Yes. You’re right. It goes so fast. Just yesterday I had a kid and today he’s almost 9. How did that happen? How did he suddenly get those knobby-kneed legs and a smart(er) mouth and a running speed that makes me work as hard as I can to not completely embarrass myself when we’re racing up the street because he’s really good at the flight response when anything doesn’t go his way. (He doesn’t know we’re racing, but we totally are. Also, he’s not really running away, for those who are concerned. He just needs a little run sometimes, to get some steam off. He knows where he’s loved most, and he’ll always come back. I just like to get a little exercise and make sure he doesn’t get run over by the neighborhood kids coming home from school and trying to drive by iPhone).
I’m familiar with the whole time-flying thing.
It’s just that this weekend Husband and I get to have a kid-less weekend. It’s the first time in 2015 that we’ve had the opportunity to spend three consecutive days without all the kids (thanks, Mom! I’m sure we’ll have to detox, but those three days are worth it every time!), and I am counting down the days.
Which means the days are crawling.
I’ve lived enough hours for it to be Friday already. Except it’s not. It’s still Monday afternoon.
See, this morning we woke up at 3 because a seal was in our house. It wasn’t really a seal, but we didn’t know it then. Husband got out of bed before I could tell him to be careful with that burglar who brought a seal with him, which sounds odd now that I’m fully awake and not in a dream reverie, but made total sense at 3 a.m. Husband came back to say it was one of the 3-year-olds, courting a croupy cough. So we got to have a little 3 a.m. escapade and give the boy some breathing treatments to loosen all those allergens, and then we got to try to go back to sleep knowing our alarm was going to go off in an hour and a half.
I don’t remember what happened after that, because the next thing I know the alarm was clanging and the house was quiet and I wanted to sit and enjoy it for as long as I possibly could before the morning rush started.
And then the morning rush started, and the 8-year-old couldn’t find his shoes, so we walked to school without him, and the croupy 3-year-old kept barking all the way so other parents would turn to look, and I was like, “What, it’s a free country? I can be outside with my sick kid if I want to,” but maybe they just thought it was a seal chasing them and I was misinterpreting all those glares. Then we got back to the house and it turns out the schoolboys had left out a million and a half things so every other second I had to say, “Nope. Don’t touch that. It’s your brother’s,” while I followed along behind, trying to minimize the damage two very persistent 3-year-olds can do while the baby bounced happily in his little bouncer seat that was, unbeknownst to me, rocketing his poop all the way up his back. He was happy. That’s all I knew. And since it takes four people to take care of the twins, I was doing pretty good just being one.
Nap time lasted fifteen minutes, two toilets nearly overflowed, Lightning McQueen caused a fist-fight, the plunger saw some unsupervised action, and I kept thinking surely it was already Friday. Surely.
And now here I am, Monday afternoon, with four more days between me and the day I can wake up without those delightful little footsteps already pattering down the hall, ready to pound on my door and scare me from sleep.
So, yeah. I know time flies. Most days I don’t want it to. This day (and the next four) I do. So go on, time. Fly.
We “met” long before we met. We “met” in all those emails we exchanged, back when you worked in downtown Austin and I spent my summer interning for the Victoria Advocate so I could live at home and save a little money before I went back to my third year of college. I used to go out on assignments, interviewing my subjects as quickly as I could and then returning to the office just so I could read the email I knew you’d send in the time I was gone. We talked about songs we liked and why and which part of the day was our favorite and why we didn’t like the contemporary Christian world so much anymore.
I’d already sworn off dating because of a serious relationship in high school that didn’t end well, but that summer, you were slowly prying my hands from the key that could unlock my heart.
By the time we were supposed to officially meet on the campus of Texas State University, I thought I already knew you in the deepest ways a person can know another. I thought we’d surely hit it off, because you seemed to be everything I’d ever dreamed of in a man. I thought we’d start something that would race toward forever, because the only piece missing was looking in each other’s eyes, and I wasn’t a shallow person. I didn’t care about looks, much. I just wanted to find someone who understood me and loved me anyway.
Or so I thought.
And then there you were, standing in front of the Quad two hours after we’d planned to meet, and I looked at your curly black hair and those round Harry Potter glasses and the smile that could disarm me in half a second, but the thing that grabbed me and shook me by the shoulders and scared the hope right out of me were those eyes. They could see everything. They could look into a soul and know all the light and all the dark that lived there. They could find those places I didn’t want anyone to ever see.
And so I did the only thing I could. I ran.
It’s a scary thing to be known. We think we want it, but then we start going over and over and over all those mistakes we’ve tried to forget and the pain we carry from other people’s mistakes, and we think maybe it would be better to hide it, because we’d be too much work. No one would want our baggage. No one would care enough to stick around after all that.
