by Rachel Toalson | Books
Well, my first fiction series has now released into the public. I’ve had a lot of fun watching people download and enjoy them. But I think the most fun I’ve had is watching my 9-year-old, who is right in the age group for whom the series is written, ask me, after our reading time is over, “Please can you read more?”
So I thought it would be fun to hear a little bit from him about the Fairendale series.
Me: What do you think about the Fairendale series?
Jadon: It’s really good. All the dragons and people.
Me: Who’s your favorite character?
Jadon: Arthur. He’s very brave. Standing up for all those children.
Me: What would you say to someone if they’re wondering whether or not they’ll like Fairendale?
Jadon: You should read it. And if you don’t like it, send a note to my mom.
And there you have it. If you don’t like it, send a note—but make it a nice note, please, so I can share it with my son.
Reading
This week I finished two brand new middle grade novels that have recently come on the market and both feature the drawings of popular picture book illustrators.
The first was Pax, by Sara Pennypacker, which is illustrated by Jon Klassen, one of my favorite picture book illustrators. For those who don’t know Jon Klassen, you should. He’s written several picture books. Our favorites are This is Not My Hat and I Want My Hat Back. As an aside, Klassen has a new picture book coming out this fall called We Found a Hat. I’m sure it will be just as lively and entertaining as the rest of his stories.
Pax is the story of a boy who has to leave his fox behind when his father joins the military service, a boy who has to somehow find his way into forgiveness. Peter, the boy, goes on a journey to find his fox again, after his father leaves for the service, and though he is journeying to reunite with his fox, it also becomes clear that he is journeying to find himself.
Pax is a story of love and friendship and determination. Along his way, Peter meets a wise sage who is broken in her own way, wrestling with her own guilt and demons. She helps him realize he is never alone. He helps her realize she can be forgiven for whatever she did, regardless of what it was.
I finished this book a few weeks ago, but there is just something about it that will not leave me. It was beautiful and lyrical and heartwarming and all the things I love most about middle grade literature. But it also explored the hard things—examining decisions, speaking on identity, upholding the miracle of community. I think kids will be encouraged, delighted and transformed by this story of a boy and his fox.
Here’s one of my favorite passages from the story. Peter has just found the farm of Vola, who ends up being a wise old woman who is broken in her own way.
“Vola studied him. ‘Oneness is always growing in the world, boy. Two but not two. It’s always there, connecting its roots, humming. I can’t be part of it—that’s the price I pay for taking myself away. But you can be. You can vibrate with its heartbeat. You may be on your own. But you won’t be alone.’
‘What if I get lost?’
‘You will not get lost.’
‘I think maybe I already am.’
Vola reached across the table, cupped his head and pressed. ‘No. You are found.’ She got up, and Peter felt her brush a kid son his hair as she passed.”
The Wild Robot, by Peter Brown is another heartwarming story, but with a bit of science thrown in. This is Peter Brown’s first chapter book. He’s usually cranking out picture books, like Children Make Terrible Pets and My Teacher is a Monster.
The Wild Robot is a wonderfully entertaining science fiction story about a robot who crashes onto a deserted island and must find a way to become friendly with all the wild animals there, who look upon her with suspicion and actually believe she’s a monster. She must overcome their prejudices and try to endear herself to them in order to create a happy life on the island.
The book ended in a very open-ended way, which leads me to believe that this isn’t the last we’ve heard from Roz the robot.
What I loved most about the book was the voice of its narrator; The Wild Robot was written in an omniscient point of view, and anyone who’s read my Fairendale series will know that I love omniscient narrators, because they become characters of their own.
Both of these books make fantastic read-alouds for children, and they’ve been added to my kids’ summer reading list.
Learning
I’ve been working slowly on a memoir for quite a while. You’d be surprised how difficult it is to access memories when you actually want to access them. So recently I picked up a book that I thought might help me at least remember certain things about my past.
Writing Your Legacy: The Step-By-Step Guide to Crafting Your Life Story, by Richard Campbell and Cheryl Svensson is a great beginner’s guide on crafting memoirs. It wasn’t written specifically about the memoir genre but was a little more geared toward autobiography, which is almost the same thing, except memoirs tend to follow a bit more of the fiction storytelling technique (just be sure not to make anything up. You could get in trouble for that.).
What I enjoyed most about this book is that it provided me with a starting point for examining my memories. I often write my memoir to a one-word prompt, which has helped so far. You’d be surprised how many memories are tied to the word “snake.” But this book and its probing questions will help me with a more exhaustive search of my memories. The questions are broken out into themes, like “Forks in the Road” and “My Life’s Work” and “The Meaning of Wealth.” For each theme, you’re exploring your memories from beginning to end. And then you can do whatever you want with those memories.
I took many notes on the book and will definitely be using it to help trigger memories and then curating those to become one or more memoirs.
Personal
I’ve been having a bit of trouble recently with work creeping into family time. This is mostly because I work for myself and also because I work from home. When you work from home, it’s extremely difficult to put work away. How do you even do that? Every time I retire for the evening, when boys finally get in bed and stay there, my computer is sitting on my dresser, which is my makeshift standing desk. Why not just take it out and work? I have some free moments, after all.
But something I’ve noticed recently is that I don’t turn off. What I mean by turn off is that my mind is always, always working something out. This isn’t a bad thing, except when it comes at the cost of other things. When my boys are talking to me about the books they’re going to write this summer, and I’m thinking through a plot line, and I can’t wait to get back to my computer so I can jot down some notes, that’s when it becomes a not-so-great practice, because I’m not really listening to my kids. I’m distracted.
