by Rachel Toalson | Books
I try to read between two and five middle grade novels every month, mostly because that’s the genre I like to write in, and the best way to learn a genre is to read in it. One of the best middle grade novels I’ve picked up so far this year was The War that Saved My Life, by Kimberly Brubaker Bradley.
The story follows Jamie and Ada Smith, who are the children of a cruel woman. The novel is written around the historical time period of Britain’s involvement in World War II, when cities were getting bombed by the Germans. Ada has a club foot, and because of it, her mother treats her like a monster and won’t let her out of the house. She watches the world from her front window. But when the other children in their poor part of town start leaving because of bomb threats and their mother talks of sending her brother off and keeping Ada at home, Ada hatches a plan and steals out one early morning with Jamie. They are placed with a woman named Susan in a country home, where Ada discovers a love for horses and Jamie discovers a pet cat and they both discover what it means to be loved in this unknown world, where they eat more than they’ve eaten before in their lives.
The War that Saved My Life was a superbly written story, with so much emotion and wonder and ache. Readers will ache for Ada as she learns what it means to be loved unconditionally. Readers with ache for Jamie as he begins to miss his tyrant mother. Readers will ache for Susan, who grieves the loss of her partner and the other person she feels who really understood her, at least until these strange children come along. Bradley tells the story from Ada’s perspective, which is an engaging, innocent, lovable voice.
Some of my favorite passages were ones where Ada was talking about her brother. She loves him so clearly and desperately.
“Jamie had a mop of dirt-brown hair, the eyes of an angel and the soul of an imp. Mam said he was six years old, and would have to start school in the fall. Unlike me, he had strong legs, and two sound feet at the ends of them. He used them to run away from me.
“I dreaded being alone.”
This passage digs up so much fear and so much emotion. We see what Ada will lose when her brother starts school, though he is already running away from her now, roaming the town without her. But when he starts school, she will be alone for much more of the day, and he is her only companion, because her mother refuses to let her out of the house.
Ada also uses some remarkable powers of description. Here, she is describing what it’s like in the train that is evacuating the children:
“The day got worse. It was bound to. The train stopped and started and stopped again. Hot sun poured through the windows until he air seemed to curdle. Small children cried. Bigger ones fought.”
We see not only what the situation was like from a 10-year-old’s perspective, but we also see a little of her pessimism: “The day got worse. It was bound to.” I was immediately drawn to her because of her observation.
And here she’s describing the house where they are taken after getting off the train, the home of Susan Smith:
“The house looked asleep.
“It sat at the very end of a quiet dirt lane. Trees grew along both sides of the lane, and their tops met over it so that the plane was shadowed in green. The house sat pushed back from the trees, in a small pool of sunlight, but vines snaked up the red brick chimney and bushes ran rampant around the windows. A small roof sheltered a door painted red, like the chimney, but the house itself was a flat gray, dull behind the bushes. Curtains were drawn over the windows and the door was shut tight.”
This is a great description of the place that ends up also being a great description of the woman who lives there: “Curtains drawn over the windows and the door was shut tight.” It will take children to fling open the windows.
Some of the emotion-filled passages were seen in the way Ada was trying to work out the difference between Susan Smith and her mother. Susan had called herself “not a nice person.” Ada tries to reconcile this:
“She was not a nice person, but she cleaned up the floor. She was not a nice person, but she bandaged my foot in a white piece of cloth, and gave us two of her own clean shirts to wear. They hung past our knees. She combed or cut the tangles out of our hair, which took ages, and then she made a big pan of scrambled eggs. ‘It’s all the food I have,’ she said. ‘I haven’t been shopping this week. I wasn’t expecting you.’
“All the food she had, she said, except there was butter on the slightly stale bread, and sugar in the tea.”
This passage shows such a stark contrast between the home they left and this one where they find themselves. It’s almost an awakening of sorts, but the way Ada repeat the words, “She was not a nice person,” suggests that she is trying to work out for herself whether Susan Smith is a nice person or whether she is just another Mam. She does not yet trust Susan Smith.
When living in their mother’s home, Ada and Jamie hardly ever bathed. In their new place, they are expected to bathe every day. Ada tries to come to terms with this:
“There was hot water, soap, a towel. I already felt clean, but the water was soothing. Afterward I put on new clothes called pajamas, that were supposed to be just to sleep in. Tops and bottoms, both blue. The fabric was so soft that for a moment I held it against my face. It was all soft, this place. Soft and good and frightening. At home I knew who I was.”
Ada does not know who she is in this new place, but she’s also terrified of leaving it. She doesn’t know how long they’ll be able to stay there, and she doesn’t really want to find her place, because she’d rather just expect the worst. She holds it all at arms’ length, but this is a passage that reveals the truth of her feelings, how she wants—no, longs—to pull it all close and hold it against her, if only for a moment.
Ada begins breaking during her stay with Susan Smith:
“Why would I cry? I never cried. But when I shook myself free of Miss Smith’s grasp, tears shook loose from my eyes and slid down my cheeks. Why would I cry? I wanted to hit something, or throw something, or scream. I wanted to gallop on Butter and never stop. I wanted to run, but I couldn’t run, not with my twisted, ugly, horrible foot. I buried my head in one of the fancy pillows on the sofa, and then I couldn’t help it. I did cry.
“I was so tired of being alone.”
