the pain of it, how you cried for days because you felt defective, how you grieved the losing of a bond they all say comes only by breastfeeding, how you wore this failure like an “unfit mother” brand blazing your forehead.
But it is not your fault. It isn’t. And your baby will be brilliant and wonderful and securely attached anyway.
Don’t worry so much about what all those others think. They don’t know you like they think they do. They don’t know your children like they think they do.
Stop trying to be the perfect mother. It’s okay to lose it every once in a while. It’s okay to make mistakes and admit those mistakes, like how you yelled and how you dishonored and how you pushed him out the door when he wasn’t moving fast enough and how you made him cry. It’s okay to think those thoughts sometimes, how you hate raising a strong-willed child, how you sometimes just want to do the easier work of breaking instead of the hard work of molding, how you never asked for twins so why did you get them. All of us, in our weak moments, think like this, and we should stop covering our shame, because we can never walk free bent in hiding.
Remember to celebrate yourself, the person you are becoming because of this baby. One day you’ll look back and say, certainly, that the person you are today, because of his grinding and cutting and chafing, is so much better than the person you used to be.
Don’t worry so much about the future. Enjoy each season for its colors and beauty and challenge. Seize the moments–don’t even try to seize the days.
Remember that “love is the whole and more than all” (W.H. Auden). It’s what matters at the end of the day, not how few times you yelled or how often you had to escape behind a closed bathroom door or that moment you regretted having a baby. Those moments when you hugged him so tight he couldn’t even move, and those moments you helped him build a ball track with 200 wooden planks, and those moments you read an extra story to him, they’re the moments he will remember most, not the raised voice or the missing mama.
You are an exceptional mother, even if you don’t feel like it. Ignore the world and be exactly who you are, because it is exactly who your baby needs you to be.
All the best,
Me.
by Rachel Toalson | This Writer Life
Lately I have been immersed in the work of submitting a novel to potential agents. It is a long and tedious process but a process that is necessary if one wants to become traditionally published.
And because it has always been a dream of mine, I have spent the last three weeks sending out queries and writing summaries and putting together proposals.
A couple of days after I sent my first batch of queries, I got my first rejection. I saved it, and all the ones after, because by then they started coming fairly regularly, one or two a day. Some were personal “try me again sometime” notes, others were form letters, but they all said the same thing: “I’m just not the right person to represent this project.”
I could have let that rejection get to me. I did once.
Years ago, before I was even a mother, I finished my first novel. It was a book based on my mother’s story of betrayal and heartache and divorce, and how she climbed her way back out of the dark.
I sent it out to a whole long list of agents and never even got a personal letter back, just a stack of form-letter rejections I tucked away in a file somewhere. Because it was my story, too, I was incredibly close to its outcome—which means I also tucked away that rejection in my heart.
The rejection hurt. It hurt because it felt personal. So I closed up shop. For seven years.
It took me seven whole years to pick up my fiction pen again. I wish I hadn’t wasted so much time. I wish I had tried again. I wish I had shaken the dust off my sandals and kept writing anyway.
Sometimes we can become so attached to what we have written, because it holds a piece of us, that rejection of it can feel like rejection of us. So we feel tied to its outcome. What people say about it. Whether it’s accepted or lauded or ignored.
Does my writing cease to be art just because it does not reach the masses?
No.
No, no, no. A loud, resounding NO.
[Tweet “Writing isn’t art because it reaches the masses. It’s art because we created it.”]
Writers will always face rejection—because writing is subjective.
The books I like to read may not be the same books you like to read. The music I listen to may not even make it on your top 1 billion songs list. The essays I consider beautifully moving may not be the same ones you consider beautifully moving.
We see with different eyes, all of us.
[Tweet “We all see with different eyes. Rejection of our writing by one doesn’t mean rejection by all.”]
Just because a handful of agents don’t think they can “get behind” my project “passionately enough to give it proper representation” doesn’t mean my project isn’t good. I know it’s good. I know it could find an audience. I know it could hold its own in the literary world.
It’s just that these things—stories, essays, books—are so subjective.
But there is something I know surely today that I didn’t quite know all those years ago: I don’t write to get published or gain recognition or to be revered in the world of literature.
I write because it’s what I was made to do.
[Tweet “I don’t write to be revered. I write because I was made to write.”]
Even if I never, ever get a word of my stories published, even if no one ever sees the value between my lines, I will still create. And that means, this time around, rejection will not have the final word. It will not steal my fiction pen for another seven years.
I will write because I am a writer. I will write in spite of rejection. Because of rejection.
Because I can’t not write.
It’s what I was made to do. It’s how I breathe. It’s how I learn to live and move and be.
And because I know this, because you know this, rejection will not clamp its chains around us. It will not hold us down. It will not bind us to a weaker pen or crumpled up paper or a story we never finish.
It will propel us to create more and better and even lovelier than before.
3 Truths of Rejection
1. It’s not a commentary on our worth.
We can’t confuse what we do with who we are. If we do, we’ll be crushed by rejection. Just because we receive a rejection doesn’t mean we are not good at what we do. It doesn’t mean we’ll never be anything but rejected. It doesn’t mean we’re no longer who we were when we woke up this morning. If anything, we should celebrate when we collect rejection—because it’s a road map to our perseverance.