There’s not an easy solution to the work bleeding into the family. We just have to purpose to think about family when we’re with family and to think about work when we’re at work. Creative people have a unique challenge when it comes to working from home. That means we need to brainstorm unique solutions.
I’m in a really busy time with work right, launching a few books and readying others for traditional publishing. But once this season passes—and it has a deadline, trust me—there will be strict stipulations put in place that no computer comes out after 5:30 p.m. Because it’s time for family.
Seasons come and seasons go. There are some seasons that require more work. There are some seasons our family requires more attention. I want to be aware of those and adjust accordingly, because this is how I believe we can achieve a sense of balance when it comes to family and work.
Listening
Husband and I have been fans of the band Blue October for quite some time. We’ve seen them in concert, which is an amazing show. I don’t buy swag from bands all that often, but I do have a Blue October beanie.
In April, Blue October came out with a new CD called Home. If you haven’t head this album yet, you owe it to yourself to give a listen. It’s not quite the same style as their former albums, not as hard and energetic, but it’s uniquely beautiful in its own way. One of the things I love most about Blue October is their creative harmonies, and this CD will not disappoint on that count. I can’t stop listening to it right now.
What’s my favorite song on the CD? you ask. That would be a tie between “Heart Go Bang” and “Home.”
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by Rachel Toalson | Messy Mondays
What I want to tell my boys every time they fight. Which is every other second, now that school’s out.
He was lucky. He only ended up with half his face burned off.
I know. So disappointing.
One of them ended up with a dented face, but at least now I can tell the identical twins apart.
Seriously. It smells like a locker room in my house. (When do they start to care how they smell?)
Surprisingly (and sadly) the fan was hurt far more than the kid who tried this one.
Who’s in the hide-food-from-your-kids club?
Lots of injuries on this one. Think he won’t try it again? It only took 24 hours to get back in the game.
We needed to buy new toilets after this happenstance. (Explosive diarrhea has nothing on 5 pounds of grapes.)
by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
Children do not see in gray, only in black and white.
Here I go complaining and criticizing and judging, and I have told them this is not the way, and, oh, it is so hard to live the way I desire my children to live, without this bend toward complaint and this critical spirit and this judging others from the sidelines, but how else will they see and know and really understand if not for the example I set?
“We don’t whine in this family,” after listening to a request for water that is impossible to fulfill where we are, and ten minutes later, I’m whine-complaining about the heat and how ridiculously hard it is to carry a double stroller packed with twin babies and lunch remains and a heavy camera up forty-five steps in 104-degree summer heat because Daddy didn’t want to trace our steps back to the air conditioned elevator, and how in the world will they understand that we don’t whine in this family if my words sound a whole lot like whining, too?
“You only have to ask me once,” after listening to fourteen demands for help opening their child-proofed pajama drawer (to encourage only adult-supervised dress-up) and then, five minutes later, demanding for the hundredth time that they put their shoes in the designated place instead of the middle of the floor, and how in the world will they understand that we don’t pester and nag in this family if this is what I do?
“We tell the truth” after one tries to sneak an extra stuffed animal friend through the church doors, even though I permitted them only one, and an hour later I’m pacifying the can’t-get-his-shoes-back-on littlest with “I’ll help you in a minute” when I really mean I’ll help when I’m finished packing up the twins and gathering their diaper bag, and how do you even answer when your 6-year-old announces it’s been a minutes and it’s time to help his brother and you’re not even close to being ready to help, and how in the world will they understand that our yes should be yes and our no should be no and that truth is the only acceptable communication in our family if I cannot do the same?
The old way of it, that do as I say and not as I do, it must become more than this, because these little ones are watching, always watching what we do, barely hearing what we say, and they will be just like us in the doing, regardless of the saying.
How will they learn the magnitude of speaking lovingly and truthfully and respectfully if they do not first see it from me?
Do as I do, that is our parent maxim, and anything less means our words become meaningless mist in a world full of dew.
[Tweet “Do as I do is the only parenting truth our kids understand. So we must do as we want them to do.”]
And when we fall short, because we all have and do and will, these little ones learn still from our awareness and our confession and their forgiving that follows.
Because we must see the wrong way to know the right.
This is an excerpt from We Speak Truthfully. Respectfully. Lovingly., the seventh episode in the Family on Purpose series, which will release July 5.
by Rachel Toalson | This Writer Life
Personal essays—we see them all the time out in cyber-space. We read about how this person went to the store yesterday and met a woman there who said something that annoyed them or hurt them or made them feel sad, and now they’re trying to air their feelings. We read about people meeting together at coffee shops and we read about the bigger things that happen—a new car!—and we read about the tiny minutiae of a day.
One of the questions we’ll often ask ourselves if we’re in the business of blogging or writing personal essays is the question, Am I an interesting enough person to write a personal essay?
I’ve considered this one often. I run a humor parenting blog, and many times I’m simply telling the daily stories of my life in a humorous way (because life is pretty humorous when we think about it long enough. Sometimes I try to make those stories a bit more universal, and sometimes I make them so specific to my family that I don’t think anybody’s even going to care about it. Turns out, people do. People do care about it, because, in every story, they get to see themselves.
At least this is what I believe.
[Tweet “Our stories have value because in them people find themselves.”]
We’re all connected by our humanity. If we find value in a story, others will, too.