We spent the next year as just friends, because just friends could know each other but never really “know” each other. I kept unscalable walls in place so none of my friends had to find out I wasn’t perfect like I tried so hard to be. So they didn’t have to feel how much work I would be. So I didn’t have to be “that friend” no one really likes and hates to be around. You see, I didn’t want to inconvenience anyone with my insecurities and my scars and the beliefs that would not let go of my heels and tripped me every which way I turned.
But the only thing all that work did for me was keep me alone.
I guess maybe I realized that the night we hung out with our mutual friends a year later. I’d just gotten back from singing the national anthem at the college girl’s basketball game, all dressed up because one of the junior coaches, a man six years older than me, had taken me out on a few dates and I was telling him this very night that I just wasn’t all that interested in him. He liked to talk about sports. I liked to talk about poetry.
And I came back to my apartment feeling light and free, and then you were there, standing with our friends when I got out of my car. I took one look, and I fell hard. Something had changed. You were no longer boy but man. A man I remembered falling in love with over thirty-six emails during a summer internship.
We spent the night talking about your band and music and what you wanted to do with your future, and I didn’t have to talk about myself, so it was safe and good and lovely. And then there was that planned double date to see Sweet Home Alabama at the local discount theater, and you set me up so I ended up being a third wheel all night with my best friend and her fiancé. I thought it was all over then, that maybe I’d slipped in some little secret that made you think what I imagined everyone else thought: Won’t be able to fix that one.
So I pretended I didn’t care. I pretended like there were others—and it’s true there were. A student government president who had a future in politics and probably only liked the idea of me because I was a reporter, and how powerful could a politician be with a reporter wife? There was the boy on the baseball team who used me for tutoring in algebra and chemistry so he could get the homework answers and scrape by with a passing grade even though his test scores were appalling. There were the boys at our campus ministry, who liked the idea of me but had no clue who I was inside. None of them were you.
And then, late one night, you showed up at my office door, where I was combing through the paper one final time before sending it to print. You had to wait to talk, because others were waiting on me and my editing, and then, finally, when the paper was free of every mistake I could possibly find, we left the office and you told me you didn’t just want to date me, but you wanted to marry me, because you’d seen my face on your walk home when you were thinking about your future, years down the line. That first weekend we made good on our date and spent the morning watching a sun that never rose but stayed behind clouds and then ambled along the Riverwalk hand-in-hand, and I drove home so you could fall asleep in the middle of one of my sentences. It didn’t matter, really. I would have a lifetime of talking.
Six weeks later there was The Majestic Theatre, where you took me to see The Nutcracker Ballet and I wore a red dress and you wore a tux, and you pulled me up on stage after all the dancing was over and popped the question and everyone in the audience shouted “What did she say?” because everyone loves a love story that begins like that one.
Ten months later was the wedding and the rain and all the crying I did before I could even put on my makeup, because this was the only chance I’d get to have that magical outdoor wedding by the lake, and we had to bring it back inside to that old historical church that held more history than we did. There was the honeymoon in the most magical place on earth—Disney World—and the way we walked all those beautiful streets with our hands held tight and how people beckoned us to the front of lines because they could just tell—they could just tell—that ours was going to be a good love story. There were those first nights in a hotel and the hands and the kisses and the love that spread its way to every inch of our skin.
Now there have been years, twelve of them, each taking a different turn in this love story. Maybe some of them haven’t turned out exactly the way we thought, like the third year where we spent time in a place that made us both miserable so we came running back home, and the seventh one that held a forever grief of losing a baby girl, and the eleventh one that carried such instability and security in terms of economics and provision and how much of us there is to go around.
But some of them have turned out so much better than we ever dreamed, because there was the first one, where we had steady jobs and young, hip friends and dates every Friday night. There was the tenth one, where we hardly had any money but we had enough to go back to that magical place where our marriage had first begun, even if it was only for a couple of days. There is this twelfth one, when we are living into a new definition of hope.
So even though we’ve seen ups and downs and pain and pleasure all in equal measure, there is not a moment I would have changed. Not one. Because all of them were spent with you, and even after all this time, I would still choose you.
It doesn’t matter that we are twelve years older than we were when we first stood in front of two hundred people and promised our love, you reading a poem from memory, me reading from six notecards. It doesn’t matter that we have become completely different people today. I loved who you were then, and I love who you have become.
Sometimes we love each other well, and sometimes we just don’t, but even that doesn’t change the force of our love. It’s a mysterious thing, this love. It means that in those moments when we think the other is quite possibly the most horrible person in the world, we stay. It means that when we can’t stand the sight of each other because we’ve never been so mad in our lives before, we stay. It means that when the other least deserves kindness and forgiveness and love, we give it and we stay.