2. It’s a necessary part of the process.
Let’s think about this for a minute. No one is born a masterful writer. It takes hours and hours (research says 10,000 hours) of the right kind of practice. But if we only wait until we’re a masterful writer to get our work out there, how does that serve our ends? Sometimes rejections come with some helpful comments. Sometimes they come with throwaway comments. But rejection is always a part of the process, because the writers who aren’t collecting rejections? They likely haven’t summoned up the courage to submit. And at least you did that much. Now you get to learn from it.
3. It shows us what we’re made of.
If we can read a letter of rejection, set it aside, and finish our word count goal for the day (and we should all have one if we’re serious writers), we’ve just successfully taken a negative thing and turned it into a positive. Because the writers who can take a rejection with little more than a flinch and continue creating are writers who are in it for the long term, who won’t giving up, who will, one day, achieve what it is they dream of achieving.
Week’s prompt
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 Mink Mingle.
by Rachel Toalson | Crash Test featured, Crash Test Parents, General Blog
There’s this school of thought that really bothers me. It shakes fingers at us and says that if we think parenting is hard or we feel like giving up on a daily or hourly or minute-by-minute basis or we, God forbid, wish our kids would be different, less difficult people for a fleeting moment in time, then we probably shouldn’t have become parents in the first place.
It’s a lie.
It’s a dangerous lie, too, one that keeps us locked in chains as parents, because that’s when we start looking around at all those people who make it look so easy, who make it look as though they’re enjoying every single minute of every single in-the-trenches hour, and we can think that we are somehow deficient in our parenting abilities.
You know what the easy part of parenting is? Making it look easy.
You know what the hard part of parenting is? Every other second.
Parenting is hard. You’ll never hear me say it’s easy. It’s hard because I work really hard at it. And, also, nothing worthwhile was ever easy.
I fail every single day at this parenting gig. Every single day. Sometimes that failing looks like yelling because the 3-year-olds just poured a whole package of brand new crayons out on the table and broke 26 of them in half before I could even get to them, even though I just got done telling them to leave the crayons alone until their brothers got home. Sometimes that failing looks like speaking more sharply than I intended to the 8-year-old because I just warned him not to swing the broom like that, and he decided to do it anyway, and he broke a light. Sometimes it looks like standing in a kitchen and crying without being able to say why I’m crying, just knowing there are two many voices and too many words and too many needs knocking all at once, and it’s overwhelmingly suffocating.
But I will never pretend I don’t fail, because it’s not true. I will never pretend that parenting my six boys is not hard, because it’s not true. The world is not served by facades and pretty little pictures and perfect little examples. The world is served by imperfection and being brave enough to bare it.
So, yeah, parenting feels hard to me. It’s not because I don’t love my children. I love them with a love that is great and deep and wild enough to gouge out whole parts of me that never belonged. They are precious and wonderful and most of all beloved.
Parenting feels hard because I’m trying, every day, to be better at it than I was yesterday. It feels hard because we’re all people and we’re all imperfect and we are living and growing together in ways that can grind and carve and shape. It feels hard because these are tiny little humans we’re talking about, tiny little humans who will one day become men and women, and we get to shepherd them into that, and it is a giant, humbling, magnanimous task. A privilege. But a mountain of responsibility.
I don’t take it lightly.
I would venture to say that if parenting feels easy every second of every day, if there is never a moment where we feel like locking ourselves in a bathroom for just a breath or 50 of them, if we never wish, for that tiny split of a split-second, that they would be different people, we are probably doing it wrong.
The best parts of life demand hard work and dedication and perseverance, and the things most worth doing will, at any moment in time, feel hard. That’s how I know I’m on the right track as a parent.
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For me, parenting feels hard every time my 8-year-old forgets how he’s been taught to handle his anger and lashes out with hands instead of words, because he’s always been a gifted kid whose emotional development lags behind others his age and we’ve worked really, really hard trying to walk him toward a place of control and knowledge and healthy expression of all the emotions, not just the good ones, and sometimes it just feels like a losing battle. It feels hard when I remember what a brilliant and kind and loving little boy he is and how much good he has the potential to blast into the world, if only he didn’t have this one little thing. It feels hard when I see that school number on my cell, and I wonder if it’s him they’re calling about.
Parenting feels hard every time the 3-year-olds eat a tube of toothpaste and leave the evidence on the counter, because I have to choose not to yell and use my words in ways that will honor and teach and show grace and love even in this discipline moment that’s happened a billion times already. It feels hard when the 6-year-old wakes up on a school morning and barfs all over the Hot Wheels the 3-year-olds dumped out, not just because now it means cleaning all of that up, but also because no mother wants to see her baby sick. It feels hard every time the 5-year-old comes home from school and talks about how one of the boys in his class was mean to him on the playground, because then I just want to throat punch the bullying kid, but I have to talk to my boy about how the people who choose to bully often don’t know any better and need to be shown a better way of making friends, and he’s the one who will have to do it, because he will have to do this brave and kind and world-changing work.
Parenting feels hard when they forget who they are. It’s hard because I love so much, because I want to order their worlds just so, because I want to make their decisions for them, because I don’t want to sit by and watch those consequences break their hearts, but I have to, because it’s the only way they’ll learn and grow and stumble back to who they are.
Sometimes I don’t feel up to this task. Sometimes I don’t feel equipped. Sometimes I want to give up, but I also know that I’m a fighter. I persevere. I keep going. Which is kind of the point of all this parenting in the trenches—to show us what we’re made of. And you know what? I’m made of some pretty tough stuff.
