by Rachel Toalson | This Writer Life
“Writers are often told not to think about their audience, but I think that advice can be difficult to use. The audience then becomes something vague and amorphous. How do you communicate with that? Better let the audience be someone real—a lover, a best friend, a colleague, someone who gets your jokes or just likes how you think.”
-Julia Cameron, The Right to Write
Lately I’ve been immersed in this wonderful book by one of my favorite authors on creativity. Cameron says much of what I know in my heart is true, and so yesterday, when I read her words about writing to an audience, I nodded.
Yes. Yes, of course. I’ve been doing this all along.
When I was a girl, I wrote for my dad, because he had left me, because I needed to prove something, because writing was how a little girl’s broken heart could communicate with a dad she never saw or talked to or kissed goodnight.
Those early stories were filled with little girls from perfect families, a mama and a daddy who loved each other, a family intact, because they were how I could tell him that’s who I wanted to be.
And then later, all those essays and journalism pieces in junior high and high school I wrote for him, too. By then they’d all turned dark and melancholy—because that’s what I needed him to know about me, that my life had turned dark and melancholy.
My dad never read my stuff, as far as I know. But I don’t write for him anymore.
Now I write mostly for my husband.
Every time I sit down to write another chapter of All That Came After, I write for him. Every time I craft a blog, I write for him. Every time I compose a piece like this one, I write for him.
I write to make him laugh. I write to make him cry. I write to make him say, “Wow. That was incredible.”
I write to know. I write to be known.
Cameron says that if we write specifically to the “someone” we choose, it will “make your writing targeted and focused. It will also bring to your writing a purity of intent.”
I write for my husband because he is creative and wise and interesting, and writing for him makes my writing pure and focused and true.
And sometimes there are other people who sit in my audience. Sometimes it’s my son, any one of them. Sometimes it’s my mom. Sometimes it’s a friend down the street.
But I never create for the masses.
When we produce art for the masses, we produce watered-down art. We produce only a small piece of who we are and what we carry inside. We produce art that is but a shadow of what we might create for an audience of one.
Because when we are working to please the masses, all those different people with all those different personalities and likes and dislikes and expectations, we will find ourselves chained, inhibited, unsure. What word is the right one? What color would “they” like best? What tune will stick in “their” heads the most?
We could never please everyone in the masses. And when we are trying to please our mass audience, we will not create anything close to the magnificent we could.
Creating for one means we can be specific and true to ourselves.
And if we do it for the one, if we make our art specific, we find that it becomes broad. It speaks to the masses. It touches multiple lives. This is the great paradox of creativity.
“Writing specifically, writing detail by detail, we encounter not only ourselves, not only our truth, but the greater truth that stands behind all art and all communication,” Cameron says. “We touch the spiritual fact that as divided as we may feel ourselves to be, we are nonetheless one.”
Art always begins with one.
Who is your one(s)? How has that changed over the years? What are your thoughts about producing for one or producing for the masses?
Welcome to The Ink Well Creative Community.
The Ink Well Community is evolving. While this used to be a place where I posted a prompt for writers to share their creative works, I have been receiving several inquiries about my process, how I create and read and manage a household with half a dozen little ones. So I thought we could turn this into a community of people who share about the creative process in all its many facets, from where we find our inspiration to when we find time to create (especially if we work other jobs). I’ll be sharing struggles about my creative life and logistical information about my particular creative process and what I’m learning about creativity, among many other things. I hope you’ll weigh in with your own struggles and observations and lessons. Let’s start a conversation. Let’s encourage one another. Let’s live the creative life together.
And if you have your own questions about creativity or process or inspiration, feel free to visit my contact page and send me a note.
by Rachel Toalson | General Blog
That’s not true, really. My kids have friends. They play with them at recess and collaborate with them in their classrooms and talk to them during PE when they’re supposed to be doing six hundred jumping jacks.
We have avoided play dates for eight years, but no longer.
On a recent day, a note came home from school with my 5-year-old, from the parents of a boy named Aaron* (*name has been changed for privacy). My son had talked about this Aaron, so I knew they were good friends.