This is such a lovely passage. It is confusion and sorrow and hope. Ada is a little girl tired of being alone, so worried that the person she is coming to love is going to leave her, or send her away, like her Mam did. This woman has been so kind and soft where her Mam was loud and hard, and she doesn’t know how to accept it, because she has never known anything else. And yet she has never wanted anything else more.
I love this metaphor that Ada stumbles upon, after reading The Swiss Family Robinson with Susan. She and Jamie have just asked what tempest-tossed means:
“Miss Smith liked at me over her mug of tea. ‘Caught a storm,’ she said. ‘Wind and rain and lightning, and if you’re in a boat, at sea, you get tossed from side to side. You’re all thrown about, because of the storm.’
“I looked at Jamie. ‘That’s us,’ I said. ‘All thrown about. We’re tempest-tossed.’ He nodded.”
When Susan touches her for the first time, Ada says this:
“It felt very odd to have her touch me. Of course it made me tense. But I didn’t go away inside my head. I sat on the sofa with Miss Smith’s arm around me, and Jamie breathing soft near my shoulder, and I watched the coal fire flicker, and I stayed right there, right there in that room, and none of us moved for half an hour. Jamie fell asleep, and Miss Smith and I just sat, neither of us saying a word, until it was time to put the blackout up, and make tea.”
She is not used to a loving touch, only one that is harsh and unkind, and it’s not only something that she has to get used to, but it’s something that she longs to have, as most children do, and is afraid she won’t get ever again.
The first passage to make me cry was this one:
“I hold perfectly still while she took off my sweater and blouse, and settled the green dress over my head. ‘Step out of your skirt,’ Susan said, and I did. She buttoned the dress and stepped back ‘There,’ she said, smiling, her eyes soft and warm. ‘It’s perfect, Ada, you’re beautiful.’
“She was lying. She was lying, and I couldn’t bear it. I heard Mam’s voice shrieking in my head. ‘You ugly piece of rubbish! Filth and trash! No one wants you, with that ugly foot! My hands started to shake. Rubbish. Filth. Trash. I could wear Maggie’s discards, or plain clothes from the shops, but not this, not this beautiful dress. I could listen to Susan say she never wanted children all day long. I couldn’t bear to hear her call me beautiful.”
It’s such a tragically beautiful passage that will grip those who have ever been hurt by one they loved and, at the same time, mend the pieces of their heart. It is difficult for a child to get the cruel voice out of their heads, so the kindness of another person makes a child feel angry and afraid. Ada is trying to figure out who it is who’s telling the truth, and it’s easier for a child like her to believe the terrible things than it is for her to believe the good ones.
In several of the passages between Susan and the children, Bradley slips in her behavior-philosophies, which I love, since these are philosophies we teach our children, too:
“‘It’s okay,’ I said, slipping my arm around his shoulders. ‘I was bad.’ I wondered if the presents were all for Jamie. Could any possibly be for me?
“‘Not bad,’ Susan said. She helped me down the last few steps. ‘Not bad, Ada. Sad. Angry. Frightened. Not bad.’
“Sad, angry, frightened were bad. It was not okay to be any of those. I couldn’t say so, though, not on that gentle morning.”
Susan is one who believes that our emotions are not who we are, and she tries to explain that to the children, though the damage of their Mam is a persistent damage to overcome.
In this passage, Ada wrestles with all her feelings:
“It was scary, how angry I felt inside. At Susan, for being temporary. At Mam, for not caring about us. At Fred, for wearing the scarf I had knit him from his wife’s wool every day, as though it was something special, when I could see myself how I’d dropped some stitches and picked up others, so that the scarf was full of holes.”
For Ada, her sadness manifests itself as anger. She feels anger because she is sad about all those things. She is caught in a place where she does not know what will happen tomorrow, and she doesn’t know how to reconcile that instability and not-knowing with anything else but anger. Anger is easier than sadness.
Ada, at times, is profound:
“I had so much. I felt so sad.”
“There was a Before Dunkirk version of me and an After Dunkirk version. The After Dunkirk version was stronger, less afraid. It had been awful, but I hadn’t quit. I had persisted. In battle I had won.”
This last passage accurately shows what happens to kids in adversity. Ada understands that even though she has endured something tough, she has come back out stronger and braver than she was before.
The War that Saved My Life was beautiful all the way through, deserving of its Newbery Honor recognition through and through.
by Rachel Toalson | Automation
Sometimes I feel like I’m doing a pretty good job as a parent. Relationships are good, all those consequences we’ve put into our Family Playbook—a list of infractions and their expected consequences—are well understood, the house is in almost perfect order.
And then my children wake up.
It only takes seconds to realize that they are completely different people today.
Not only have they forgotten all the new infractions and consequences we brainstormed yesterday, but they also no longer care about getting to school on time or wearing clean clothes or keeping their room even the slightest bit tidy.
Yesterday my two older boys came down for breakfast fifty minutes before we had to leave for school. Today they were still not eating breakfast 10 minutes before we had to walk out the door, and I had to shout my last you’re-not-going-to-get-breakfast warning above the volume of an audio book, because I’m too lazy to walk up the stairs for the sixteenth time (I blame my laziness on my broken foot. And Post Traumatic Stress, which I feel every time I approach stairs).
Yesterday they liked the grilled broccoli and cauliflower and carrots we brushed with olive oil and sprinkled with sea salt and roasted in the oven. Today they gagged just looking at them.