Love doesn’t look like roses and fairy tales and stimulating conversation all the time (though there are pieces that do). Sometimes love looks like puke you have to clean up in the middle of the night, because one of you can’t really handle this side of parenting. Sometimes love looks like a dark comedy, because one of you is sick now and the other is one on six, and those six are cutting with scissors and scribbling on a library book and running out the door he’s not supposed to open and asking for more milk and sliding down the stairs in a box and trying to get your attention so he can whine about how he didn’t have his technology time today and just getting dinner on the table feels like winning the Trojan War. Sometimes love looks like planning the week’s meals in the car—the only time you can hold a decent conversation, as long as the kids are listening to Disney songs or anything Taylor Swift.
Love is made of every day, every minute, every second, and therein lies the secret for why I would still choose you: Because you have loved me well every moment you’ve had. Your love has knocked me to my knees sometimes, and they get all bruised and a little scarred, maybe, but your love also picks me back up again. It lifts me to a greater height. It lets me fly.
I would choose you again because of your love, because you love without condition, because you love me just for me. You have touched every corner of the dark with your love, and there is no greater gift than this.
There is no greater gift than you. Happy anniversary, my love.
In this episode Rachel highlights the science fiction book Ender’s Game, the importance of resting as a writer of thousands of words, a modern-day true-life love story (or how Ben and Rachel Toalson came to be), and Disney’s 2015 film Cinderella.
5-year-old: [home sick from school.] I DON’T NEED A NAP.
[five minutes later, snapped the picture above.]
Me: You’re going to be late again.
8-year-old: Well, you should have gotten me out of bed sooner.
Me: Well, I wanted you to get the most sleep you possibly could so you wouldn’t be tired.
8-year-old:
Me:
8-year-old: Well, I don’t know what to say about that.
Me: Why are you drinking out of a bowl?
6-year-old: Because I couldn’t find any cups.
Me: That’s weird.
[Open cabinets to see a million different cups.]
Me:
6-year-old:
Me: What was that again?
Me: Time to go.
8-year-old: You should have told me to get out of the shower sooner.
Me: That’s not my job.
8-year-old:
Me:
8-year-old: Everything’s your job.
As writer parents, we may not have much time to write. I do most of my writing in 18 hours a week, and that’s probably stretching it for most parents—especially if you work another job.
But I used to do it for only 30 minutes a day. One thing that that helped me immensely with my limited time was brainstorming.
Some writers shake their heads at brainstorming. They don’t want to be put in a box. They want to go where the story goes. They want to use the freshest voice to tell the best story, and they want to be surprised just like their readers.
I used to be that writer. And then I discovered, through an experiment that tracked daily word count, how much brainstorming can speed up my writing. So now I use it all the time.
For my nonfiction work, I keep a brainstorming notebook readily available at all hours of the day. In it is a running list of all the blogs and essays I plan to write in the next week.
I don’t write on weekends, because I’ve chosen to spend my weekends with my children, but I always record in my brainstorm journal all the essays I plan to write in the coming week—the topics I’m exploring, the tone I’d like to take, the thoughts I’ve already had about them. I take this notebook everywhere with me, and when I’m sitting in my car waiting for my kids to get buckled, I look at the list and jot down random ideas. Sometimes they don’t even make any sense in terms of coherent writing. Sometimes they make perfect sense, but either way, I’ve found that when it comes time to write the articles, they are written in at least half the time.
I do things a little differently as a fiction writer. I used to fly by the seat of my pants. In fact, I’ve written three whole novels without a brainstorm. And then I started on a fantasy series that required lots of characters and lots of action, and I decided it would help keep everything straight if I just plotted it all out.
It took me about five hours to plot and plan about 20,000 words worth of brainstorm text, which will result in about 150,000 or more words of story. Because of all the effort I made to plan the story out, I worked much faster than I ever had. In an hour and a half I could log 6,500 words. That means if I was only writing on that story once a week for an hour and a half, I could end up with an entire rough draft finished in about 23 weeks—just a little more than five months. And if I worked on it more than once a week, it would get done even faster.
When I’ve written books without a brainstorm, the rough and final drafts have taken me longer. Mostly because the rough draft meanders, taking me to places that aren’t really needed in a final draft, and then I have to spend time cutting out large pieces of text and piecing together the rest. But in the process of brainstorming, you learn before you start writing what needs to stay and what can go. That’s valuable time saved.
Now. Brainstorming fiction doesn’t work for everyone. I totally get wanting to stay open with the writing and deciding you don’t really need a scene-by-scene synopsis before you start writing, but we’ll never know what works until we try it. For me, brainstorming has made my writing much, much faster, which is incredibly valuable as a parent pinched for time.
So if we’re parent writers and we’re limited on time, brainstorming might be something we want to try. Here are some things to remember before we brainstorm:
1. A brainstorm is not set in stone.
Just because the brainstorm says that A must happen and our character suddenly wants B to happen, that doesn’t mean we have to force the character to do A instead. We can defer to B, because characters usually know best. A novel doesn’t have to go by the book every single time, but if we’ve done our work brainstorming and getting to know our characters thoroughly before we even begin, we won’t likely be surprised a whole lot. It may still happen occasionally, but not often.