“Aaron would like to arrange a play date with Asa,” the note said.
I had no idea how to go about this.
The note, fortunately, listed telephone numbers and e-mail addresses for Aaron’s mom and dad, asking me to “get in touch.” Being the introverted person I am, I chose to text the numbers given. Surely that would be the easiest, and definitely much less awkward than trying to fumble through a conversation on the phone with people I don’t know.
Two days passed, and I heard nothing. That’s when I assumed maybe the numbers given weren’t cell phone numbers and didn’t have text capacity. So I did the next best thing.
I e-mailed.
Meanwhile, I mentioned to my oldest son, who is 8, that his little brother was going to have a play date with a classmate and did he have anyone he would want to invite over for a play date, too?
He had to think about this.
My 5-year-old had his friend over, and it went well, and I was preoccupied wondering about the after-play date etiquette—thank you note for letting him come over? Follow up of some kind? Reciprocated play date?—when my 8-year-old, one day after school, grabbed my hand and pulled me over to a woman I had never met, but clearly needed to, right this minute.
He didn’t say a word of introduction.
We stared awkwardly at one another for a minute-that-felt-like-an-hour, before she held out her hand and said her name, which I didn’t hear because my heart was roaring in my ears.
Awkward, awkward, awkward, it beat.
“I’m Christopher’s* mom,” she said. “He wanted to schedule a play date with Jadon.”
Oh no, oh no, oh no, not like this, not here, not in person. I wasn’t expecting this. I wasn’t prepared. I DON’T KNOW HOW TO DO THIS!
“Okay,” I said, and then I realized I had no idea what to do next. I panicked a little and then started babbling words that probably sounded something like this: “I don’t have my phone or a piece of paper or a pen or anything at all to write with or record your number but do you have a phone or a piece of paper or a pen or anything at all to write with or record because if you do I could give you my number and then you could text me so I have yours and then we could figure out this play date thing like when and where and how.”
Oh, crap, I thought. My mouth and its word vomit just lost my boy a friend.
“Oh. Oh, okay,” she said, and I knew then, for sure, that I was doing this exactly wrong and weird and much more complicated than it needed to be done. Most people just pick a day, I’m sure. They set a time. It’s easy. Except I was totally unprepared and didn’t have my calendar with me and needed to talk to my husband…
She fumbled around in her pocket for her phone, trying to maintain her grip on the arm of her 2-year-old, who was trying to escape exactly like my 2-year-olds would have tried to escape, and I thought about how I would have felt the teensiest bit annoyed that the person talking to me couldn’t see the struggle I was having, and couldn’t we do this later?
Fail.
I started working on an apology to my son, because I knew his friend would never be allowed over to our house.
Christopher’s mom took down my number, and my boys and I went home, and two days passed. Two days.
Then she texted, instead of calling, and invited my boy over.
He and his friend played LEGOS for three hours, and when they were done, I walked to pick him up, and Christopher’s mom invited me in, and we sat in clumsy conversation on her couch while our boys kept playing some more.
And that’s when I realized she was just like me.
Awkward. Weird. Unpracticed at this whole play date thing. (She was just like me!)
Her boy and mine have had another play date since.
And I might have made a new friend, too.
by Rachel Toalson | Messy Mondays
This isn’t your typical Messy Monday post. This isn’t that mess under the bed or the one in his room or the nasty waiting to be emptied from the trash can.
This is the kind that can wreck a heart into a mess.
You see, there is a boy in our home who is 5 years old. He tried to draw his older brother, who is 8, a picture of Darth Vader, because his older brother is in love with Star Wars right now. Apparently it didn’t quite look like Darth Vader, or at least in the 5-year-old’s eyes. So he got really upset, because he really wanted to draw his oldest brother something special.
So our oldest boy wrote him the sweetest note an older brother can write to a younger.
I might not have even see this, except that my boys are really bad at putting things away. This time I’m glad. So beautiful. So messy. So wonderful to see the bond between a boy and his brother.
Heart effectively wrecked.
(They were fist-fighting about 20 minutes later, so sweet doesn’t last. You just take it while you can.)
by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
It was so unexpected, the way it showed up.