Now. It makes a difference how you tell it. If we’re just telling the facts of our outing to the grocery store, we’re probably not going to get many people nodding their heads in agreement. No one really wants to know that at 8 a.m. we pulled up, and the parking lot was close to empty, and we brought home five pounds of apples and ten pounds of bananas, because we live with the equivalent of monkeys. But what they will want to know is how we feel about that grocery bill and maybe a funny story about what one of the kids did when he tried to carry a gallon of milk to the basket.
The most important characteristic of a personal essay is its emotion.
[Tweet “The most important characteristic of a personal essay is its emotion.”]
Emotion is universal. That’s how we make our story universal to our audience. We sprinkle in a little emotion, tell about how this trip to the grocery store affected us, tell about what we thought as we strolled out the doors with that basket full of groceries and the receipt still crumpled in our hands and kids hanging off the sides, making the basket even harder to push. We tell about how it seemed like the sky turned grayer as we walked to the car, because we’re worried about how we’ll possibly be able to feed the bottomless pits of six boys when school’s out for the summer.
We don’t have to make up situations or things that happened in order to make our lives interesting enough to warrant a personal essays. The trick is just to highlight the emotions of an encounter—whether that’s humor, fear, hope, joy, frustration, surprise. The possibilities are endless. I could write four different personal essays out of one event in my life, focusing on different emotions.
Essentially, a personal essay is the telling of a life story and our reflection on it.
So it doesn’t really matter if we lead an “interesting enough” life or not (also, who gets to decide who leads an interesting enough life, anyway); what matters is that we know how to tell a story.
Do we know how to tell a story?
A story has characters, and it has plot, and it has tension (this is where I feel we’re getting a bit confused in our culture of marketing-with-a-story, because we’ve forgotten what the essentials of a story are—but more on that another day). We start with characters, we add a little conflict and tension, we have a theme, we have characters transforming, even a tiny little bit, by the end of it. A personal essay needs all of those elements, too.
If we think about our lives, they have all of those elements. Characters: family and friends. Conflict and tension: Our dealings with other people, the environment, ourselves. Plot: what happens in the course of a day or outing or whatever it is we want to write about. Theme: What we take out of our experience. Character transformation: We are changed by everything that happens in our lives.
Writing a personal essay is, at its simplest, telling a good story. It’s a commentary on the human condition, told through a personal story.
So maybe rather than worrying about whether or not we have an interesting enough life to warrant a personal essay, we worry more about weaving a story around our lives that, though specific, feels universal to the human condition. We look at the stories we’re telling about our lives. We examine where themes slide in and where conflict throws rocks on the road and where we might be most changed, and then we tell it all for the understanding and recognition it might bring.
There are millions of blogs out in cyberspace. How we make a mark in all their minutiae is to tell something that matters to us and the rest of humanity. Even if we’re writing about surviving the time when our son was diagnosed with a heart murmur, as long as we’re writing about the emotions of that experience, other parents suffering through their own child-scares will find value in it. When we work through our emotions on a page, we make our personal stories mean something to others.
I tell personal stories all the time. I use them to demonstrate a larger point, because it’s only after I’ve reflected on my personal stories and tried to find a common theme in humanity, tried to find where the story fits in the world, that I feel I can effectively share that story with the world’s people.
So, you see, it’s not about whether or not we’re interesting at all. It’s really about how well we can spread our experience into the experience of others.
Week’s prompt
Pictures have an amazing ability to spark our creativity. Write whatever you want for as long as you want on the following picture.
by Rachel Toalson | General Blog
I was done with school long before the year ended.
The early-morning schedule gets old by week #2, because boys like to sleep until at least 8 (unless it’s the weekend, and then they’re up at 5:30), and school starts at 7:45 a.m., and that tardy bell rings strong and fierce, and even though it’s only three who must be there on time, all the others have to get up, too, because the three make enough tornado noise trying to find a backpack he’s sitting on (if you’re the 5-year-old), complaining about what’s for breakfast (if you’re the 7-year-old), and bemoaning the fact that he has no more sweat pants that are clean (if you’re the 9-year-old) that everybody wakes right along with them.
The homework gets old by week #4, because what 7-year-old remembers that he has some math worksheets he has to do when there are LEGOs in the house, and who can even concentrate on reading a passage and answering some silly questions about it when your brothers keep running through the kitchen screeching like spider monkeys dressed in Robin Hood costumes or when they keep exclaiming over the cool fort they constructed from a box or they are, heaven forbid, reading aloud from a book?
Homework at 7 is like adding another line on a parent’s to-do list: Keep boy on task even though he’s used up his on-task capabilities in the seven hours he was at school today.
Believe me, my to-do list was massive enough already without this extra line. I mean, someone has to sit on the couch and read a book every now and then, and it might as well be me.
We were done with all the on-grade reader books by about week #12. All my boys are fantastic readers who read whatever they want all the time here at home. They read Pokemon graphic novels and Bill Watterson comics and the newest Elephant & Piggie books. Which is why we stopped signing those log-their-reading folders right around the beginning of December. It looks like none of them have picked up a book since Dec. 3. They have. I promise. I just can’t always find a pen. Or remember which one read what. Or find the actual folders, because boys are so good at putting things where they belong. The chances of all three of those happening at the same time are very, very rare.
AND THEN THE PAPERS.
So many papers.
There are advertisements for sports camps and karate programs and dance lessons all throughout the year. There are all the worksheets a first-grader and kindergartener and third grader do. There are amazing works of art they paint and draw and color that come home from his art class. There are essays and teacher notes and lunch charge reminders that we owe the school some money.