Sometimes, when I’m looking at a brainstormed nonfiction piece and it’s come to the day of the writing, I have a completely different idea about what I want to say. That’s okay. In that case, what the brainstorm helped me do is further clarify what I really wanted to say, which likely still saved me time and, inevitably, frustration.
2. Brainstorming will take some time, too.
But it’s not nearly as much time as writing a rough draft without a brainstorm, at least not in my experience. Mostly because when we’re just writing thoughts on a page, it’s going to take a few drafts to turn those thoughts and fragmented words into a final draft. If we’ve already gotten those fragments out in a brainstorm, our rough draft is going to look a whole lot like the final. What I’ve found when I’ve brainstormed an essay before I write it is that it doesn’t take very long to massage those rough draft words into a final draft, because they’re much more concise and polished from all the thinking I did beforehand.
But if we’re hoping that brainstorming will just eliminate the need to do a final draft, we’re going to be disappointed. We still have to put in the work to make our words the best they can be.
3. Leave adequate time between the brainstorm and the rough draft.
Time helps our subconscious work out any problems that we might meet on the screen or the page. Problems like wording or connection, because sometimes our brainstorms will come out random and unconnected and seemingly confusing. But when we allow space between the brainstorm and the rough draft, we can often work out all those problems before we even get to the actual writing. For my nonfiction essays, I try to leave at least a few days between a brainstorm and a rough draft and another day or two between a rough draft and a final (this means I have to work with a production schedule). For fiction I leave much longer periods of time, because it’s beneficial to take a longer break between drafts so you can read it with fresher eyes.
4. Brainstorming will feel hard at first.
I didn’t really know what to do with brainstorming at first. I didn’t know what I was supposed to write or how it was supposed to be done. But there is freedom in brainstorming, fortunately. There is no right or wrong way to do an effective brainstorm. No one will be able to tell us how, because it’s different for every person. Some people outline. I can’t stand outlining, so I basically dump. For nonfiction, I write points on my page, sort of like an outline but with no numbers. For fiction, I write in scenes, just jotting down all the scenes that will happen in a novel and then rearranging them in a way that makes sense (they might be rearranged later, too). I also do extensive character histories and analyses, because it gives more depth to y characters. I brainstorm all the possible settings for those scenes and everything necessary to create a new world, if I’m writing science fiction and fantasy. But when I first started, I didn’t know all this. I just wrote myself into a process that worked for me.
Don’t be afraid to find what works for you. And don’t believe that just because brainstorming feels hard it’s not for you. Keep trying. You’ll find your groove. And I think you’ll be glad you did.
I’ve just finished reading him the project we decided on this summer—a picture book they’ve all written and will illustrate—when he looks at me and grins.
“Are we going to sell it, Mama?” he says, because he’s 8, and he’s always looking for ways to make money, this little entrepreneur.
“Of course we are,” I say. “But we still have to do a lot of work from here.”
“Okay,” he says.
And he gets back to work, poring through all those picture books to see how many pages are in them and how many pages his book will need to have and how we’ll break up all that text to match with pictures.
It all came about after a school’s-out dreaming session, which we do every summer, to talk about what we will do with our summer and what project we’ll create in the free days we have.
All three of our older boys chose to write books (which made their mama so happy).
I knew it was a lot of work, because I do this on a daily basis, and so we sat down to have a dreaming session, talking about what our projects would look like and how they would be completed and how much time we would need from start to finish.
We planned how to put feet on our dreams—feet that will run and jump and play and accomplish what is in our hearts to do.
We do this often with our children.
The practice began back when we chose our family values and added “We unveil dreams” as an important one. We had our first dream session where we dreamed about what we wanted to be when we grew up (parents included). And then made a plan of pursuit.
We conduct Dream Sessions with our kids periodically during the year, to evaluate whether our dreams have changed and whether we’re still on a path of pursuit or we’ve gotten a little sidetracked. We share our dreams with our children, and they share their dreams with us. We dream family dreams.
Dreams are important to our children. Dreaming together is important for our children. The time we take to engage with them this way shows them that we believe in them, that we believe they can become what they dream they’ll become, with enough hard work and effort. Dream Sessions show our children that they have the potential to change the world. They communicate our knowledge and our expertise and, most importantly, our belief that they have it in them.
The first dream session we had, our oldest, who was 5 at the time, said he wanted to be a cinematographer. Since that dream has not changed all these years later (he’s 8 now), he continues to study videography. He reads biographies about people like George Lucas and Walt Disney to learn how to animate. He reads every comic book he can get his hands on, because he knows that a foundation in story and pictures is what it takes to be a successful videographer. He studied a screenwriting book to learn the techniques necessary for writing a good screenplay.