There is someone staying with us, someone helping out in these crazy days of adjustment, someone who burned the side of a chair because of a not-thinking mistake, and when I came downstairs the early morning after I smelled melting microfiber but was too exhausted to investigate, I ran my hand along the ugly, startling black of an arm that should have been cream, and I cried.
And cried and cried and cried.
Because it can’t be fixed, because it’s a whole black arm, because we’ve tried so hard to keep pieces of our life normal and nice and presentable, and it’s next to impossible with six rowdy boys, and this destruction wasn’t even done by one of the children but by someone who knows what a hot pot can do to fabric.
It felt like reality giving me a big, fat slap in the face.
You will never have or keep or make anything that will survive destruction, it said.
You will never not be embarrassed to have the neighbors over, it said.
You will never have a nice home, it said.
In this home there are holes in walls and milk splatters on doors and dining room chairs with loose legs we can’t trust will hold us when we sit. There are mirrors with perpetual finger smudges and plants that are dying and carpet that has seen much better days.
There is a favorite armchair with a blackened arm.
This is a home that is shabby and ragged and worn out.
This is a home I would like to change, make better, beautify.
///
The first home I remember I only see in flashes, a trailer in a sunny place with a playground in the backyard, or somewhere close, where my brother and I would kick our feet high enough to reach the sky, or so we thought. It was bright and small and charming.
And then there was a home across the street from a school, where I watched my brother walk out the door at the beginning of a day and then walk back in at the end, knowing he’d sit and teach me all he’d learned in his kindergarten class.
In this home I remember a playroom where my mom found a snake in our toy box and ran out of the room screaming so we all chased her like it was some kind of game. I remember sharing a room with my brother and sister, rolling from the top bunk where my brother slept and hitting the floor so hard I couldn’t even cry, could only lie there on a hard floor and try to remember how to breathe.
I remember seeing my mom hacking snakes into pieces with a hoe and listening to someone playing piano so it echoed through the wood-floor living room and watching my dad driving away on a motorcycle and the way the yellow curtain above the front door swished, swished, swished, until I could not hear his motorcycle anymore, the way it felt like I’d just fallen from the top bunk again, because his leaving hit me so hard I couldn’t cry, could only lie there and try to remember how to breathe.
This home was dark and light and sad and funny and ugly and beautiful and full of paradox.
///
There was another home with magnolias in the front yard and so many pecan trees in the back that my Nana would pay us to gather them when she came to visit, and because it was money and it was for Nana’s pecan pie, we’d do it for hours and hours, bringing in buckets of pecans.
I remember forts in climbing trees and a tire swing we used to make our kittens dizzy and watch them walk and blackberries we’d soak in milk and sugar for an afternoon snack.
I remember sitting on my dad’s lap with a bowl of cucumbers soaked in vinegar, and I remember the dark hallway I could never walk down, only sprint down, and I remember birthday parties with lines of kids playing Red Rover and getting clotheslined by the solid of two clasped hands.
This home was chipped and wobbly and not quite secure, in a way that could not be explained, like the old porch swing that hung out front.
///
The years turn a little hazy after that, because there was a move out of state and a move back, and those homes were unexpected and traumatic and lonely.
There was the one in Ohio, where I slipped down cement stairs the day of my birthday and tore my new pantyhose all the way down the leg; where we came home to an empty house and locked all the doors tight behind us, because there was no money to pay someone to watch us and it wasn’t exactly the best neighborhood; where I slept every night with a doll I’d had since I was a baby, even though I was too old for dolls, resting the back of my hand on her cool face all those nights I could hear a mom and dad fighting through the walls.
It was the home that told us the truth about a man we loved and another woman and a baby on the way, all laid out on an answering machine because someone thought we should know.
It was the home that said life would never be the same. And it wasn’t.
That home led to another home, one we shared with a grandmother, because a divorce was coming, and I don’t remember much of this home, only frustration and resentment and a bitter root that had to be carved out, years later.
I remember a brother with ulcers and a mom who had to work too much and three kids once more squished into one room, even though they were all too old to share.