We did fairly well with all those papers for about the first twenty-four weeks of school. I was actually pretty proud we lasted that long. We had a system: sort them, store them or toss them in the recycling. “Store them” ended up breaking down a bit, because I’d start putting the whole stack of papers in the “store them” pile so I could “look at them later,” except later never really came back around.
And when February swept in, we just stopped caring.
I don’t even know if it was a gradual not-caring or an all-at-once not-caring, but now those papers sit on the bottom shelf of our coffee table or on the library shelves covering up the spines of books or between the beds in the twins’ room (they thought paper might work for insulation and smuggled some in their room without our noticing. The papers are now tiny, tiny little pieces that will have to be hand-picked from the carpet because our vacuum cleaner sucks but doesn’t really. Thanks for the gift guys. I now feel like setting the house on fire.).
The paper hills have become paper mountains. Soon, we’ll be able to repair all the things that are wrong about our house with paper. Hole in the wall? Cover it with paper. Fan is missing a blade? Construct one out of paper. No more toilet paper? WE HAVE PLENTY OF PAPER!
The end of the school year is a bittersweet time, because it holds the sadness of a school year ending and a child getting older, or at least seeming to get older, and the (mostly unspoken) fear of having said child home ALL HOURS OF ALL THE DAYS ALL SUMMER.
But when I weigh the sad and the afraid and the glad, I think I am mostly glad, because the be-an-involved-school-parent pressure and the papers will stay far, far away. Mostly I’m glad because my sons are brilliant and funny and delightful, and I’m going to enjoy their around-all-day presence for all of 2.3 hours on the first day.
Today is the last day of school, the last day we get up early, the day books will no longer come home and homework will stay in a classroom for next year. Which means tomorrow boys will sleep late and they will play together well, because they missed each other so much, and they will spend quiet time in their alone places so I don’t even have to remind them to get “back where you’re supposed to be.”
Well, you know, a mom can always hope.
by Rachel Toalson | Books
My first fiction series releases this week (tomorrow, actually). It’s an epic fantasy series that contains mermaids and dragons and all sorts of magical creatures. They are secondary characters, more or less, and the main characters are children who are running for their lives from a king who is trying to capture a magical boy. Magic is the only thing that makes a king, which means that a magical boy who is not born to the royal family is a danger to that royal family. So the king pursues and the children run. The story of the children is all wrapped up in the story of the king and his family, and all sorts of fairy tale villains will make their appearance in different seasons of Fairendale, which, right now, according to my writing schedule, will probably span another four years.
The first season will be available June 1, with the first episode of the season free for people to try. I’m really excited bout this release, because, like I said, it’s the first fiction that I’ve formally released to the public, even though I’ve shared some snippets of my fiction on blogs and in my newsletter. So I’m hoping that readers will fall in love with Fairendale as much as I have.
I eventually have plans to produce an audio book version of the series, but for now I’d like to read you the prologue of season 1, episode 1:
“If one were to visit the kingdom of Fairendale, it would take quite an extraordinary mind to imagine what loveliness it wore once upon a time.
This is the land all fairy tales wish they could inhabit. It is the kingdom where the Violet Sea lends its tributaries with grace and generosity, where mermaids wait just below the shallow waters to call out to those brave enough to cross their bridge from the village of Fairendale to the kingdom grounds, where colors of every hue shimmer in the great green grass and the brilliant blue sky and the lacy flowers of orange and yellow and scarlet.
The kingdom, as it used to exist, lived in a perpetual fall, that season of crisp, cool air whispering in ears and stroking cheeks and sneaking into bedroom windows to lie beside sleeping children. Now the wind is hard and biting and bitter, as if anger blows across this land. And anger is certainly justified in its blowing, as we shall soon see.
It was not so very long ago that Fairendale lost what remained of its loveliness, dear reader, but to its people, a whole lifetime has passed.
They have forgotten what their beloved children used to sound like. They have forgotten the music of laughter. They have forgotten the pleasure of busy chatter. They have forgotten joy.
This once-grand kingdom has faded into a colorless shadow land, dark and sinister and cold.
The children were the light of the kingdom, you see. And now they are missing.
Why are they missing?
Well, now, that is a story worth telling.”
I hope you enjoyed that preview. This whole series is just lovely.
Reading
I love great middle grade fiction. Middle grade fiction is my favorite genre to read, because it’s so sweet and innocent and yet also deals with some deep subjects, like divorce and disappointment and friendship and overcoming what seems like insurmountable obstacles.
Two middle grade books I recently enjoyed were Goodbye Stranger, by Rebecca Stead, and Raymie Nightingale, by Kate DiCamillo.
I’ve followed both of these authors for a very long time and have loved everything they’ve written. The latest from Rebecca Stead is about the power of love and friendship. The main character, Bridge, survived a skating accident and is now wondering what’s going on with her friends, because they’re suddenly interested in boys and things Bridge doesn’t really care about yet. She’s trying to navigate this new world, while, at the same time, trying to figure out why she was spared in the accident.
I loved the whole theme of becoming different people during this volatile time in a person’s life—which is right around the seventh grade—because it’s a transformative time in kids’ lives. I also liked that the book was written from multiple perspectives—including that of a high school girl. The book had a lot of meat in it, touching on cyber bullying, the new world of texting and the disappointment of divorce. It was everything I’ve come to expect from Rebecca Stead.