Yesterday they all sat perfectly still in their separate spaces while their daddy read two picture books and I read a Narnia chapter book and again while we engaged in our ten minutes of Sustained Silent Reading time and then again while we did our meditation breathing and prayer time. We didn’t have to remind them once to get back in their spots or stop talking or that, no, an art journal is not a book you read and, no, the pen in your hand is not necessary during reading time (unless you’re taking notes—which he was clearly not).
Today they think reading time means chase-your-brother-around-the-library time.
It’s enough to drive a parent insane.
I’ve often joked that parenting is like living in an insane asylum. But the joke is usually true.
Insanity is defined by Albert Einstein as “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
THIS IS WHAT KIDS DO, EVERY SINGLE DAY.
They try to write during story time, even though we’ve told them a billion times it’s not allowed. They try to sneak that LEGO toy into the bath tub, thinking this time will surely be different and we won’t object. They seem surprised that 8 p.m. is lights out, even though nothing has changed in their thousands of nights.
The problem is, our kids are the least consistent people on the planet. Every single day they wake up completely different people.
The bigger problem, though, is that they give us that one little taste of expectation realization, and we think they CAN sit still for two stories and a chapter book.
And we keep expecting it every other day.
For as long as we’ve had twins, I have fantasized about two boys napping in the same bedroom for more than an hour and a half.
We were spoiled, because our older boys took three-hour naps and could be trusted to sleep in their rooms with their doors closed.
The first time we left the twins for three hours with the door closed, they pulled down the forty-four shirts in their closet, painted with poop and ate the cardboard pages of Goodnight Moon.
So the next time I set a timer for two hours (because surely they’d just woken up early) and I sat outside their door to work on some deadline material. I could hear them shrieking, but we’d baby proofed everything, and there were only two mattresses on their floor (not even beds, because the twins could destroy furniture in 3.4 seconds). Nothing they could get into. Nothing that would hurt them. Nothing to occupy them for two hours.
They got really quiet, but I didn’t worry. We’re all quiet when we’re sleeping.
When the timer went off, I opened their door and found them sitting on clouds, all the stuffing ripped out of the lone Beanie Boo someone had left in their room.
The next day, I opened their door. I sat right outside. I corrected them when they so much as moved.
AND THEY FELL ASLEEP. FOR TWO WHOLE HOURS.
Oh, thank God, I said. It is possible.
So, of course, the next day, I did the exact same thing. Except as soon as they were asleep, I went to my room to do some more involved work and make a few business phone calls. Two hours later, they had knocked their closet doors off the hinges, strung all their ties from the ceiling fan and neatly lined up all their shoes under their mattresses.
Oh my word.
It’s maddening and confusing and impossible to keep up with these every-day-different children.
It’s impossible to know that today the 8-year-old only got seven hours of sleep but will wake up the happiest kid in the world, but tomorrow he’ll get 12 hours of sleep and will wake up gnawing on all the heads he bit off before breakfast.
It’s impossible to know that today the 6-year-old will follow all the rules and help with everything around the house, and tomorrow he will wake up a defiant little monster.
It’s impossible to know that today the 4-year-old will love reading those books to me but tomorrow he will wake up acting like he’d rather eat spinach than finish the last five sentences of that Little Bear story.
What’s a parent to do?
We just keep doing the same thing over and over, expecting different results from this insane asylum. Because, you know. Consistency and all.
Also because sometimes it does work, and those times it works might just be enough to power us through the times it doesn’t.
And if they’re not, well. At least there’s red wine. And chocolate.
And a lock on our bedroom door they haven’t yet learned to pick (it’s coming).
by Rachel Toalson | Messy Mondays
Today is a day we celebrate a great man of history who envisioned a lofty dream for America, one of peace and love and equality, spread to every corner of the world. While I love the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. I have to admit that I’d forgotten it was a holiday until I woke up at 4 in the morning and couldn’t get back to sleep, so I thought I’d check my email and then happened to read the note from my kids’ principal reminding me that school was out for the day. Yay! My favorite.
I lay in bed, trying desperately to get back to sleep, while Husband clearly didn’t have any trouble ignoring my insomnia, judging by the noises coming from his mouth and nose. So, naturally, I started thinking about my own dreams. I ran through them, writing dreams, book dreams, music dreams, dreams for my kids, dreams for Husband, and when I’d listed them all in my much-too-busy-for-4-a.m.-head, I thought about the one I want most right now. It’s a little sad and simple, but it’s a big one all the same: Get a decent nights’ sleep for once.
You might say I’ll probably never have a decent nights’ sleep, because I have six kids, and kids become teenagers and teenagers become adults and I’ll never stop worrying about them until the day I die. Okay. That’s fair. But let me just explain here that it’s not often that worry or anxiety, thankfully, keeps me up at night. Usually because I’m so exhausted by the time I get to fall into bed that sleep comes easily. That old saying “asleep before your head hit the pillow?” That’s me.
Also, our kids have always been champion sleepers, ever since they were tiny babies. It was unusual for a Toalson baby not to sleep all the way through the night by, at the latest, eight weeks of age. It’s rare that any of the boys will wake in the middle of the night with nightmares or feeling sick, although it does happen on occasion. Besides, I’m not even talking about that kind of decent nights’ sleep. Because the truth is, those are more the exception than the rule, and of course I’m going to rub a boy’s back when he’s not feeling well, and of course I’m going to make sure they feel safe until they fall asleep, and of course I’ll hold that baby if his gums are hurting too much.