I remember pine cones and watching out a window to see who would be first, Mom or Memaw, and Metallica blasting from an open garage, speaking what we could not.
That home was cold and disappointing and hard, like the sidewalk out front where we would roller blade for hours, just to get out of the tension that threatened to break us all.
///
My last childhood home is the one where my parents still live today.
The day we moved in, the windows had a film of dirt so thick you could hardly see through them. The carpet was rust-colored and shabby and smelled ancient. The porch bent in the middle.
I remember feeling afraid to bring my first boyfriend there, because surely he wouldn’t want to be with someone as poor as me. I remember, for the first time, not wanting to have my birthday parties at home, because what would all those classmates think? I remember wishing I lived in her house or in his or in that one so much nicer than mine.
I was ashamed of that home.
It didn’t matter that this home held memories of a sister falling asleep in the closet while she was dressing for school and how we laughed about it so hard we were crying, for the first time in years. It didn’t matter that it held the miracle of a brother walking the road to a canal where he would fish and find himself. It didn’t matter that it held the victory of a mother who groped her way back through the dark.
It didn’t matter that it held a second chance in all its rickety, peeling walls.
Because all I could see, then, were those holes in the porch and the way the front door stuck when we tried to open it and all the dirt and dust still left in the corners after hours of trying to scrub it clean.
All I could see was what glared from the outside.
///
All I can see in my home is what glares from the outside, too.
Holes in walls. Splatters on doors. A burned arm on a cream chair. Especially that.
But in all these days after, the truth of home begins to bloom.
Home is not a place. It’s not four walls and a roof and perfectly arranged and preserved furniture.
It’s them. It’s me. It’s a heart-space.
Home cannot be contained. It is carried. Given. Received.
I can see it all the way through the time line of a life, the leavings, the moves, the starting-overs. Home never changed, even though those houses did, year after year.
Home is love, overwhelming, pure, unbridled, burning the arms of a mama wrapping all her boys in hugs.
Sure, I might grieve the destruction of that favorite chair, because it’s real, and it can’t be fixed, at least not right now, and it will always stare at me from a room inside my house, but it does not tell the whole truth of my home. It never will.
Home is more than a chair where a mama fed all her babies.
Home is an 8-year-old writing a sweet, sweet note to his little brother, and it’s a 5-year-old helping a twin put on shoes so he can play outside, too, and it’s a 2-year-old saying that what he’s thankful for tonight is his mama’s beautiful eyes, even though she spoke a little too harshly to him half an hour ago.
Home is a husband making his wife lunch every single day, because he knows she won’t take the time to eat unless he does, and it’s a 4-year-old playing Battleship with a brother, and it’s a last baby grinning at a mama in the early morning hours, when no one else is awake.
This home is radiant and wild and free.
It is lovelier than any home we could build with two hands and a bank full of money.
And I am so glad I get to live here.
by Rachel Toalson | On My Shelf
On my shelf this week:
100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write, by Sarah Ruhl
The Rum Diary, by Hunter S. Thompson
Bloom: Finding Beauty in the Unexpected, by Kelle Hampton
This week I’m reading a book of essays, a novel and one of the most beautiful memoirs I’ve ever read.
Best quotes so far:
“I found that life intruding on writing was, in fact, life. And that, tempting as it may be for a writer who is also a parent, one must not think of life as an intrusion. At the end of the day, writing has very little to do with writing, and much to do with life. And life, by definition, is not an intrusion.”
Sarah Ruhl
Read any of these? Tell us what you thought.
by Rachel Toalson | Fiction in Forty
You kiss me in the salty morning light. The sea sits calm behind us, but my heart is pitching, anything but calm. Then I feel the grit of sand chafing the back of my legs. And that’s when I know.
Challenge: Find a picture. Write exactly 40 words about it. Post.
(Great practice for brevity.)
by Rachel Toalson | Stuff Crash Test Kids say
We’re winning at parenting
Jadon (8): “I need a haircut. My hair is so long it keeps getting stuck in my ears, because my ears have too much wax in them.”
Asa (5): “My ears have so much earwax!”