Raymie Nightingale touched on some of the same themes as Goodbye Stranger, but in a much different way. I’ve loved Kate DiCamillo for a very long time, and part of what draws me into her writing is her elegant poetic style. Raymie Nightingale is a story of friendship in the midst of tragedy. Raymie Clarke has hatched a plan that she thinks will get her father, who left her and her mother, to come back home. She’s going to win the Little Miss Central Florida Tire competition so her father will realize what he’s missing and decide he still wants to be married to her mother. It’s such a tragic beginning for the book, but, as is the case with most of Kate DiCamillo’s books, it doesn’t end tragically, though it’s not a happily-ever-after sort of ending, either. But Raymie finds strength in two lively girls. The girls all come from homes that are broken in some way or another, so they really find strength in each other. They meet for the first time while waiting for their twirling lesson to start, and their friendship blooms.
What I love most about Kate DiCamillo is that though she writes quick reads, they are not light reads. This book was full of profound insight into the life of a child of divorce. And DiCamillo is also a master of characterization. Just listen to this quote, about Louisiana Elefante’s grandmother:
“Louisiana’s grandmother did not believe in stop signs, or she did not see them, or maybe she did not think that they applied to her. Whatever the reason, the Elefante station wagon went past every stop sign without stopping or even slowing down very much.
‘They were going very, very fast, and the car emitted a lot of noises: screeches (from the piece of loose wood siding), thumps (from the door that would not stay closed), and a cacophony of mechanical grinding noises—the overworked and desperate sounds an engine makes when it has been pushed beyond its limits.
“Also, from the backseat it was not possible to see Louisiana’s grandmother’s head, and so it seemed as if they were being driven around by an invisible person.
“It all felt like a dream.”
I love that there’s some humor involved in this, and Louisiana’s grandmother is a source of humor all throughout—stealing food from a funeral and showing up when the girls are watching their twirling instructor talk to the police about a stolen baton.
Both of these are books I’ll have on my shelf to read over and over again, because I don’t think one time is quite enough.
Learning
I’ve had my nose stuck in some research books, because I read a picture book for my kids a couple of years ago about Horace Pippin. Pippin was a black American painter who was self taught. But what is so remarkable about Horace Pippin is that he was wounded by a sniper shot in World War I. The shot paralyzed his right arm, which was his art arm. But instead of giving up, Pippin taught himself to paint, using his left hand to hold his right arm. He became famous in the last years of his life as one of the greatest American painters in our history.
After reading the picture book, I became fascinated by Horace Pippin. He exhibited the kind of perseverance we hope for our children. He was kind and peaceful and unafraid to share an imperfect art that he taught himself to create. So I knew I had to tell his story.
I’ve had a grand time researching this remarkable figure in history, and I’m looking forward to telling stories along the way about who he was and the significant example he gave to the American public.
Personal
While I was on Sabbath for Mother’s Day, my husband and boys brought me breakfast in bed, homemade cards that I’ll keep forever and ever and a video that they had made about all the reasons they love me. I cried, of course.
But after Mother’s Day was over, I started thinking about Father’s Day. It lands right in the middle of my book launch summer, and I knew that I would be hard-pressed to do anything even close to creating a video where my boys talked about all the things they love about their daddy. I started feeling a little pressure, because, of course, I needed to return the favor.
And then I remembered something that my husband has told me time and time again:
You don’t owe me.
See, we live in a world where people give us things and we think we have to somehow give them something back. It’s natural. But when you’re in a marriage, things don’t work that way. Just because I single parent-it one night so he can go out with the guys doesn’t mean that he is obligated to return the favor and single-parent it for me. Of course things will even out. But we don’t owe each other anything.
It can be hard to wrap our minds around this—that someone would just do something because they love us and they don’t expect anything in return, but I’m wondering now how I might be able to apply that even to my business. How might I be able to give without anything expected in return? Of course you couldn’t do it all the time, because there are bills to pay and mouths to feed, but how much more generous might it make us if we didn’t expect anything in return?
I think maybe it’s worth a try.
Watching
For my husband’s birthday, which is way too close to Mother’s Day to really give him a great celebration, we went to see Captain America: Civil War. I just have to say that I am so impressed with the screenwriters that work for Marvel. I’m not really a comic book sort of girl, but every movie Marvel has produced has been amazing. The dialogue is natural, the characters are well developed, the plot lines are always exciting and new. I love the science and the other-worldliness and the themes that run through the movies. I just love everything about them.
Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely wrote this particular screenplay, and it was just as fantastic as everything else Marvel has produced. Well done, guys.
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by Rachel Toalson | Messy Mondays
It’s their first day back from the grandparents’ after a week of running wild outside in the country and swimming in a pool and watching movies for Quiet Time, and my boys have forgotten how to act.
We are incredibly blessed that my mom and stepdad took the older three boys for a week (and do every summer) and that my father-in-law took the Dennis-the-Menace-times-two twins for a few days (because that’s about all the time anyone can handle with these guys), but man. Detoxing stinks.
My parents eat a lot like us—no processed food, lots of fruits and veggies, no special “treat” with every meal. So I can’t even blame it on the food (which is my usual culprit). But when they come back from Nonny and Poppy’s house, my boys are bouncing off the walls (and that’s an understatement.). No one wants to go into the backyard when I suggest bouncing on the trampoline instead, because they all missed their toys “so, so, so much!”
No one remembers where to put their shoes (the shoe basket we’ve had by the door for YEARS). They don’t even remember how to get dressed. It’s like dressing for seven days in a row is enough effort to last the entire summer.