I’m talking about the nights I’m woken up for no other reason than the fact that I sleep with a lawnmower.
I can’t even count the number of times I’ve woken in the middle of the night and thought one of the neighbors had mistakenly set their yard guy as their alarm clock and then, when reason climbed back to its rightful place and I looked over at Husband, I saw the culprit.
There are nights when Husband will roll over and put his arm around me, and it’s one of my favorite things to momentarily wake up and feel his warmth. But woe to me if I don’t find sleep before he starts revving his motor, because I will have no hope of finding it for the rest of the night. Sometimes he’ll turn over on his stomach, which he says is better for the snoring thing, but I’d like to report that no, it’s not. It muffles the sound just a tad, but it definitely does not eliminate it.
That is one magnificent yard he’s mowing.
So, as we remember the contribution to history that Martin Luther King Jr. made, I’d like to ask the powers that be, to please, please, solve this snoring problem, because I did not sign up for a John Deere tractor chime on my alarm.
And then, just before pushing Husband onto his belly, I remembered that I’d recorded last night’s one-man performance, because Husband didn’t believe he could possibly be snoring as badly as he is. I stuck a headphone in my ear and played the recording. I was surprised to find that there were two lawn mowers in our room last night. I have no idea who the other one was.
I was too afraid to investigate. Instead, I just rolled over and went back to sleep.
by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
There is a little boy, identical to another, who roams my house burning with curiosity, looking for all the hidden places, touching everything he can possibly find that looks interestingly forbidden. Day after day after day it’s the same story, and my tone often says frustrated and annoyed and angry because he’s really, really good at exploring those cloth diapers just folded, when I step away for two seconds, and he’s really, really good at finding those glass containers when I’ve re-folded and hidden safely away, and he’s really, really good at pulling out yesterday’s food from the trash can while I’ve closed myself in the bathroom for a minute.
This day, my boys have forgotten to close the bathroom doors and the baby gate upstairs, but my attention is divided elsewhere, and before I know it, his twin brother is playing with the cars I got out for them and his older brothers are reading books to each other and he is out of sight upstairs, emptying drawers of their clothes and scarves and hats, and my patience stretches just a little too thin. I speak harshly, and he starts to cry, not so much for the words but the look on my face, because I see it in the mirror, how that look says no love lives here.
A little boy, not even 2, hurt by the one he loves most. Where is the love and honor here?
And I know why it happened, because it’s why it always happens: I need to get something done. And every time he pulls out something he shouldn’t, he takes minutes away from my finishing what I needed to do, so what should have taken five minutes has now taken forty-five, and how does a mama love and honor her children when she is focused on her own agenda, that never-ending to-do list?
Maybe she lets go that list and picks up her boy instead.
So this is what I do. I pick up my little boy, who doesn’t get much more than my “Don’t do that” and my “Stay out of this,” and I hold him, let him rest that sandy head on my shoulder, let him pull back to look me in the eye, and while we’re staring at each other, he smiles and says, “Hi.”
Sometimes it takes only a moment, only a stare, only a word from a baby you held when he was only four pounds, eight ounces, to remind a mama what really matters in all the world. It’s not the taxes I’m trying to file or the kitchen I’m trying to prepare for lunch in the moments when the computer thinks too long or even the schedule I must keep to the second so I can get these children down for naps and start on my full-time work.
All that matters is this, a boy and his mama, a boy honored by his mama, a boy loved by his mama.
It matters what I say and how I speak, and it matters whether my attention shows him honor and love. So how do we do it? How do we meet these needs with four other children and a full-time job and a writing career on the side, with all those leftovers like dinner and laundry and home-cleaning?
Maybe we do it moment by moment, choosing the next right thing.
And maybe the next right thing is putting that laundry load in the wash and honoring them with clean clothes, or maybe it’s letting those piles keep piling so we can sit on a couch with a 22-month-old and look in those eyes and really, really see. So they hear the words we don’t speak. I see you. I honor you. I love you.
This is an excerpt from the Family on Purpose series, Episode 2. For more about the Family on Purpose series, visit the project landing page.
by Rachel Toalson | Stuff Crash Test Kids say
5-year-old: Knock knock
Me: Who’s there
5-year-old: How do you get germs on your fingers?
Me: How do you get germs on your fingers who?
5-year-old: How you get germs on your fingers is you lick all over them.
Me:
5-year-old: you didn’t laugh.
Me. Oh, right. Hahaha
6-yearold: What do you call a witch that’s on the beach?
Me: I don’t know.
6-year-old: A sand-witch.
6-year-old: What happens when a banana is playing in the sun?
Me: I don’t know.
6-year-old: The banana peels
6-year-old: What do you call a singing cat?
Me: Um…
6-year-old: A cat singing.
Me:
6-year-old:
Me: I think I saw that one coming.
6-year-old: What do you call a car that’s not moving?
Me: A stationary car.
6-year-old: No. A stopped car.
Me: Same thing.
6-year-old: No it’s not.
Me: Actually it is. Stationary means not moving.
6-year-old: But this car was stopped.
Me:
6-year-old:
Me:
6-year-old: It’s not the same thing. Trust me.
6-year-old: What do you call a penguin who doesn’t win?