Where are you going?
Hosea (4): “Where are you going, Daddy?”
Daddy: “To Sean’s house.”
Hosea: “I want to go.”
Daddy: “Oh, Sean doesn’t allow kids at his house.”
Hosea: “Wait, so you can’t go?”
Tastes Like Brown
Hosea, while eating an apple: “Daddy, I just ate a caterpillar.”
Daddy: “You probably didn’t eat a caterpillar. What did it taste like?”
Hosea: “It tastes like the color brown.”
Smells Like Brown?
Asa: “I just tooted on my hand. Smell my hand.”
by Rachel Toalson | This Writer Life
I don’t remember where it happened, exactly. It was years ago, but it chased me for too, too long.
Someone, somewhere, told me that to be an artist, to chase the writing dream that flapped in my heart, I would end up poor and penniless.
It’s not unusual to meet the ones who believe it to be true. They say it in subtle ways, asking what we “do,” and when we answer, “I’m a writer” or “I’m a painter” or “I’m a musician,” they stare blankly and maybe shake their heads and then ask their follow-up.
“Yes, but what do you do for money?”
Because being an artist, chasing a dream, couldn’t possibly support a family of eight.
When I was just a girl, all I wanted to do in the world was write and read other people’s writing in the margins, and there was a summer that came when someone in my family called me lazy for the way I would sit and scrawl in a notebook or lie in a hammock and read.
Writing, you see, was not really a career pursuit. I was not practicing for my profession, in their eyes. I was enjoying a hobby for hours, and that made me lazy.
Except when I wasn’t doing the work of writing or reading, I felt like half a person, like I existed but didn’t really. I satisfied my urge by signing up for all the extracurricular writing I could do in junior high and high school, because writing and reading for school-related competitions gave me the reason I needed to do what I loved.
But writing down the novels that took shape within me even then? It would be a long time before I did that, because “they” told me it was silly and irresponsible.
In college, I started out as a creative writing major and a music minor, until a well-meaning advisor said I might want to choose a major that was “more practical in this economy” and just minor in music and creative writing. A “more practical” major like journalism or teaching, something that would make money.
I chose journalism, because at least I could work for a newspaper and do some of what I loved.
I don’t regret this, or course I don’t, because I learned to be a student of human nature during my newspaper years, and I learned to write concisely and quickly, and I learned how to take a story no one else thought was worth telling and make it something people would want to read.
But I do wish that I hadn’t spent so many years with fiction stories trapped inside me because I believed they were not worth pursuit and ended only in poor.
I spent too many years not writing what I wanted, not embracing my art, and then that urge just burned too wild within me, so I had to do it or explode.
I had to chase. I had to dream. I had to write, and who cares what “they” all said?
If we love our art, we must pursue it or we’ll never be whole.
Maybe those people who don’t believe that pursuing art is a worthwhile profession will always be around. Maybe they will always (intentionally or unintentionally) make us feel wrong for our “frivolous” pursuit. Maybe we will not ever be able to make them understand what makes it so impossible to do anything but what we have been made to do.
Write. Sing. Paint. Draw. Dance. Play.
They are not hobbies. They are life.
I hope we will be true to ourselves. I hope we will know the beauty our art brings to the world and how necessary that beauty is. I hope we will create no matter what “they” say.
Because we will find, once there, once enmeshed in the creative career, that the only starving artist is the one who never pursues his art.
What story do you carry about someone discouraging you from pursuing your art? How did it make you feel? How did you overcome?
Welcome to The Ink Well Creative Community.
The Ink Well Community is evolving. While this used to be a place where I posted a prompt for writers to share their creative works, I have been receiving several inquiries about my process, how I create and read and manage a household with half a dozen little ones. So I thought we could turn this into a community of people who share about the creative process in all its many facets, from where we find our inspiration to when we find time to create (especially if we work other jobs). I’ll be sharing struggles about my creative life and logistical information about my particular creative process and what I’m learning about creativity, among many other things. I hope you’ll weigh in with your own struggles and observations and lessons. Let’s start a conversation. Let’s encourage one another. Let’s live the creative life together.