The first day of detox was the third son’s fifth birthday, which means tradition set a birthday treat in front of him at breakfast. I had a feeling it was a bad idea, but what are you going to do with tradition? Ten minutes later they were catapulting over the side of the couch so quickly I didn’t know whose name to call out in my scolding, because they were blurs.
They got crayons, coloring books, Hot Wheels and a bin of four million LEGOs out all at the same time, even though we have a very important rule about “only one thing out at a time.”
“I’d like to see one of you build something with LEGOs, color a picture and play with the cars all at the same time,” I said.
They looked at me like I’d lost my mind. (By that point, I already had.)
After dinner, they forgot how to put their plates and silverware away.
“We used paper plates at Nonny and Poppy’s house,” they said when I asked.
“But Nonny didn’t make you throw them away?” I said.
“Yeah,” they said, not noticing the glaring inconsistency here: They still had to carry their plates somewhere.
There is just something about not being in the house where your parents live that makes you forget all the rules. Or, worse, make up your own.
Detoxing day one was filled with rules amended by incompetent-at-logic children. Here are just a few of them.
Actual rule: Only one book down from the shelves at a time.
Amended rule by detoxing, too-creative-for-his-own-good 8-year-old: Except when I create this world called Animalia. You see, Mama? I brought all my twelve thousand stuffed animals up from the garage where I found them in a trash bag—why were they in a trash bag?—and made my room like a stuffed animal resort. They have a reading corner here. See? There’s a book for every one of them. I’ll clean it all up, don’t worry.
Yeah, right.
Actual rule: Before you get something else out to play with, clean up whatever it was you were playing with before.
Amended rule by detoxing, I’m-the-birthday-boy 5-year-old: Except I get to pick everything to play with for the day AND I don’t have to clean anything up, because I’m the birthday boy. What’s that, Mama? It’s clean up time? Well, I’m the birthday boy, so I don’t have to clean up. Nuh-uh. I don’t have to clean up even though I got to pick all the toys. I’m the birthday boy and I LOVE NOT CLEANING UP! IT SHOULD BE MY BIRTHDAY EVERY DAY FOREVER!
(Don’t ever promise a birthday boy he’s exempt from cleaning up.)
Actual rule: Stay at the table until you’re finished with your food and we say yes to your “May I be excused?” question.
Amended rule by detoxing, I-can’t-stop-moving-my-feet 6-year-old: Except that I forgot to show you this really neat picture I made at Nonny and Poppy’s house, and did you see this word search I colored instead of circling words on, and, oh, yeah, I made this really neat paper airplane out of a superhero drawing. Do you want to see it fly? And my brother just go new markers for his birthday and I have this blank sheet of white paper and I LOVE TO COLOR SO MUCH!
It was getting pretty ridiculous.
Actual rule: Don’t touch the CD player when you’re only 3.
Amended rule by detoxing, strong-willed 3-year-old twin: Except I’m an annoying 3-year-old who won’t listen to anything you have to say. Touch, touch, touch. See me touch?
“Stop, son,” I say.
Touch, touch, touch.
[Sit him on the couch while I sit beside him acknowledging that I understand he really, really, really wants to touch those buttons and that I really wish I could let him but that he could break the CD player touching them all. Let him up three minutes later.]
Touch, touch, touch.
Long, long sigh.
Actual rule: Body excrement belongs in the toilet. Please, for the love of God, don’t poop in your underwear.
Amended rule by detoxing I’m-the-other-menace 3-year-old: Oops.
I finally had to lock them all in the backyard (cruel, cruel mother) just to regain my sanity.
I am incredibly grateful for the time our boys get to spend with their grandparents, no matter how challenging it is to get them back on a schedule and remind them of the rules they’ve known since the beginning of time (at least their time). They are not only spending valuable time with another generation but they are also giving their daddy and me the opportunity to spend some beautiful time by ourselves, reconnecting and engaging in conversations where we actually get to finish our sentences and remembering how much we liked each other in the first place.
The time we spend detoxing is definitely worth that reconnection. Every single time.
P.S. Just power through that first day, Mama and Daddy. It will get better. Remember? It always does (not before you add a few gray hairs, though). Pretty soon you’ll be right back to counting down the days until you can send them away again.
by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
Dear society,
Let’s settle something once and for all: Boys are allowed to have feelings, too.
I know you feel uncomfortable with a boy who cries. I know you cringe to see a boy walking sad. I know you can’t stand to see a man barely able to crawl from his bed for the darkness hanging his head, weighing him down.
I watched my brother shake beneath your hand, society, but I didn’t fully understand it until I had six boys of my own.
These boys in my home are brim full of emotions, and those emotions leak out his eyes when he’s told he can’t bring a book to the lunch table, because he’d rather bury himself in a book than talk with friends about video games he doesn’t play; and they climb out his mouth when his playing time passes way too fast and he’s not ready, not at all, for the clean-up time; and they hide behind frustration when he just can’t execute that flip as perfectly as he wants.
I know what you would tell them, society.
Forget about it.
It’s not that bad.
We’ll give you something to cry about.
Man up.
Man up, because real men don’t cry.
And there they go, walking around with their emotions trapped by your dam, so they’re ticking time bombs, and you shake your heads in disgust when you read about that young man sneaking into an elementary school with a loaded gun and that baby’s daddy beating her, a toddler of only two years, to death and all those men walking out on their families because disengagement is easier than feeling the sorrow of alienation or the frustration of a crying child or the disappointment of a rocky family that points to a rocky marriage that points to a messed up life.