It’s not unusual that I will find original comic books he’s written and left on his desk or my bed or the kitchen table, because he set down a dream and he is working toward it.
Our kids are natural dreamers. They don’t know the limits of possibility and impossibility. We can learn how to dream by watching our children.
We don’t tell them what’s possible and what’s not, because we don’t ever know, either. Just because it wasn’t possible in our life doesn’t mean it’s not in theirs. Because something else dreaming does is it teaches kids that dreaming takes hard, intentional work. Anyone who puts in the work can achieve a dream, but the work must be put in.
Jesus dreamed of a church that would meet needs and take care of the people and love them for who they were and wherever they were in their faith. So he did the work, keeping his disciples close, teaching them, helping them see the work they would have to do when he was gone.
Jesus was a dreamer. He was a teacher.
I want to be like him.
How to hold a Dreaming Session with young children:
1. Get the crafts out. Have them draw pictures of what they want to be when they grow up. Sometimes kids need a little help with this one, but if they say “Batman,” which is what my 3-year-old wants to be when he grows up, see it for the spirit behind it. He wants to keep the city safe from bad guys. Help him learn how to do that.
2. Start a dream folder for your child. Put snippets of newspaper or magazine clippings or a list of links and resources to help them learn more about their dream. If you know how to do what they dream about doing, share your expertise.
3. Periodically evaluate with your children what they’re doing to achieve their dreams. Dreams aren’t worth much without a plan. Help your children make plans and constantly adjust plans as their dreams change. We hold Dream Sessions once a quarter.
Husband and I used to be in a band. Well, we technically still are. We just don’t ever play the songs we’re still writing, because we have six kids. But before those six kids, we played all over Texas and took a few tours through Arizona, Colorado and New Mexico. We wrote our own songs and practiced every day and stayed up way too late playing gigs.
When the first son was born, we continued our pursuit, because we enjoyed doing it and wanted, secretly, to be rockstars. And Son #1 was super easy to pack up and take along with us, because he loved music and enjoyed meeting new people who fawned all over him and was amazingly tolerant of long trips.
Son #2 came along two years later, and it was still relatively easy. We just packed for two kids instead of one. We just brought a friend along who could watch the kids while we did our hour-long set on stage, and then I’d rescue the friend while Husband and the other band members went to talk to people at the merch table.
Then came son #3. I won’t say he meant to change everything. It’s just the logistics of it. When parents go from two to three kids, everything gets real. You’ve suddenly run out of hands. And eyes. And ability to focus.
Two weeks after he was born, we boarded a plane to fly to Arizona and record our third album, and we took them all with us so I could worry the whole time about what if the oldest wandered off when one of us wasn’t looking because the baby needed to be fed and he was still so tiny and cute and wonderful and I just couldn’t take my eyes off him but I also couldn’t take my eyes off the older walking ones. We made it, with 12 new gray hairs.
But when it came time to promote our album, here’s where the “we can still do this” really fell through. Because there aren’t a whole lot of people who enjoy watching a 3-year-old, a 16-month-old and a one-month-old. We tried to limp along for a while, and then the twins came along and life was completely over. Because twins.
Ever since I was a little kid I’ve wanted to be two things: a writer and a rock star. I get to be one of them, writing every single day of my life, and it’s bliss. And, for the other, well, this is all I got.
Being a rockstar used to mean fame.
I know it sounds shallow to put it like that, but doesn’t any performer who’s good at what they do dream of this? Packed crowds chanting the band’s name and singing along to songs with their camera phones as “lighters?” Fans wanting to meet us just to shake our hand or say a few words to us? People dancing in their places or moshing or whatever kids do these days, even if they can’t hear a note of the music because they’re screaming too loudly?
Actually, this sounds exactly like my house. There’s a packed crowd chanting my name when it’s time for dinner and I don’t even have anything started. There’s a line of kids wanting just a minute of our attention because they have to tell us their brother took the toy they were playing with and they’re really sad about that and they need help getting it back. And there are little boys dancing or moshing (mostly unintentionally, but this is what happens when you’re eight people in a small living room and Imagine Dragons is playing on Pandora) and screaming so loudly you can’t hear a note of the music because we’re playing one of the songs we wrote for them and they just want “If You’re Happy and You Know It” or the Kidz Bop version of anything Taylor Swift.
Being a rockstar used to mean wealth.
Another shallow one, I know. But we had dreams, you see. We would make the big bucks with just our music. Who gets to make the big bucks doing what they love? And we would use those big bucks to build schools for orphaned children and dig wells for the people who don’t have access to clean water, and after all that, we’d use the leftover funds for dinners out when we didn’t feel like cooking and a house with as many rooms as we needed and expensive parties.
I guess this one looks like my life today, too, because when I don’t feel like cooking there’s always a picnic dinner out at the park that we’ll pack ourselves (but it’s still not cooking!) and a house with…enough rooms and birthday parties at home with twenty 6-year-olds running wild on cake and cookies and lavender tea that’s supposed to balance those effects but doesn’t (expensive parties in terms of energy. They cost days.).