And if you have your own questions about creativity or process or inspiration, feel free to visit my contact page and send me a note.
by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
A few days ago we were all invited to take a trip inside an alternate reality and imagine what the world might look like if our sons were treated like our daughters, based on the story of Logan. It’s only fair, I think, to take another trip, inside another reality, and imagine what the world might look like if our daughters were treated like our sons.
Let’s start at the beginning, where a baby girl is born into a boys’ world and you, her mother, watch from the sideline.
In the womb: It’s time for the baby shower. Sports theme, of course, because she’s a girl, and of course it’s expected. Football at the top of the cake. Some soccer balls on the sides. A basketball in the center. Which one will she play? Everyone has a guess. Maybe it will be football, like you. You were pretty good in high school. She’ll probably be good, too, if the onesies have anything to say about it. “I get my muscles from my mom,” one says. “Future first-round draft pick,” another says. Of course she will be.
Birth: Welcome, baby girl! She’s finally here, two days late. Seven pounds. Bearing the name Eleanor, because it’s an old family name, and names were meant to be passed on. She’s healthy and tiny and perfect. “What a little beanpole,” they say when they see her. “It’s okay. She’ll chunk up fast.” Because she needs muscle and bulk, if she’s going to be a successful girl. She needs solid, because that’s what girls are. All those well-wishers wave her out of the hospital, saying, “We’ll see her on a court or a field someday. I just know it,” even while you think what lovely hands she has for piano or painting.
Age 1: Happy first, Eleanor! Here’s the party, with family and close friends, just a small thing, really, a cake decorated with Wonder Woman and Batgirl and Black Widow in skin-tight costumes that show muscle and bulk and everything it means to be a woman, presents wrapped in pink and never green or blue, which might confuse her about what kind of colors a girl should like. She opens her gifts, a soccer ball and a foam sword and a superhero cape, because little girls love to play tough. She tries out the sword, but it’s a little big, and she’s not completely steady on her feet yet, so she falls and skins her knee and starts crying. Everyone says, “You’re okay. It doesn’t hurt,” because she’ll have to learn that big girls don’t cry about silly things like falling over and skinning a knee. Big girls shake it off. Big girls toughen up.
Age 2: Eleanor’s a toddler now, learning about the world from whatever her hands touch and feel and explore. You want to show her how to put that train track together, but they say, no, she can figure it out, you don’t want her relying on someone else for her thinking. Girls think for themselves. The train station door is stuck and won’t let the train through? Well, just keep trying, Eleanor. And she will, because she’s persistent, until she throws it across the room and accidentally breaks a picture frame and gets a swat on the bottom for it. And don’t let her cry because it’s frustrating, even though it is. She needs to get a handle on those emotions. She needs to suck it up.
Age 3: Preschool days have come around. She likes making huge, tall buildings with the blocks. And when a boy comes and snatches one of the blocks she’s using right out of her hands, she takes it back. Only she does it a little too forcefully, and the boy falls over, screaming and crying. She sits in time out for three minutes and then does it all again. Three more minutes. And again. Three more minutes. They call you to come pick her up, because she’s “being a bully.”
Age 4: Every day Eleanor goes to Pre-K, but there are some problems. She can’t sit perfectly still on the carpet like all the little boys. She likes to play by herself because she’s tired of getting in trouble for taking back her blocks. Do normal kids have this much energy? Are normal kids this emotional? Are normal kids this secluded? Maybe she has ADHD. Maybe she has autism. Maybe we should worry.
Age 5: She made it to kindergarten! Time went by so fast! All her teachers are men, but she doesn’t mind, at least not yet. Except they tell her she’s too loud. She’s got too much energy. She needs to learn to reign in those emotions, still. So, to teach her, we’ll have her sit out of recess. We’ll have her do all her work in a corner of the classroom so she won’t be tempted to talk. We’ll have her stand in the line for lunch perfectly still and perfectly straight, so she can get enough practice doing what she’s told, and if she fails, if one foot gets out of line, she’ll sit at a lunch table by herself. Lunch isolation. That’ll teach her. Time with the school psychologist for extensive evaluations. That’ll teach her, too. Different is not tolerated.