Husband: I don’t know.
6-year-old: A peng-in. Get it?
Husband:
6-year-old:
Husband: No.
6-year-old: A peng-in. He doesn’t win, so you take out the w.
Husband:
6-year-old:
Husband:
6-year-old: Never mind.
by Rachel Toalson | This Writer Life
Writers have very sedentary jobs. When we’re not sitting down reading, we’re sitting down writing or editing a manuscript or working on pitch materials or compiling a book. If we wanted, we could sit here in the same place, forever.
But all that sitting isn’t good for a body.
I tend to be a pretty healthy person. I enjoy eating well and working out, and it’s easy for me to schedule that exercising time on my calendar every day. I walk my boys to school every morning. I do interval training. I eat mostly paleo, because my body has little ability to process carbs.
But the writing was a problem.
Last last year I found that sitting for four hours every day was really getting to me. I couldn’t figure out a way to do anything differently until I discovered the beauty of standing desks.
Standing desks allow a writer to stand for whatever period of time they’re writing or working on a computer. I don’t use my desk when I’m writing by hand, which is only during my morning journal time, because I write so much faster if I’m typing, but I use it any time I use my computer, which is five hours a day.
Now. Standing for five hours a day doesn’t sound possible when you haven’t been standing for an hour. So I have to tell you that I didn’t start out standing for five hours. I stood for an hour, and then I stood for two, and then three and then four and then, finally, five. And some days, when I wake up with a back ache because one of the kids landing his jump-off-the-couch wrong on my back, I don’t stand for the full five hours. The point is to stand for the majority of our writing time instead of remaining sedentary.
A change like this doesn’t have to be expensive. You just have to get creative. I don’t actually have a standing desk. I set up a makeshift one one my bedroom dresser. I stacked a few Writer’s Market books on top of each other, until the computer sat at a height that was comfortable, and called that my standing desk.
What I love about a standing desk is that when I’m stuck on a plot line or I can’t think of a word I need for this particular phrase, I just bounce on my toes a little, or I step back from the computer screen, and I figure things out that way. Sometimes I’ll accidentally look at myself in the mirror (which is a little startling. Do my eyes really look that crazy when I’m concentrating?), because, like I said, my standing desk is really a dresser stacked with books.
For writers, a standing desk will increase our word count, because there is a proven link between physical activities and the inner working of our brains. I’ve measured this phenomenon. I produce about 20 percent more words (especially the rough draft kind) when I’m standing.
Not only that, but a standing desk is beneficial to our health. While it may seem like standing for all that time couldn’t be exactly healthy for you, if you’re wearing the right shoes (I wear my bright pink running shoes with adequate arch support), and you’re moving around a little (I walk in place sometimes or dance to the music coming through my Pandora station), then you’re actually burning calories while you’re writing. How cool is that?
For a while, I had a bum knee, an old injury from high school volleyball that flared up with the weeks of rain Texas had. I had to take a few days off of standing and, instead, sit in my blue wing chair. I didn’t produce nearly as many words when I was sitting. And my brain felt all tied up, because there was no movement happening.
Standing while creating makes it happen faster, more easily, and also makes it better. I’ve seen this in my own practice.
A new year always results in people making resolutions to stay healthier, and sometimes, when we’re pressed for time like parent writers often are, it’s hard to find time to fit in something as “unnecessary” as exercise and healthy practices, but we will be better writers if we keep ourselves healthy. As we’re taking care of ourselves, we can better take care of our children, and then we can better take care of our work.
It’s at least worth a try.
Some ways to get healthier as a writer:
1. Set up your own standing desk.
It doesn’t have to be something you spend a whole lot of money on, but it does have to be something that doesn’t hurt your eyes and neck and back. My husband once set up a standing desk on a treadmill, using some old lumber, so he could walk while he was writing. This is all I needed for my standing desk:
(Picture)
2. Take half an hour every day to do something physical.
You could go for a walk or play a game of kickball with your kids (Someone once said that if you play like children, you won’t ever have to do another workout in your life. It’s true. My kids play hard.). You could do an actual workout. I practice interval training and weight lifting, mixed with some anaerobic and aerobic activity. I also walk my kids half a mile to their school. Sometimes I got out on a long run to clear my head.
One of the best way to get our brains working is to do a workout. The brain responds surprisingly when we get moving. Not only does exercise benefit our writing, but it also boosts our immune system. Fewer sick days off means more days writing.
3. Write on the go.
While you’re out for a walk, or even running (if you can manage—I never could do it well while running. Too many hills in this part of the country.), speak your words into your voice recorder. Turn them into essays or chapters. This will increase your word count considerably.
4. Drink water. Eat.
This may seem like a crazy one to put on a list like this, because how can we live without drinking water and eating, silly woman? But the truth is, sometimes I get so involved in my writing that I completely forgot to drink water and eat. My kids eat lunch pretty early, and I”m not usually hungry while they’re eating, and so then it gets to nap time and I get started with some of my writing, and before I know it, it’s time for dinner and I never even had lunch. Same with the water thing. I keep a Klean Kanteen next to me at all times. I try to drink three of them a day.