So, no, I’m not going to suck it up, buttercup, because I have discovered something else in my eight years with these delightful little boys. Parenting is hard because I’m doing it right. Because I fail. Because they fail. Because we keep going, all of us together, along the road toward wholehearted living.
There is nothing greater in the world than this.
by Rachel Toalson | Books
I’ve been studying prize-winning books this year, taking them apart, learning what I can and letting their stories settle into me. Recently I finished two adult books written by Pulitzer Prize winners.
The Known World, by Edward P. Jones, won the Pulitzer back in 2004. I know this is an old book. It’s been on my list forever, and I finally got around to it.
It is very clear why Jones won the Pulitzer. He is a masterful storyteller and weaves an entire culture into a book. The Known World takes place on a slave plantation during the historical time when slaves were a normal and accepted part of society. Jones builds a world so believable that sometimes The Known World reads very much like a historical text, which I found fascinating. He mentions characters as if they actually exist, weaving in historical events to ground the plot in something that feels like it’s a natural part of history.
The book begins with the death of a slave master, who was a slave himself but bought his own freedom and then came upon wealth by working hard and, eventually, purchased his own slaves. This, of course, was a source of slight tension between him and his slaves—a black man owning slaves was not seen as an empathic thing in those days.
Throughout the book, Jones weaves together many intersecting story lines, examining not only life on the slave plantation but also the intriguing dynamic of the town in which the story takes place and how the sheriff deals with things like slaves escaping and men stealing slaves and, sometimes, free men, and selling them before the authorities can do anything about it. Several horrific acts happened in the book, all characteristic of that time. So The Known World is not just a commentary on the state of human affairs during slave times but also a lesson in the horrors of history.
What I like most about the book is that Jones would take a character involved in a scene, and he would strip them out of the scene for a minute and show readers their future. It was fun to see how their future was impacted by their present and how they were this one particular person at this moment in time, but they would become someone completely different. Someone better, most of the time. It lent a feeling of hope to all the tragedy in the book.
This story took a while to read, because it’s very dense, with lots of great characters and stories and so much wonderful commentary by the author. The Known World is one of those books that will need a little time to sit and unfold in a mind and a heart. Jones highlights part of our history in a way that is horrific and yet beautiful, giving us a story that tells of slave people resilient enough to dream of a better life than slavery.
Here’s one of my favorite quotes from the book:
“When he, Moses, finally freed himself of the ancient and brittle harness that connected him to the oldest mule his master owned, all that was left of the sun was a five-inch-long memory of red orange laid out in still waves across the horizon between two mountains on the left and one on the right.”
It’s a beautiful description of summer isn’t it? You can just see the waves of the sunset. It’s a perfect example of Jones’s storytelling
Let Me Be Frank With You, by Richard Ford, did not win the Pulitzer Prize but was a finalist last year. It’s the story of Frank Bascombe, wandering through life after a hurricane hits close to where he lives. It’s told in four rich, entertaining narratives.
In the first, Frank is meeting with an old friend of his to whom he sold his old beachfront property that’s now been completely destroyed by the hurricane. In the second one, he has a visit from a woman who used to live in his house, and she tells him an appalling story about something that happened when she was a child, in the basement of his house. In the third narrative, Frank goes to visit his ex-wife and gives readers a hilarious look at his underground hatred of her. In the last, he comes to terms with a dying acquaintance who shares a secret with him right before he dies—a confession of sorts.
Frank Bascombe is probably one of the best characters I’ve read in a long time. He had a hilarious voice and interjected commentary on growing older, the state of society and how the people of the world relate to each other, all of which I found delightfully entertaining. I love Frank. I’ll have to read more of Frank, and, thankfully, there are more books with Frank in them because Ford wrote Frank as a series.
Here’s Frank commenting on stress—a great example of why I love him so much:
“(What isn’t ignited by stress? I didn’t know stress even existed in my twenties. What happened that borought it into our world? Where was it before? My guess is it was latent in what previous generations thought of as pleasure but has now transformed the whole psychic neighborhood.)”
Here’s another, where he’s talking about growing older:
“I don’t look in mirrors anymore. It’s cheaper than surgery.”
And here’s one more, where he’s talking about an old dying acquaintance he really can’t stand:
“Mike’s fingers are slender and pretty like a girl’s and have trimmed, pink, well-tended nails. He is a rare breed of asshole.”
You can’t beat that kind of voice.
I hope you enjoyed these book recommendations. Be sure to pick up a free book from my starter library and visit my recommends page to see some of my favorite books. If you have any books you recently read that you think I’d enjoy, contact me. I always enjoy adding to my list. Even if I never get through it all.
by Rachel Toalson | Crash Test featured, Crash Test Parents, General Blog
A few weeks ago I got a text from my sister, who had her third baby in February. The text said, “Tell me you have days when you just can’t handle it. When walking out of the house is all you can do to survive. I just need to hear it from another human.”
I laughed out loud, even though I knew she was dead serious. And in my head were responses like “every damn day” and “just this morning” and “on a minute-by-minute basis.”
Parenting is hard. It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done, and I used to run six miles every morning in 10,000-pound humidity before commuting an hour to downtown’s Houston Chronicle office. I used to marathon-train on 10 miles of hills pushing a double baby stroller that carried a 4-year-old and a 3-year-old. I used to work for a narcissist.