Being a rockstar used to mean writing original songs.
We dreamed of writing a new song every week and sharing it with the world. We dreamed of changing lives with our melodies. We dreamed of hearing those songs on the radio and imagining others singing along.
We still write original songs. It’s just that they’re mostly about farts and poop and cleaning too much earwax out of an ear. Everything a boy thinks is hilarious, but at least we’ve got our adoring (or laughing) fans. You won’t hear them on the radio, but you will hear them in stereo sound when you come for a visit.
Being a rockstar used to mean practicing a whole song without a kid interruption.
We used to be able to practice for two hours, uninterrupted, song after song after song, and this made us really, really good. We could take our time and run the parts that gave us trouble last week and perfect every song before we shared it with the world.
And I guess if you’re getting all technical we can still practice a song, or thirty seconds of it, give or take a few, without a kid interruption, and you do get really good at accommodating this sort of thing when you have kids. Husband and I can keep a conversation going for an entire day, even with ten thousand five-minute interruptions. We can even maintain it when the interruptions are things like “Why is my poop lime green” and “What happens when a bird crashes into the window, because one just did” and “I just answered the door and one of the twins ran out with a man I don’t know.” It’s quite a skill. So thanks, kids, for that valuable gift.
Being a rockstar used to mean a whole crew of roadies.
Roadies are people who carry all the heavy stuff and help set up the equipment and wait around until the show is over just so they can help some more. They’re pretty handy people.
And I suppose, in a way, I still have roadies, because when we go to the local museum, the 8-year-old does do the heavy lifting with those books he likes to bring anywhere, even though we didn’t ask him to bring them. And the 5-year-old will load up that backpack with a thousand stuffed animals he wanted to bring along so they could see the lions at the zoo, and he’ll carry it the whole time. And one of the 3-year-olds will always try to get the picnic lunch out of the car and accidentally dump it out on the sidewalk so the birds come swooping. I know. He’s just trying to help, like roadies do.
Being a rockstar used to mean a whole closet of cool clothes.
I thought long and hard about what I wanted to look like on stage. I was the only female in a band of males, and I needed to stand out. Be noticed. That meant bold colors and dramatic makeup and shoes that were comfortable but still said “Woman.”
And it’s true that I do wear a bright orange workout shirt about once a week with my uniform workout pants and I have gone way dramatic with the makeup and adopted the “naked face” look, and my shoes do say “Woman” because they’re fluorescent pink running shoes that allow me to chase after my 3-year-olds when they get a wild hair every other minute and decide they’re going to sprint in two different directions and see who Mama catches first. My cool clothes have just become be-prepared-to-run-at-all-times clothes.
Being a rockstar used to mean a glamorous life.
Of course we would meet all the famous people, like Simon Cowell or Ed Sheeran or maybe just Adam Sandler. We’d sit down to fancy dinners and wipe our mouths with silky napkins and engage in stimulating conversation. We would get in the car and cruise to a party at any hour of any day.
Okay, so, yes, I get to meet famous people like the 8-year-old’s principal or the 5-year-old’s best friend (he talks about her ALL THE TIME) and I get to sit down to a dinner of sun-roasted tomato parmesan pasta with the cloth napkins we made ourselves and engage in stimulating conversation like how we could do a sugar experiment with ice cream and root beer, because that’s what they did in class today and they DRANK IT ALL AND IT WAS SO YUMMY and now they can’t stay at the table because they have too much energy and they need to ruuuuuuunnnn. And even though it takes us three hours just to leave the house, we still get to go to the occasional party when the kids are invited, (because sitters for six kids are hard to find). What kind of person would want to party at all hours of the day, anyway? My kids are up all hours of the day. Midnight and I have become intimately familiar, and let me just tell you, he’s pretty exhausting.
I used to want to be a rockstar. And this is all I got.
But you know what? I don’t think this parenting gig was the short end of the stick at all. Mostly because I get to feel like a rockstar every single day. I feel like a rockstar when my kid is whining and I just can’t take it anymore and I miraculously don’t yell but calmly say that his whining makes me feel like the tea kettle that’s going off on the stove. I feel like a rockstar when I finally get dinner on the table without losing my mind from all the “I’m hungrys” following me around and not one of them complains about what we’re having for once. I feel like a rockstar every time I get out the door in the morning with all six kids dressed and wearing mostly matching shoes.
I feel like a rockstar when I climb out of bed after a night cleaning up puke. I feel like a rockstar when I remember my toothbrush on a trip, because I usually pack for the kids first. I feel like a rockstar when they smile at me after a long day like I’m the most important person in the world to them.