5. Read while on the run.
When I’m running or walking, I’ll listen to podcasts about the craft or I’ll read audio books. This is a great way to pass the time and let our subconscious minds gather what they need in order to write better. My husband also got a blu tooth speaker that is water proof, so we can listen to whatever we’d like in the shower, too. When we’re parent writers, we have to squeeze every single minute out of our lives. Reading and learning always make us better writers, which means that time is never wasted.
by Rachel Toalson | Books
For the past year, I’ve been studying the art of humor writing, because I run a parenting humor blog, and I didn’t want it to be just run of the mill. There are so many humor writers who make their living from what I call roasting—making fun of people who are in the same camp they are, and I’ve found that it rubs me the wrong way.
So when I discovered the classic humor of Erma Bombeck, who was a humor writer in the 1960s (and on) published in a syndicated newspaper column, I knew I needed to channel HER. She wrote about suburban home life and described it so hilariously—without throwing her peers under the bus—that I was instantly drawn to her. I’ve now read five of her books.
The most recent one I finished had even a hilarious title: When You Look Like Your Passport Photo, It’s Time to Go Home. I took notes copiously throughout the book, trying to study what it was about her that made her so funny.
Most of the time she uses self-deprecating humor.
When she and her husband were on a cruise ship for several days, she told a story about how all they would do was eat, eat, eat. They were growing large. Here was a response from her husband when he told her they needed to do something about all this eating and she dared ask the question, “Why?”
“Let me put it this way. If someone wants to show home movies, all you have to do is wear white slacks and bend over.
“I looked in the mirror. He was right. I was beginning to dress like the Statue of Liberty. I held out my arms and fanned the skin that hung like a stage curtain. It was only a matter of time before fourteen tourists would fit in my arm. I couldn’t go home like this.”
She uses humor to make fun of herself (and her family at times) but also employs one of my favorite humor techniques—exaggeration.
When she and her husband get lost in a foreign country, on their way to the airport, she says this to her husband:
“I don’t want to panic you, but our plane leaves in four days.”
When her husband tells her he wants to go out jogging in the African bush, this is her response:
“No one is going to feel sorry for you because you’re stupid. We’re going to ship your body home and prop it up in the Boston Marathon. It will be hours before people realize you’re not moving under your own steam.”
I laughed out loud at that one, because it creates such a humorous image, and speaks just a little bit of truth, too.
“I don’t understand people who can go abroad and come back with nothing to declare but diarrhea,” she says. This sentence is so blunt and unexpected that I could not help but laugh. I’ve been abroad. And I did come back with diarrhea.
Other self-deprecating examples:
“I was being held captive on a no-frills ship of geologists, zoologists, and botanists who cared about the preservation of the world but nothing about toilet tissue. I hate to make generalizations, but there is a definite correlation between smart people and little regard for creature comforts.”
She is saying, essentially, that because she cares about these “creature comforts,” she is one of the not-smart people.
“At nights, I joined the group in the ship’s small lounge to listen to lectures, watch slides, and make notes on what we were to see the next day. No one suspected that in college, in response to the question, ‘What is a chinook?’ I wrote in, ‘The name of the guy I just broke up with.’”
At times, Bombeck takes a popular phrase and turns it around surprisingly:
“It has always been my theory that the family that plays together gets on one another’s nerves.”
And she uses surprise as an element of her humor, as in this passage:
“Standing at the south rim of the Grand Canyon, our family looked like an ad for constipation…Our daughter was ticked off because it was four in the morning and she didn’t want to be there. Her brothers were fighting because one of them was staring at the other one, and my husband didn’t know how he could possibly be on a raft on the Colorado River for six days with only a gym bag of clothes.”
Anyone who has traveled with a family will understand where she’s coming from.
Bombeck uses real-life humor often, which draws her readers to her. Anyone who has been a parent of teenage drivers understands the following (if a little exaggerated):
“I have survived three teenage drivers: one who used cruise control in downtown traffic at five p.m., one who put on full makeup and finished her homework while driving through a construction area, and another who got a ticket for driving forty-five miles per hour…in reverse. But this was unbelievable.”
I love that phrase at the end—“this was unbelievable”—which follows something that was really unbelievable—a driver getting a ticket for driving forty-five miles per hour in reverse.
Bombeck also has a hilarious passage on people trying to make their friends and family look at vacation slides (in her time—it could be translated to showing travel pictures or posting all your travel pictures on Facebook). But you’ll have to read the book to get that passage.
Bombeck is a master at turning a witty phrase:
“You don’t even know what fear is until you are out in the bush with eleven shutter-happy hunters who load film and shoot at anything that moves.”
“One (child) ran with the bulls through the narrow streets of Pamplona and told me later so I could have a heart attack at leisure.”
“We have paid as much as $300 a day to throw up in a sink shaped like a seashell.”
“From the rear, I looked like a Disney parking lot.” (She’s looking in the mirror wearing the full expedition costume.)
But lest you think When You Look Like Your Passport Photo It’s Time to Go Home is all fun and games, Bombeck also has a serious side. She pontificates on the shared hopes of humanity:
“Once you have looked into the eyes of people in a foreign country, you realize you all want the same thing: food on your table, love in your marriage, healthy children, laughter, freedom to be. The religion, the ideology, and the government may be different but the dreams are all the same.”
And, when speaking about a particular family trip that was the last her family would take as parents and children in an essay titled “Rafting Down the Grand Canyon, she says this:
“For the first time we could remember, we were a family who gave one another space to be ourselves. We had never done that before. It was as if we all knew that this was the end of a chapter in our lives and the beginning of a new one. The umbilical cord that had bound us together as a unit for nearly two decades was about to be severed.”