Parenting is still the hardest thing I’ve ever done.
There are so many hours of my day that I just feel like giving up and hitch-hiking to downtown San Antonio’s Riverwalk, where Husband and I had a life before children—a life that didn’t include a panic attack every time a kid steps too close to the edge of the path and I imagine having to jump into that dirty black water to save him.
Like the morning last week, when the 3-year-old twins went outside into our very safe (normally) backyard while I transferred a load of laundry from the washing machine to the dryer. Two minutes, tops. That’s all it took. By the time I finished, one of the twins had come back inside, and the whole house smelled like gasoline.
“Why does the house smell like gasoline?” I said, to no one in particular. The twin looked at me. I looked at him. He had his guilty eyes on.
“What were you doing out there?” I said.
“Nuffing,” he said.
I knew it was definitely something, because of those guilty eyes. A mom always knows, after all.
His twin brother came in smelling like a gas pump, so I looked out on the deck, where they didn’t even have the foresight to hide what they’d been doing. There, on a deck chair, was their daddy’s gas can used to fill up the lawn mower the three times a year he mows. That gas can is stored behind a locked door. A locked and sealed door that somehow, SOMEHOW, these Dennis the Menaces had cracked open in less than two minutes.
They poured gasoline (less than half a gallon, for those who are concerned) all over the back deck, the grass and themselves. It’s a good thing no one in my house smokes, because we all would have been blown to high heaven.
I put them both in the bath (which was not on the schedule for the morning) while the baby stayed downstairs in his jumper seat wailing because he doesn’t like to be alone, and washed them, rinsed them, scrubbed them, rinsed them and washed them again. Husband sprayed off the deck (which also wasn’t on the schedule for the morning) and saturated all the grass, because a Texas summer hits 4,000 degrees, and we were afraid the sun might make the gasoline-drenched grass spontaneously combust and blow us all to high heaven anyway.
That morning was one of those give-up days, because there’s no way to be one step ahead in my house. There’s no way I can fully toddler-proof every room. There’s no way I can keep them out of every single thing they find to amuse themselves. It would take 23 of me.
That morning I wanted to walk out and let them fend for themselves in gasoline scented clothes that spread their stench all over the house in less than two seconds.
I used to feel guilty when feelings like this crept up. I used to beat myself up for sometimes wishing that they just weren’t twins, that there weren’t two of them ALL THE DANG TIME, that they weren’t so insatiably curious and 3 years old and nearly impossible to parent right now.
But there is something important I’ve learned in my years of parenting: Just because there are moments when we want to run away, when we want to flat-out give up, when we want to trade our kids for easier kids for just this little moment in time so we can catch up and learn to appreciate them again, it doesn’t mean that we don’t still love them with a love that is never-ending.
These little, irrational humans can be the best and worst people we know on any given day at any given moment.
There are days when I want to sit down and color next to my 3-year-olds, because they’ve just been playing so well together and the morning’s disasters have been minimal, and, gosh, I just love them so much, and then there are mornings when I want to put them on Craig’s list’s free page (I’d have to lie to really sell the idea, though. Something like “Two well behaved twins, of undetermined age.” Because what kind of crazy person would want two 3-year-olds voluntarily?)
There are hours when I love to comb through those old picture albums that show these two hooked up to machines because they were premature and remember how I fretted and cried and tried my best to help them learn how to eat, and there are days when those first moments feel like entire lifetimes apart from this moment, when they stuck their whole arm in the just-used toilet to see what poop floating in pee feels like (They already know. We’ve done this drill before.).
There are minutes when I pull them into my lap and kiss all over their faces until they’re giggling uncontrollably, because they’re getting so big and so fun, and then there are minutes when I’m half-heartedly holding their big brother away from them so he doesn’t clobber them for marking all over his journal with a giant red permanent marker they found lying around somewhere (who keeps giving us permanent markers? Please stop.).
Parenting is not for the weak. This is the hardest responsibility we will ever have in our lives. Raising another human being to be a decent person is not easy, and there are many times along our journeys when we will feel like giving up and giving in and giving out.
It just comes with the territory.
So I fire off my response to my sweet sister. “Yes,” I say. “Just about every day. Doesn’t mean you’re a bad mother.”
Because it doesn’t.
These moments when we feel the tension between wanting to give up and knowing we can’t make us stronger parents. They make us better people. They drag us into a deeper understanding of love.
Good thing, too. Because my toddler just figured out how to open a can of paint Husband left unguarded and now the pantry wall has a Thermal Spring scribble-masterpiece drying on it.
I’m going to be one amazing person by the time this is all over.
by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
I met you early in life.
I was just a girl. Just a girl looking for life. Just a girl looking for perfect. Just the right kind of girl for you.
You whispered your lies in my ear one night when a crack split right down the middle of our family.
Make him love you, you said.
Make him come back, you said.
Make him choose you, you said.
I did not know then that there is no easy answer for divorce. So I took your hand.
I skipped lunch that first day, sat out by the picnic tables with those friends who always brought their lunches so I didn’t have to smell the chicken noodle soup and cheese sticks inside the cafeteria. I forgot mine, I’d say when they asked.
The truth is, I was poor enough to qualify for free cafeteria lunches, poor enough not to have much in the refrigerator at home to even pack. But they didn’t know that.