There they go, turning from their inner lives toward stoic silence and solitude and cynicism. There they go straightjacketed by the rules of manhood, so they don’t even know who they are anymore.
You are stealing life from these boys, society.
You whisper it behind your hands: Wow. He’s really sensitive. Dramatic. Easily upset about so little.
And you shout it in their faces: Be someone different.
And you tell them a thousand other ways that men don’t feel because they’re men, dammit.
But here’s the thing, society:
Real men do cry. Real men do feel. Real men talk and grieve and walk with vulnerable hearts instead of clenched-tight ones.
You are not a man if all you ever do is hide behind a straw house of strength. You are not strong if you never show us weak.
[Tweet “Real men do cry. Real men do feel. Real men talk and grieve and walk with vulnerable hearts.”]
When do our boys just get to be who they are, without being called names or labeled into a box or dismissed as something they’re not?
What if all that negativity poisoning a life leaks from a clenched-tight heart in those tears that make you so uncomfortable? What if letting a boy walk sad for a minute means we save him from not just a physical heart disease but an emotional one, too, because he feels understood and supported and highly esteemed? What if naming the darkness following that man who can barely climb from his bed means, for him, a release from the shame and fear and anxiety heaping his shoulders at the possibility of being found out, of being seen as weak, of forfeiting his identity as a real mean?
What if they all walk lighter for it?
Maybe we see a brave new world, a world where boys stand with an emotional vocabulary they aren’t terrified to use, where boys honor and value their emotional lives as rich windows to their souls, where boys unclench those precious, magnificent hearts.
Where men can be real men.
And that, society, is worth letting my boy weep for the losing of a toy, because it meant a whole lot to him. It’s worth permitting him a good, healthy cry for the leaving of a house when it’s time to go, because he genuinely, wholeheartedly enjoyed this visit with people he loves. It’s worth holding him while he shakes out his sorrow for the trouble he had at school because he really, really regrets it.
After all, “teardrops are healers as they begin to arrive” (Rumi).
[Tweet “Teardrops are healers as they begin to arrive. –Rumi.”]
by Rachel Toalson | This Writer Life
Writers, we sometimes tend to be different people than the national norm. Not all of us, but some of us. I know a few of us who are really positive people, but a whole lot of us feel like the world’s ending when we can’t think of anything to write for the day’s blog or we’re stuck tight in a plot line. What if it never gets better? What if this is all we’ve got? What if all of that is true?
I tend to be one of those people who thinks worst-case scenario. If something goes wrong, I think it will always be so. If I write a blog post I think will cause all sorts of waves and maybe even hit the coveted viral spot (even though that’s overrated) and then I share it and it’s crickets, I think no one likes the things I write and that I’ll never be popular enough to do the whole blog-a-book thing. And if I have a book that doesn’t do as well in a launch as I’d hoped, I think that it’s probably always going to be this way, that no one will ever enjoy my writing and the people who read all my writings right now are probably the only audience members I’ll ever get.
So it’s odd that I would be the one to make a case for thinking positively, since that’s something that most definitely does not come easily or naturally to me. My husband is a positive guy, and he’s usually the one who can talk some sense back into me when I’m feeling a little down about something that went wrong for the day. He’s usually the one who can help me see what it is that I’m doing and how I can learn from the disappointing experience.
If you don’t have a husband like mine, maybe I can help you a little.
There are all kinds of studies that show us the power of thinking positively. We can accomplish more in a day when we meet it head-on and see its challenges as learning experiences rather than you-should-give-up-now experiences. Recently, the hard drive of my computer, where I have ALL of my writing (the ONLY place I have ALL my writing—about three million words that exist in no other place on earth) decided it didn’t want to be all that helpful anymore, and I thought I’d lost it all. Years of writing I would never get back.
[Tweet “It’s much easier to bounce back from hardships when we see them as learning experiences.”]
My husband, of course, thought it would be possible to restore everything, and he hoped enough for the both of us. I was ready to hang up my career, because that was eight manuscripts I’d worked on last year, and how would I ever recover from that? There were book releases that were fast approaching, and I didn’t have any of those books available anywhere else. It was the worst thing that could have happened.
My husband spent hours trying to recover my work, and he succeeded, not thanks to me.
But I’d lost a whole day to worry. I’d lost a whole day to imagining the worst-case scenario. Sure, I tried writing a little to distract myself, even though I didn’t have a computer to write on and had to use my husband’s unfamiliar one that didn’t know my hands like mine knew them, which was, in itself, a reminder of how dire this situation was (what if I didn’t get all that work back? What if I lost whole years? What if my computer was broken for good?). The writing helped me not think about it as often. But every time there was a lull in the typing of an essay, I would think about how I would have to give up. It wasn’t worth trying again, not if we couldn’t recover those files.
Everything ended up perfectly fine. And what we learned from the experience is that we need to back everything up, because those files are far too important not to—and we do this every evening when I’m done for the day.
How much time would we save in thinking positively? I’d wasted a whole day thinking negatively. I could have done a whole lot in a whole day.
I know it doesn’t necessarily come easily for all of us, and I know it can get difficult to see the silver lining in something like losing a whole hard drive with three years’ worth of work on it, and it can be hard to see the positive in a book release that fell flat, and it can be hard to look at personal problems with something akin to hope. Sometimes we’re too afraid to hope, because we’d rather imagine the worst-case scenario and then be pleasantly surprised when it doesn’t end up that way.
But we could save ourselves a lot of heartache and worry if we would just think something like this:
Yes, this will go well.
Yes, I can do this.