Every parent who is raising a human being to be a decent person is a rockstar, because we have legions of adoring fans (okay, a handful at the most), even if we’re the ones who chose them in the first place; and we have a glamorous life, even if it looks like eating dinner at the same table every night and parties at home and conversation about what they did in school today; and we have songs, every day, in all the spaces of life, because those songs are the voices of our children, chanting their demands and complaining about their problems and murmuring their “I love yous” when we most need them.
So what if I used to want to be a rockstar and this is all I got?
What I got is love and fun and adventure and life. So much more than I ever dared to dream.
We were happily bathing the younger boys, trying to keep the 15 gallons of water inside the tub for once, when our 8-year-old came howling into the house. Now, this isn’t all that unusual. This boy has a penchant for being…dramatic. For example, one day we were at a local museum, which has a kids’ area with kid-sized workout equipment, and he was adjusting the seat on a stationary bike and accidentally scratched his leg on a pedal. He fell on the floor like he was dying, moaning so that a museum worker came over to us and asked if maybe he needed some ice or a first-aid kit or maybe an ambulance. There was hardly a scratch on him. I thanked her for her concern and told her he’d be just fine, and, sure enough, thirty seconds later, he was chasing after one of his brothers who had accidentally picked up the book the 8-year-old had brought with him, because he brings books everywhere, in case there’s a second or two between exhibits when he’ll get a chance to bury himself in a word or two.
He comes howling into the house when he’s tried “skating” with two scooters and runs into the van. He comes howling into the house when his brother mis-aimed a ball and hit him on the foot. He comes howling into the house when he jumps off the trampoline the wrong way (and yet still does it).
So, of course, we didn’t think much of this little display.
Our boy limped up the stairs and into the bathroom, and this time we knew it was for real. His chin was bleeding, his upper lip was bleeding, and his knee was smeared with red.
“What in the world happened?” I said, freaking out a little, but trying hard not to show it.
“I ran into a wall,” he said.
“How did you run into a wall?” Husband said.
“I was riding my scooter too fast and couldn’t stop when I came around the corner of the house,” our son said.
Husband and I looked at each other and tried not to laugh. Because even though we could visualize it almost perfectly—the way he would be cruising down the cul-de-sac, how cocky he gets about his “skillz,” how his face might have looked when he saw he’d misjudged and the wall was coming at him instead of moving away—it really wasn’t funny. It wasn’t. Stop laughing.
We checked him over for broken bones and then cleaned up his scrapes, listening to him talk about how he wouldn’t be able to walk to school the next day and probably couldn’t even go at all because he was so beat up. And you know? I almost felt sorry enough for him to let him stay home (because he’s pretty good at generating a yes). Except that he’s 8. If I’d done what he did, I would be laid up for a week. But he’s 8. His body’s much more capable of bouncing back.
So I smiled at him and said, “I hope you’ve learned your lesson, sweet boy.”
What lesson would that be? Well, apparently he didn’t know, either. Three minutes later, he was back out on the scooter, trying to race his brothers down the hill, navigating between the van’s front bumper and the wall that had beat him up, just so he could be the first one inside and win the prize of…nothing.
I have a sneaking suspicion that this is just my life as a mom of boys. God help me.
You are sitting inside your office at 200 Old Main, where you’re waiting for the designer to finish laying out the newspaper so you can edit it one final time before it goes to press. You’re tired and a little grumpy because it’s already 2 a.m., and you have class in 6 hours. You do this three nights a week, and it starts wearing on you after a while. I haven’t forgotten.
You probably wouldn’t believe me if I told you that in 10 years, you’d be a managing editor once again, and not just for a college newspaper.
But I didn’t come here to talk about me. I came here to talk about you.
I have learned much in the years stretching between you and me and will learn still more as the years roll on, but I want to share my wisdom gained so far, so that maybe you can experience freedom earlier than I did.
You’re probably thinking, right this minute, about that B you got in your creative writing class last semester. It bothers you like almost nothing else ever has, and it will for a while. But it won’t bother you forever because you will learn this: One professor with an overly inflated ego saying you’ll never write well does not mean you’ll never write well.
You’ll come against all kinds of opposition in your life, so many people who doubt you and what you have to offer, and you will push through that opposition and surprise them all. Every time. Because you are strong and focused and pretty damn amazing, even if you cannot see that right now from where you sit, hands frozen by the winter sliding through cracks in those 100-year-old windows.
Waiting in that solitary room gives you plenty of time to think, doesn’t it? And you think of your father often, because you left that spring break visit a year ago on not-so-great terms.
That wound, it needs to be healed, so let me tell you something: Your father did not leave because of you, so stop trying to prove yourself exceptional. You are good enough just as you are. Good enough to write, good enough to dream big, good enough to make it all the way to the top, if that’s what you want.