They’d offer to share theirs, because we were all trying to attain the best body, even then, and maybe if we all ate the same thing one of us would not be skinnier than another.
No thanks, I’d say.
I was only 11, back from a year spent in a state 1,000 miles away from my home one, and now we were home again, except it was all different, all broken, because it was middle school where looks mattered, and there was no dad telling me I was beautiful, as is.
Would I have believed him anyway? I don’t know.
What I do know is that you made it easy to believe you. And once I did, you had me.
Our love affair began slow, with a stomach rumbling over lunch. But a stomach gets used to the hole after a while, and it didn’t take long before it just stopped talking about the better way I pretended didn’t exist.
You moved into the empty space. You gave me three years of skipped lunch, and then there was high school and early morning volleyball practice, and you threw out that innocent question: You don’t really feel like eating in the morning after those intense practices, do you? Wasting all those calories you worked off?
I started “forgetting” my breakfast at home.
There came a day, an early-morning tournament day, when a coach brought homemade monkey bread to give us an extra boost. I could smell the honey and the cinnamon, and it was all the things I loved most. She handed everyone a plate. All my teammates ate while I excused myself, left my plate on a counter and sat on the toilet until I was sure they’d all finished and I could pretend I’d forgotten where I’d set down my plate.
No one even noticed.
It was really too easy.
I had energy reserves. I told them eating right after an intense workout made me sick. I told them eating right before an intense workout—like the 12:30 p.m. athletics class—would make me sick.
I was sick. But no one knew about you.
Mostly because my mother saw me eat. My friends saw me missing. I didn’t waste away, because there was still dinner, however small it was. You and I covered all the necessary bases.
After graduation, when those stories started rolling in about the Freshman Fifteen, the extra pounds most freshmen come home with after their first year of college, my heart thrashed.
Don’t worry, you said. We won’t let that happen.
And we didn’t. Because college meant fewer eyes watching for when I should eat. It meant abnormal (or nonexistent) eating hours. It meant freedom to hold your hand and run away.
“Two hundred meals will be enough, right?” my mother said. “Two hundred fifty?”
“Two hundred will be fine,” I said.
I ended that semester with one hundred seventy-three meals left on my student ID card.
Mostly because you fascinated me. I enjoyed the me you carved from who I had been. The thin legs that had always been a little thigh-heavy. The arms that had always been a little tricep-flabby. The chin that was never as defined as I wanted it to be.
The new me was almost just a little bit maybe pretty.
So I let you keep doing your work. And when my college roommate noticed all my clothes sagging and dragged me to the cafeteria with her and the girl across the hall, I let your sister slip in for a time. We conducted our clandestine affair in the dorm bathroom, where I’d get rid of the chocolate cake and the mint chocolate chip ice cream and the pepperoni pizza and the enchilada casserole and the mashed potatoes with brown gravy and the buttered hot rolls with a stick of a finger or the swallow of a pill, even the night that cute baseball player came looking for me and I forgot my toothbrush.
That year ended and I came home not only without the Freshman Fifteen but without another twenty-five. I looked good. So I cut ties with you for a while, mostly because I lived with my grandmother that summer, and she cooked for me every night when I got home from my city job. I felt guilty not eating. And I couldn’t purge, because the living room was right next to the bathroom, and she would hear. She was smart enough to know. I could see it by the way she looked at me.
A year, two, three passed, and then you came back ready to play the summer before I got married.
I didn’t give up eating completely, because I was more interested in health this time around, but that interest in health didn’t stop me from packing my lunch of one cucumber and calling myself satisfied at the end of it.
“That all you eat for lunch?” a coworker once asked.
“I eat a big breakfast,” I said. Eight large strawberries was a big breakfast, in my book.
And then came marriage to a man who actually cared whether or not I ate and you and I lost touch for a time. You came to visit sporadically over the years, after the first baby, when I was appalled that my body did not immediately shrink back to its former acceptable proportions; after the third in four years, when baby weight stacked itself like it was going to stay.
After this last one and a broken foot.
It happens quickly, that sliding back into your arms.
I told myself it wasn’t going to matter this time. I told myself I would be unaffected. I told myself I was better than you.
And yet the six-week scale told a story I didn’t want to read, and those weeks after the weighing with a broken foot and a walking cast that made burning calories next to impossible I found myself skipping lunch because “I forgot” or because “the kids eat so early and I’m just not hungry when they eat” or because “I’m working and can’t really spare the time right this minute…”
Because “…”
So this last week I scheduled time to eat, and I ate. You looked on. You sneered. You shook your head. You pointed out the pooch. You laughed at my legs. You reminded me of the scale number.
But I ate.
You have been in and out of my years, whispering your untruths, pointing to your solutions that aren’t really solutions at all, luring me in.
Making me stronger.
Because, you see, every time I look you in the eye and say, “No. You cannot have me today” is another day I grow stronger. You didn’t count on this.
I don’t know how many times you will visit me in my lifetime.
I don’t know if I will ever look in a mirror and completely like—or love—what I see.
I don’t know.
But there is something I do know: You will not win.
I am stronger than I used to be when you came knocking. You don’t look quite so attractive anymore. Or fascinating. Or worthwhile.
Keep trying (I know you will), and I will keep saying no.
No.
NO.
For as long as it takes.
by Rachel Toalson | Books
Every year my boys and I sit down and make a summer reading list for them, with both books of their choosing and books of my choosing.