“From that day on, our lives would all turn in different directions. In many ways it was like the Colorado River. It would wind and twist with a promise of a new experience at each turn of the bend. There would be smooth waters for long stretches, then suddenly a patch of rough rapids that would test us and take away our control. It would demand everything we had to hang on and get back on course again.”
She finishes this essay with:
“It would be several years before we planned another family vacation. We all had a lot of thinking and growing up to do…a lot of things to prove to ourselves. But strangely, this was the trip that we all talk about and remember, the pictures we pore over in the family albums. We have never said it to one another, but it was the last summer of the child…the last summer of the parents. From that day on, all moved to become contemporaries.”
Makes me want to pack up my family right now and take them on a vacation.
by Rachel Toalson | Messy Mondays
So much for a yell-free year. I screwed that up at about 10 a.m. New Year’s Day.
Husband and I keep it no secret that we own a megaphone and use it frequently, because the noise six boys can make on a daily basis is like a thousand frightened elephants crashing through Stonehenge. The house trembles with the sound of it. And in order for our hourly instructions to be heard over all this trumpeting and stomping and crashing, we make sure our house is well stocked with Energizer D batteries and the megaphone is within reach of parent hands (definitely not kid hands. They don’t need any help in the louder department.).
So, on the rare occasion that the megaphone is nowhere to be found, or the batteries have run out and there are no more, yelling is necessary. Yelling to be heard above the voices of boys when they’re playing together. Yelling to be heard over their whispers, even, when they’re telling secrets (My kids are the loudest whisperers I’ve ever heard in my life). Yelling to get their attention, yelling to save them from dying, yelling to announce that dinner’s ready, because they surely won’t want to miss a single meal.
I’m not talking about this kind of yelling. This kind of yelling is necessary, at least in my home.
No, I’m talking about the kind of yelling that grabs the fire of anger and flings it at walls and doors and, mostly, kid-faces.
See, we’d been doing a whole lot of it in the last months of 2015. We’re not angry people, but boys, six of them, can quite often be maddening people. And, honestly, we were a little worn out. And we’d sometimes had enough of “whatever” before the kids had had enough. And there are a thousand excuses.
But when we looked around at our children during their two weeks (and an extra day!!!) off school, we realized (yet again) that yelling is not the answer. It’s true that sometimes we didn’t get enough sleep, because we had too much on our mind or the baby woke with a snot tree growing from his nose or the 9-year-old burst through our bedroom door at 3 a.m. to say his tummy hurt five seconds before yesterday’s pork chops splattered my face. It’s true that money’s tight right now and we’re building careers from the ground up and we’re balancing household responsibilities and we’re raising SIX BOYS who don’t often understand what it means to “just be quiet, please. For one second.”
I didn’t want to be that parent, though.
So we went around our table, asking boys what in the world we could possibly do besides yelling (even the necessary kind). How could we get their attention? What would make them stop and listen? How could we better express our momentary anger? What could boys do that might help parents do that might help boys do (because this parent-child relationship is a symbiotic cycle.)? We made our plan. We put it in place.
And still we failed on Day One.
We can tear ourselves up about something like this. We can believe we’re not good parents, because we slipped up that one time today, or those two times or those five thousand times. We can feel like maybe our kid is going to be forever messed up because we can’t seem to make it through a nighttime routine, with its getting out of bed a thousand times, without yelling at them to “JUST STAY PUT FOR GOD’S SAKE.” But the truth is, we’re only ever going to be good enough parents. That means we’re not ever going to be perfect. There are people who will tell us we should be perfect. They’re wrong.
It’s all well and good to make it our goal not to yell. It’s great to have a plan and put that plan in place. It’s great to take steps along the journey to where we want to be.
“We will never, ever, not even on our best days, be perfect at this parenting thing. Because we’re human. Because we’re raising humans.
So we can stop making ourselves feel so bad for being imperfect people. We can stop beating ourselves up for slipping up.
You know what we get to do when we yell in front of our kids because they’re losing their minds with the LEGOs, tossing them all up into the air like monkeys throwing poo, and we don’t really want to take down our ponytail tonight and feel the fourteen tiny little dragon-claw pieces spill out onto a floor and disappear to places where they’ll be found in the dead of night on a half-asleep trip to the bathroom? We get to show our kids what it looks like to make amends. We get to show them what it sounds like to offer an apology for a mistake we made (because yelling is a mistake in my personal parenting playbook). We get to show them that we aren’t perfect, so they don’t have to be perfect, either.
[Tweet “We’ll make plenty of mistakes in our parenting. Good thing imperfection fosters resilience.”]
I feel better already.
by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
There’s this story I’ve listened to all my life. Your story. Your story that says I should have been prettier. I should have tried harder. I should have walked thinner. I should have been kinder. I should have been smarter. I shouldn’t have missed that question; it was a silly mistake. I should have been closer to perfectly perfect.
I remember the first time you came to me, after a teacher told me I was needed in the nurse’s office, and as soon as I walked in and saw Nurse Kuchler, she said, “I just need to check your eyes, sweetie. Your mom told us you’ve been having some trouble seeing,” and I felt your flush burn my body like a warm wave of lava had broken from the dormant volcano inside. It would scorch me long after I failed that eye test and found out I would need glasses, which meant I would never, in fact, ever be perfect.