You work hard for those grades, but they do not define you, so stop obsessing over that B in creative writing like it’s a great black spot on your perfect record. You comb this paper with editor-in-chief eyes, tired but efficient, but its perfection is not the perfection of you, so stop feeling like such a failure when a mistake becomes glaring in the light of the morning printing. You run six miles a day and eat salad and cans of green beans, but skinny does not equal beautiful, so stop killing yourself trying to look like you think you should look.
You are beautiful. I know it’s hard to believe, but you are. In another four years, your body will stretch and grow and tear to deliver new life into the world, and you will see it then, the beauty you carried all along.
That boy you think you love, he is not The One. The One is coming, and it will be soon, but he, with his leading-on ways and his divided heart and his take-you-out-only-when-he-needs-some-tutoring-or-test-answers habit, is most definitely not The One. He will show you off to his friends at the games because you’re a pretty girl who sings the national anthem, and he wants to say he knows someone like you, but he does not care for your heart like The One who is coming will. So don’t waste one more second of your time or one more corner of your heart dreaming of that sounds-like-a-reporter last name. The One coming will make you feel like no one else has ever made you feel, because he looks you in the eye like you have something important to say, like you contribute more than just beauty to the world.
Enjoy these days. I know you’re carrying a full load, juggling those five writing-intensive courses while you wear the hats of editor-in-chief and substitute teacher, but soon you’ll be planning a wedding on the side, too. And this is all vital practice for when you become a full-time working mother. Appreciate your time alone; it’s a luxury. You will understand this in four years.
I know you see that man walking up the stairs to class, his stick clicking the way, and you have to look anywhere else but at those feet climbing stairs blind, because the sheer determination and will to achieve in the face of difficulty is just…
And I know you read Shakespeare aloud in class and your voice fractures for the emotion of it, and you pretend to cough so they won’t all notice…
And I know you watch that old teacher nearly bent double with age, who bikes all the way down the road from Austin, and I know you feel the emotion of that persistence because your fingers shake when you’re typing the story, and you close your office door so no one will be the wiser.
Stop trying to hide all these big emotions. This is who you are, an emotional wreck most of the time, and that’s OK. The world needs your big emotions because it needs someone to care. You care deeply, and sometimes that can change the world.
Don’t worry so much about what you’ll do after graduation. I know that’s easy for me to say because I know all the job offers that come, and I know how you’ll spend those months with the Houston Chronicle and then those years with the San Antonio Express-News, and I know all the fascinating people you’ll meet who will infuse your life with rich stories and deep wisdom. Your life will be a series of adventures, and you will learn that seasons are fluid and rhythmic, that nothing is ever written in stone, except what is written on your heart, that both the expected and unexpected changes hold the same beauty—those blissful months when you think you might be walking on clouds are just as beautiful as those jobless months that set you on the writing path and see you cut back creatively so you steward better.
Don’t be so hard on yourself. I know you love to learn and want to do the very best you can do, and I know you value trying hard for everything. But lighten up. It’s OK to miss one of those morning runs every once in a while. It’s OK to be late to work every now and then, those days when traffic bottles and parking places run low and your car won’t start so you have to walk instead of drive. It’s OK to take the tram and forget to get off because you’re so deep in Shakespeare’s As You Like It.
When you bake a cake for The One, and it falls apart, it’s OK. He’s not going to take back that engagement ring because he just discovered you don’t really like to cook. When you forget your key and your roommates forget about your call to request they don’t lock the front door and you’re stuck outside in the rain, it’s OK. The One will climb two stories and break into your patio door and open the front for you, and he likes showing you this hero side.
When you let that distasteful cartoon slide even though your gut says no but the editorial staff hails “free speech,” it’s OK to stand by your decision when the hate mail comes flying. Don’t take it personally. They don’t know you and what you stand for. And, anyway, it’s good practice for when you’re doing your own writing and the haters start hating. Your thin skin will never grow thick, but you will learn how to handle the criticism. Eventually.
Remember to laugh at yourself. When you trip on those stairs and don’t even try to catch yourself because you took some allergy medicine before going to class and your head is full of fog, laugh at yourself instead of hiding your face in burning shame. People fall on those steps all the time. You see them every day. You are not the first and most definitely will not be the last.
When you sing the wrong words during that song, be sure to laugh at yourself later. When you stumble over sentences during your Sylvia Plath speech, don’t forget to laugh. When you pronounce incorrectly that word you’ve only ever read silently to yourself while reading aloud in class, laugh.
It’s OK to make mistakes. This is what humans do. You’ll go crazy trying to be so perfect all the time. Because you’ll roll down the hill instead of up when you’re driving that old 5-speed Civic, and you’ll completely miss that tennis ball in your PE class, and you’ll walk across campus for that awards ceremony in heels, and you’ll roll your ankle and almost fall (Don’t worry. Soon there will be such a thing as TOMs shoes, and you’ll only ever wear flats again), and some of your friends will see you do it. Laughing is all you can do.
You are an exceptional person just the way you are. Ignore the world and be yourself.