My 5-year-old is a great reader. He excelled in his first year of school this year, and I knew that he was ready to be challenged a bit with his reading list. He is still a very early reader and was hesitant to pick up chapter books. He wanted to keep his list to picture books. So I told him we could pick a couple of picture books, but he should try some more difficult reads, because I knew he could do it.
And then I put one of Mary Pope Osborne’s Magic Tree House books in his hand, and I’ve lost him to Magic Tree House for the rest of the summer. Not really, but he loves those books, and he’s chosen to populate his section of his summer reading list with Magic Tree House.
I chose a few more difficult reads for him this summer, just to challenge him. I chose:
1. A Light in the Attic, by Shel Silverstein
2. Dinosaurs Before Dark, by Mary Pope Osborne
3. Little Bear collection (for early readers)
4. Frog and Toad collection (for early readers)
5. The Knight at Dawn, by Mary Pope Osborne
6. The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane, by Kate DiCamillo
7. Three Tales of My Father’s Dragon, by Ruth Stiles Gannett
8. Fantastic Mr. Fox, by Roald Dahl
Some of these might seem a little advanced for a 5-year-old, but he’s also a kid who perseveres. He tries hard at everything he does, and I know that he’ll be able to get through his list before the end of the summer. In fact, he’s already done with four of these.
I wanted to take a minute to say that summer reading is so important for kids. They get out of school, and it’s all great to have free play and to spend some time outside, but there should also be a time, every day, when they’re sitting down to read. Reading is so great for the expansion of a mind, to give kids something to think about, to help them gain perspective and, also, learn the art of story. In our house, we block off one hour every afternoon for silent reading time, and then another fifteen minutes every night for silent reading.
Silent Reading may not happen easily without days and days of practice—because it’s taken us quite a while to get where we are—but it will happen if you’re willing to put in the practice. We’ve been practicing so long now that even our infant pulls out his books when the announcement comes that it’s time for Silent Reading.
And it’s definitely worth it, because not only are my kids broadening their minds and practicing the skill of reading, but I also get a chance to read. I’m always thankful for every moment I get to pull out a book and get lost in the pages.
I hope you enjoyed this look at my 5-year-old’s summer reading list. Be sure to pick up a free book from my starter library and visit my recommends page to see some of my favorite books. If you have any books that must go on my summer reading list, contact me. I always enjoy adding to my list.
*The books mentioned above have affiliate links attached to them, which means I’ll get a small kick-back if you click on them and purchase. But I only recommend books I enjoy reading myself. Actually, I don’t even talk about books I didn’t enjoy. I’d rather forget I ever wasted time reading them.
by Rachel Toalson | This Writer Life
This week my husband and I spent three days at a creative conference.
Mostly it was designers and illustrators, no writers at all, but still it was amazing to be in a place with so many other creative people and admire their work from the sidelines.
And then.
On the last day, a friend of mine spoke about building a platform from a business perspective. It was helpful even for me, even though I come from a completely different creative pursuit, and I knew it would be especially helpful to all the other hand-lettering artists who are trying to do what he has already successfully done: get their art recognized and appreciated.
Right after his talk, someone tweeted something disrespectful and rude and, frankly, immature.
Someone who was there.
Someone who was one of us.
And, see, I just felt so angry. I felt angry for my friend and for hand-lettering artists and for all of us.
And then I felt sad.
I felt sad that we can feel so threatened by someone else’s success that we think it says something about us. That we feel the need to discount another artist. That we let hate slide in to our hearts.
I felt sad that we don’t know how to share our space well.
I felt sad that we seem to have so much trouble finding a way to cheer one another on in our similar pursuits.
I am no exception. I have never ridiculed publicly, but I have felt threatened and ruffled and discounted and territorial and afraid. I have spoken harshly of others to my husband, possibly even in the presence of my children. I have raged about how it’s not fair that they got that while I still get this. I have felt like I deserved something more than another did. I have thought (erroneously) that there isn’t enough space for us all.
This needs to change.
Our inability to share the writing spaces in the world and support other writers and help talented people do what they do really just boils down to fear.
We are afraid that if another writer is successful with her writing, there will not be room for us. We are afraid that if this novelist “makes it” with a story that sounds a little bit like ours, there will no longer be an audience to stand behind us. We are afraid that someone else will take our rightful place and do it better.
Saturation of the writing market is a lie.
[Tweet “Saturation of the writing market is a lie. There is enough room for all of us.”]
Saturation of the market says we live under the laws of scarcity.
It says:
1. There is not enough to go around, so we must be the best.
2. If someone else is more “successful” in their writing than we are, we obviously aren’t the best.
3. We must protect ourselves by proving those others artists are not the best.
Best and better and all those other comparison words have no place in the writing world, unless we’re talking of our own progression–as in, I’m better than I used to be. I reached my personal best in word counts this week.
When we are comparing our work to another’s, when we are bemoaning what someone got that we didn’t, when we tear down another writer just because we’re afraid of their presence in the marketplace, we are an island of alone, and writers cannot survive and keep creating on an island of alone.
Because, at the heart of it all, we are people. People need relationships. People need community.
Comparison kills relationships. Affirmation restores them.
[Tweet “Writers are a community, but comparison kills relationships. Affirmation restores them.”]
So there are some things I want us to remember.