I could have spent the rest of my life avoiding every mirror I came across so I could still believe I was perfect even though I could feel the weight of those corrective lenses indenting the bridge of my nose and worming their way to my heart, too. I could have pretended like I was a completely different person, this was happening to someone else, when the emotions came swinging, because it would have been more convenient to the ones who bore their news. It would have been closer to perfect. I could have ignored the disappointments that stacked up down deep inside that these eyes had failed me.
I would wear glasses. Everyone would know, now, what I had suspected for a while: Perfection could not live in one such as me.
It seems silly now, over something so insignificant as a pair of glasses, but you had already written the story. You. Shame. You had already scrawled your words across the landslide, and this is what your thick black pen said: Because of you.
He left because of you. He won’t come back because of you. There’s no money because of YOU.
It was such a shameful place for an 8-year-old to be, that needing help to see all the colors of the world.
That’s when you started talking to me. That’s when you started lobbing your accusations at me. You are not enough, you said. You must be more, you said. Who you are is nothing, you said.
I tried to argue, but the truth is, I believed it. I believed every word you said. I tried to be better. I starved myself to be thinner. I turned away when I needed a good cry. I folded up in on myself.
I tried to prove my worth in the way I studied and the way I ate and the way I made friends and the way I brushed my hair and the way I put on my makeup and the way I picked out clothes and the way I tried to find a career that came easily and the way I chose to date and the future I planned for myself. I tried to outrun your ever-present being, but there was no running. I know that now. There is only, ever, facing.
Well, I am facing. And what I have to say to you, after all these years, is this:
I am enough.
I am enough.
I AM ENOUGH.
I am enough.
It’s okay that I can’t see two feet in front of my face without corrective lenses. I am enough. It’s okay that sometimes I feel like I’m going to snap in two for the stretching six boys and a job and a home and a husband can do to me. I am enough. It’s okay that I’ll go a little crazy if I don’t get a half second break. I am enough.
It’s okay if I sometimes get frustrated because things aren’t getting shared the way they should be getting shared and I wish someone would just pay attention in this saturated marketplace. I am enough. It’s okay if sometimes I have no idea what to have for dinner. I am enough. It’s okay if sometimes I feel in over my head with this parenting thing, this raising decent human beings thing, this love-without-conditions thing. I am enough.
I have always been enough.
It doesn’t matter if I got a B in my first college creative writing class, or that I quit my dream job for a job much less satisfying and then settled for eight whole miserable years, or that I didn’t have a little girl, or that my body doesn’t look like it did before kids, even though I’m killing myself trying, or that I have a few more gray hairs than I used to have, or that my eyes have constant bags under them now because of kids and work and worry, or that sometimes I wear a Snuggie because it’s the warmest thing around or that sometimes I don’t get a shower every day.
We can all feel it take flame in the backs of our throats, when we think maybe we should have spent a little more time with our family instead of playing on our smartphone. We can feel it rake our faces when someone mentions they’re a stay-at-home parent and we think we should really stop letting work bleed into family time. And we can feel it numbing our legs sometimes when we see someone who looks so much better than we do, someone who is the very definition of stunning and we are so far from it.
We can feel it after we’ve yelled at our kids or said something we shouldn’t or slammed a door that should have stayed open or crumbled the world in a snap of our jaw.
Shame speaks different things to all of us, but those words are always nothing more than fancy lies.
We are enough.
So just move along on your black-path way, shame. Leave us all be. We are enough. We are all enough, no matter where we come from or where we are now or where we’re headed.
We are born enough.
by Rachel Toalson | Stuff Crash Test Kids say
Husband: You’re being a pest.
8-year-old: Well, then, call pest control.
Me [under my breath]: How I wish it were that easy.
Me [Turning out the lights in their bedroom]: You lost the privilege of a longer reading time, because you’re playing instead of reading.
3-year-old: I want to read.
Me: You had a chance to read. Now you have to take a nap.
3-year-old: I telling Daddy you not having dinner.
Me:
3-year-old:
Me: Good thing you don’t make the rules.
5-year-old [marching from the bathroom with one green flip flop and a bare foot]: I am the master of poo!
While Husband is clipping his toenails:
5-year-old: Daddy, are you clipping your toenails?
Husband: Yeah.
5-year-old: I bite my toenails.
Husband: Oh, really?
5-year-old: And then I swallow them.
Husband:
5-year-old:
Husband: Don’t tell Mama, okay?
Just after getting home:
9-year-old: Who’s going to check the upstairs for monsters?
Me [laughing out loud]: Jadon. You’re silly.
9-year-old: Did you just volunteer, Mama?
Me:
9-year-old:
Me: What kind of monsters?
9-year-old: I just dislocated my jaw, I think.
Me: Do you think it’s because you talk so much?
9-year-old:
Me:
9-year-old:
Me:
9-year-old: I don’t think so. I think it’s because I yawn too big.
Leaving late from a Christmas party:
6-year-old: It’s stuck! I can’t get it in!
Me [giggling, to husband]: That’s what she said.
6-year-old: I need help! I can’t do it!
Me [giggling harder]: That’s what she said.
6-year-old: Daddy, my seat belt won’t buckle! Help!
Me [giggling hysterically]: That’s what she said.
Husband: OK, you’re taking this too far. I think we had you out in public too long.