Yes, I will get through this.
It’s not easy to change ourselves so drastically, but here are some things that might help us see the value in positive thinking:
1. We won’t spend as much energy worrying.
So many studies point to the fact that worrying is terrible for our bodies and our minds. It affects us physically and emotionally, and that, too, can affect our ability to write well. If we weren’t spending so much time and energy worrying about what might happen, we could spend a little more time writing. Which is always needed in the life of a parent writer.
2. Thinking positively has been proven to make us feel happier and more fulfilled.
If we’re a glass-half-empty kind of person, we tend to see everything with a glass half empty. We see our family and our relationships and our writing and our life half empty. I want to see my life full. I want to see my relationships and my family and my writing with a glass half full. I want to believe that this is the best life ever—even if my hard drive crashes and I lose all my work—and that the future has great things in store for me. Maybe being disappointed, if those things aren’t actually true, is better than being pleasantly surprised, because, along the way, you actually get to LIVE.
3. Thinking positively could possibly bring those positive things to you.
There are different camps to this line of thinking. Some say it doesn’t matter what your mind thinks, the universe gives what it gives. But more and more people are recognizing the power that our minds can have over what we get in life (and some scientists have even proven it in studies). When we see things in a positive light, they say, we tend to attract those things.
And if I’m looking at it objectively, when I’m caught in one of my negative thinking patterns, I tend to see the negativity everywhere. What if we expected the best? Would the best then come to us?
Well, I guess I’d like to try. Wouldn’t you?
[Tweet “What if we expected the best? Would it come to us? I guess I’d like to try. Wouldn’t you?”]
Week’s prompt
Write as much as you can for as long as you have about the following word:
Smells
by Rachel Toalson | General Blog
“Oh. You must be a stay-at-home mom.”
There we sat, in a doctor’s office for an annual exam, the nurse tapping in all my background information. We’d just established the six kids piece when she said it.
“No,” I said. “Actually, I work full time.”
It came out almost like an apology, like I was ashamed to say I, a mother of six boys, work the equivalent of a full-time job, and I followed it up with a disclaimer about how I work from home in the afternoons and sometimes late at night so I can spend mornings and evenings with my children and work when they’re being cared for by their daddy or asleep.
“Oh. Oh, wow,” she said. “OK.” She turned to put this latest bit of information into the computer with nothing more said.
It’s not the first time I have encountered this assumption or felt the need to apologize for correcting it. It’s usually women who make those comments, “So, obviously, you stay home with them all,” “Wow, you must be way too busy to work a job,” “Isn’t it wonderful to stay home with them while they’re little?” and it baffles me a little, because if there’s one thing I’ve learned in my seven years of parenting, it’s that we are all different.
Which means that what we think we might do if we had six children doesn’t mean that’s what she chooses to do.
There are moms of one child who choose to stay home with their child, and there are moms of six children who choose to work.
Every afternoon, I hole away in my home office and write essays and chapters of the latest book and a few poems in all the margins, and I thoroughly enjoy what I do. I always have. It’s what I was made to do. Having children did not change that.
I work for myself, but I still choose to work. Because I am passionate about words and language and crafting beauty and truth to release out into the world. Because I believe in what I’m doing. Because I want my boys to know that women have as much to offer the world as they do.
But mostly because I am a better mother for my separate pursuit, for my writing, for the ways I can process through mistakes and circumstances and potential solutions outside of the constant demands of my children, but that is just me.
I have friends who are stay-at-home moms, and I love them dearly. I have friends who are working moms, and I love them dearly, too.
There is no one right way. There is only our right way.
[Tweet “There is no one right way to be a mother. There is only our right way.”]
We get really good at debating what’s best for the children, but sometimes what’s best for the children is what’s best for us. Some of us can be better versions of ourselves with a career to pursue. Some of us are better versions of ourselves away from the stress of an out-of-home job.
We can argue about who has it hardest, too, but it’s all the hardest job in the world, because we are all mothers, and even when we’re in an office, miles away from our children or just a few feet, we are still thinking of them and worrying about them and missing them. We are still loving them, just like any stay-at-home mom.
And when we’re at home with them, meeting all those needs in real time, trying to hold fast to our sanity because all the whining is pulling it rapidly out of our reach, locking ourselves in the pantry for just a minute to breathe or think or eat that piece of chocolate we’ve been hiding, we are still thinking of them and worrying about them and loving them, just like any working mom.
Just because a mom chooses to mother six kids doesn’t mean she chooses to stay at home full time or she has to give up on a career or she cannot pursue a dream for herself. It just means it may look different for her, like working odd hours to get all those tasks done, like trading off with their daddy to avoid childcare costs, like commuting to an office twice a week and working from a home office the other three days.
I don’t work to get promotions or make a lot of money or even to be some super-mom placed on a pedestal as a “she can do it, why can’t I?” I work because it’s enjoyable to me, because without writing and creating and chasing a dream, I am not the best version of myself.
I know that nurse didn’t say those words to try to make me feel bad or guilty or wrong for my choice, and I don’t.
[Tweet “I don’t feel badly that I’m a mom who works. In fact, I feel more fulfilled. But that’s just me.”]
But I do believe that maybe the world could do without all our assumptions, that the next time we see a mama with a whole tribe of kids crowding around her legs, fighting about who’s going to ride her feet across the street this time, we don’t just assume she is one who has chosen kids over a career, because it’s the only way a thing like that would work.
Maybe we just admire those children, pat them on the head with an encouraging smile and leave those assumptions where they lie.