1. There is enough room for all of us.
2. The way our art expresses itself through us is not the same way art expresses itself through that other person (unless we’re intentionally trying to copy them).
3. We belong to each other.
The last one is the most important.
[Tweet “We are a writing community. We belong to each other. Let’s speak well to and about each other.”]
We are a writing community. Creating beauty for a world that may or may not appreciate it is an incredibly lonely pursuit, and we need to be cheering each other along the way. We need to admire each other and we need to be admired, but we will do neither if we’re only interested in discounting those by whom we feel threatened.
We need to be giving to each other, not taking away.
Giving instruction. Giving away our secrets. Giving away the strategies that have worked for us. Giving support. Giving encouragement. Giving lessons we’ve learned so others don’t waste their time making the same mistake that cost us a year.
It feels scary to give when this is our livelihood, but relationships are ALWAYS better than existing alone.
So let’s take care with other writer hearts. Let’s respect one another for who we are. Let’s be each other’s champions at every turn of the journey.
Let’s turn our lonely art into community art.
Week’s prompt
Write as much as you can, in whatever form you want, on the following word:
Candy
by Rachel Toalson | Crash Test featured, Crash Test Parents
There is this weird thing that happens when you have multiple children.
You only add them one at a time, so you start out so well. Setting up that nursery in old-fashioned airplanes. Displaying books on the dresser so they’re all nice and neat and you can see each one. Organizing outings to the park and the pool and the children’s museum with all his little infant buddies.
And then you have more children. You start letting things fall through the cracks. You start losing track of time. You start slacking when it comes to things like…birthdays.
Not long ago we celebrated our third son’s fifth birthday. I forgot to plan his birthday party.
So I scheduled it for two weeks after his actual birth day and then had to listen to him every single morning say, “Well, I guess I’m not having a birthday party this year” after I answered the initial, “Is TODAY my birthday party?” with a negative. If only 5-year-olds weren’t so bad at time relativity.
“Your birthday party isn’t today,” I’d say. “It’s in another ten days.”
“So tomorrow?”
He can count to one hundred, but he can’t count the ten days between the day he asked and the day with the box that says “BIRTHDAY PARTY” in big blue letters on the calendar beside the fridge.
One day he took the guilt a little farther. “I didn’t get a cupcake for breakfast on my birthday,” he said.
It’s tradition in our house that the birthday boy gets a cupcake for breakfast on his actual birth day. He got cinnamon toast this year, because I’m drowning doing just fine.
“But you had cinnamon toast,” I said. He looked at me like he was the most neglected boy in the world.
“We’ll plan what we’re having for your birthday party tonight,” I said. “How about that?”
He perked up. “How much longer until after dinner?” he said.
We ate our dinner, did all the chores, and then sat down at the table to plan. I had my pen and notebook at the ready.
“What theme do you want?” Husband asked.
“What’s a theme?” our 5-year-old said.
“Like Robin Hood or Treasure Island or Star Wars,” our 8-year-old bookworm said.
“I want Penguins of Madagascar with ninjas,” the birthday-boy-for-the-last-week said.
Husband and I looked at each other with the same “What the—” expression on our faces. But I knew there was a solution. We live in an artsy fartsy world, after all.
I opened Pinterest.
What a mistake.
Now, I used to be a pretty crafty person. When my 8-year-old started school, I sent him there with five reusable napkins and five handkerchiefs complete with a monogrammed picture drawn by all the members of his family so he wouldn’t feel lonely during the school day. I know. I’m an overachiever. But no longer. When the next-in-line started school, he was lucky to get two of each. The third starts in a little more than three weeks. I’ve done all of zero.
My closet is full of material I always intended to use for on-the-go crayon bags and custom backpacks and notebook covers. There are baskets filled with ripped-up books I plan on using for craft projects someday (I’ve been waiting three years for someday. So far.). I have a bag that sits beside the living room couch for when the kids are all serenely playing and I can take out that blanket I’ve been crocheting for five years (I haven’t touched the blanket, because boys hardly ever serenely play).
But the feed for a “Penguins of Madagascar party” was crazy. Homemade cakes with 3D penguins made from icing, standing up on top. Elaborate crafts that we could have for all the kids at the party (and who would clean up the mess? Me.). Coloring pages and games and party favors with penguins hand-drawn on the sides of cups.
I scrolled through. Can’t do this. Can’t do this. Won’t do this.
Shouldn’t have even looked.
When the oldest boy had his Star Wars party last year, I made Ham Solo sandwiches and Wookie cookies and Yoda soda. This year I just wanted to bake chocolate cookies and call them bombs.
I felt a little guilty about it. I couldn’t help it.
We live in such a Pinterest-perfect world. People post those elaborate cakes where 3D characters from The Jungle Book are standing up on a no-lines-in-the-icing cake, striking their elaborate pounce poses, and I wonder how anyone plans a birthday anymore with pressure like this.
“Think you could do this?” I asked Husband, pointing to an impressive cake, because he’s the artist.
“Absolutely not,” he said. “Who has time for that?”
Exactly. Who has time for that? Last time we tried to decorate a cake in the kitchen, the 8-year-old tried to walk up stairs in roller blades and Spider-Man’s mask came out looking more like a face behind bars. Last time we tried to make our own pin-the-mustache-on-the-Lorax game, a little brother found some scissors and cut up all the school papers left in the basket beside the table. Last time we tried to make those hand-lettered food labels the twins discovered the plunger and a toilet their brothers forgot to flush.