Age 6: The tests came back! No autism or ADHD or learning disability. Only a very high, very unexpected IQ, with reading scores close to junior high school level. But girls don’t read well, so it was surely a mistake. Maybe a fluke in the test. After all, she’s only a first-grader. She loves art and she loves music and she loves running around at recess, but there isn’t much time in the day to do these things, because there are more important things to do. She likes to read, but surely it’s not at the level you, the parent, says it is, and the test was a fluke, so let’s give her these books that are way too easy for her so she fidgets and talks when she’s finished, and then she can sit out of recess again for her bad behavior.
Age 8: She’s getting older, and all these years of denying emotions are making her volatile. She explodes in class, collapsing in a heap of tears and is sent to the principal’s office, with a discipline write-up for “disturbing” the class. Three more times it happens, and then she gets in school suspension for three days. We will get a reign on these emotions. We will. Take away PE, take away recess, take away interaction with her classmates, and eventually she will learn. Girls don’t cry. Girls don’t explode. Girls stay calm and collected.
Age 11: It’s time for middle school. Once again, she’s surrounded by male teachers, and this time it matters, because there’s puberty and there are hormones and everything feels wild and out of control. She walks around with raging emotions and unbalanced hormones and a fever of anger because she’s denied those feelings for so long, but all she gets for her explosions is in school suspension or detention. No one thinks to help sort it all out, because she’s a girl, and girls can figure it out. She starts losing interest in her studies, because what’s the point, really. No one really likes her, because she doesn’t play sports like girls are supposed to. And even if she did, they’ve all been playing since they were 3. She’d never be able to catch up.
Age 14: She’s been taking art lessons for years, and she enjoys them more than anything, but art isn’t womanly, she’s told. She has to find some other, more masculine profession. Maybe she should just pick a sport and get it over with. Maybe she should take up welding. Maybe she should quit altogether. She has a friend who tried to slit her wrists, and she wonders what it would be like. Probably better than trying to stuff all these emotions and live up to the expectations of other people. She still wants to do well in school, but girls who do well in school are outcasts, teased mercilessly. She doesn’t have the emotional capacity to deal with teasing, so she just pretends she doesn’t already know all the answers.
Age 17: Time to apply for colleges, Eleanor! But she doesn’t want to go, because education long ago lost its lure for her. Who needs a degree? Not her. She probably wouldn’t be able to make it in college, anyway, since high school didn’t really turn out all that well. What if she fails? Women aren’t supposed to fail. What if she picks the wrong degree? There are only a handful of right ones, ones that could support a husband and a family like she’s supposed to do. Like she’s expected to do. It’s overwhelming. So she just doesn’t try.
Age 23: Eleanor is now an adult. She goes into her office five days a week, eight hours a day, like everyone taught her to do. She’s really starting to get a handle on her emotions now. When her dog died last year, she didn’t cry. When her dream job slipped through her fingers, she shook it off. When her boyfriend broke up with her, she didn’t feel the sadness. She just joined a friend at the bar. She took a drink. Two. Who knows how many.
Eleanor’s story and Logan’s story prove that both genders have a long way to go toward equality. There is much work to be done. There are many Eleanors, and there are many Logans, and they are all struggling to find their feet in their very different places and a society that does not always look kindly upon them.
Instead of denying that gender problems exist, maybe we should use our arguing energies to change a world that needs changing—for both genders.
by Rachel Toalson | Messy Mondays
This basket is designated for school papers. It takes less than a week to fill it. So many papers. Why are there so many school papers? Fliers about camps our kids probably won’t attend, sign-it sheets that get lost in the shuffle and make me send an apology note to my boys’ teachers every other day, birthday party invitations we don’t ever attend (because we’re terrible, anti-social parents), worksheets I really don’t care about want to see, because everything my boys do is amazing.
Can I opt out? Is there some “please e-mail me” list I missed out on? If there is and I am needlessly spending my mornings after a slept-three-hours night sorting the papers out of my boys’ school folders, I quit. Forever.