So it’s not a party unless it’s a Pinterest party? Unless we spend two whole days making sure everything is perfect? Unless someone can tell us what that blob on the cake is supposed to be?
No thanks.
Pinterest can go take a walk all the way to Antarctica. Hey, Pinterest: Don’t let the ice numb your backside on the way out.
I’ll take my imperfect party with the rowdy kids and the penguin box game we never finished and the cake balls we called eggs any day.
See, the thing is, our kids have no idea. They have no idea. They hardly notice the clothes they took off and left all over the floor or the shoes they pretty much ran right out of or the way they smell when they come back in from playing outside in the middle of a Texas summer. Do we really think they’re gong to notice the way the eyes on that penguin-that-doesn’t-really-look-like-a-penguin are lopsided? Do we really think they’re going to say there just weren’t enough decorations at their party? Do we really think they’re going to point out the way the cake sinks in the middle?
No. They’re going to shove that cake in their pie holes. We should, too (well, maybe use a fork), because it’s dang delicious.
When my son’s party was over, I pulled him close and asked him if he enjoyed it.
“Oh, yeah,” he said. “It was the best party ever.”
And he meant it.
He started to run off and then turned back around. “Can I have another poop cupcake, Mama?” he said.
“Poop cupcake?” I said. “That doesn’t sound very tasty.”
I thought he was joking, because, well, boys and jokes. The grosser the better. But my boy was dead serious. He pointed to two cupcakes left on the table, each with chocolate icing swirled up high.
I laughed so hard I cried.
Guess those pretty cupcakes weren’t as pretty as I thought.
(Photo by Sheelah Brennan on Unsplash)
by Rachel Toalson | Books
I’ve been a little obsessed lately with the middle grade author Brian Selznick. He’s not actually just an author. He’s an author illustrator for middle grade, which isn’t a common combination when you start moving into books for older grades, unless we’re talking about a graphic novelist. But Selznick isn’t that, either. He has a very unique style of writing his books—using both prose and picture.
I was first introduced to Selznick back when I read his The Invention of Hugo Cabret, which was released in 2007 and was turned into a movie in 2011. This book is aimed at 8- to 12-year-olds but is 533 pages long. Most of those pages, though, are illustrations, which I find charming about Selznick and his style. He writes his books for middle grade readers, and they’re all more than 500 pages, so by the time a kid finishes a Selznick book, he or she feels incredibly accomplished. Do you remember the first 500-page book your read? My oldest was 7 when he read the Invention of Hugo Cabret, and it was the longest book (and heaviest book) he’d ever held in his hands.
So recently I went back and read two of Selznick’s other books that my oldest son has already read. The first was WonderStruck, which is a story about a boy named Ben who just lost his mother. He’s living with his aunt and uncle in a cabin that’s right across the way from the cabin he used to share with his mom. One night, he’s in his old abandoned cabin, and the phone rings. He answers it and is struck by lightning, which renders him deaf.
From there, he goes on an adventure to find his father, who was never around when he was a kid. There’s a bit of a mystery about his father and where he is. His story collides with the story of Rose, a deaf child whose mother was a famous actress. Their stories are set fifty years apart, so by the time their paths cross, Rose is an old woman. Selznick weaves Rose’s story into Ben’s using beautiful illustrations.
WonderStruck is a rich and entertaining read perfect for readers who are a bit shy about picking up those larger books. The pictures make the book feel as if the reading of it is much easier than it first appears.
The other book of Selznick’s I read was The Marvels, which was released last year. It begins with Selznick’s characteristic illustrations, telling the story of a theater family. It then switches to prose for the story of Joseph Jervis and Albert Nightingale. Joseph runs away from his private school and goes to London to seek refuge with the uncle he’s never met. The house where his uncle stays is cloaked in mystery. Selznick is a master at keeping his readers turning the pages—whether to see his brilliantly executed drawings or to find out what happens next.
The Marvels touched on themes like forgiveness, moving on with life after tragedy strikes, and doing something about changing your life if you don’t like the way it’s playing out. Selznick’s characters are rich with their own backstories, and even though Uncle Albert is a bit difficult to get to know, readers will identify with him once he opens up.
Here’s a quote from The Marvels that showcases Selznick’s blend of descriptive and engaging prose.
“At the end of the hallway was the staircase Uncle Albert had told him to climb. But to his right, just beyond the painted shipwreck, were shiny black double doors that opened into the dining room he’d seen from the street. Inside, the fire hissed and snapped and cast flickering shadows across the glossy green walls. Joseph couldn’t help himself. Mesmerized, he put down his suitcase and felt himself pulled into the room, like a moth fluttering helplessly towards the light.”
I enjoyed both of these books, because while they were simplistic reads, it took quite a lot of imagination to dream them up. And the illustrations made the books charming and lovely.
I hope you enjoyed these book recommendations. Be sure to pick up your free books from my starter library and visit my recommendation page to see some of my best book recommendations. If you have any books you recently read that you think I’d enjoy, leave them in the comments and I’ll add them to my list.
*The books mentioned above have affiliate links attached to them, which means I’ll get a small kick-back if you click on them and purchase. But I only recommend books I enjoy reading myself. Actually, I don’t even talk about books I didn’t enjoy. I’d rather forget I ever wasted time reading them.
