by Rachel Toalson | General Blog
Being a parent who cares is exhausting.
Let me explain. There are so many things that you HAVE to care about when you are raising another human being. You have to care about making sure their bodies are properly nourished with food and water. You have to care about them having the right kind of shelter. You have to care about them getting enough sleep. You have to care about them wearing the appropriate amount of clothing to protect them from the elements (or to keep them from running around naked in public places). You have to care about how their excrement is handled. You have to care about good hygiene. You have to care about their health. You have to care about the 1,476 ways they can harm or end themselves because of their gross lack of experience and judgment and general lack of motor control. This is the basic stuff. You also kinda have to care about their emotional well being and development, their ability to learn the skills necessary to function in society, and their ability to cooperate with others and not be self-centered little goblins for the rest of their lives.
Hills I will no longer die on.
As we parents often do, we take even more care than these basic few things, pushing the limits of our emotional bandwidth until something gives, either in small, periodic ways or big explosive ways. There are “hills that we should die on” for sure, but I just wanted to share a handful of hills that I’ve chosen to abandon. I have simply stopped caring, and my heart and my children’s ears are better for it.
1. I don’t care if you wear mis-matched or non-appropriate clothing.
A red sock and a green sock? Are there two of them? Great, get your shoes on, let’s go! A tennis shoe and a boot? Are they the opposite foot from one another? I call that a win! Put ’em on. Yes, that black shirt goes perfectly with your brown sweatpants. Sure, you can wear a scarf, gloves and knit cap in the middle of July! You want to wear pj’s to the store? Are your privates covered? Then, we’re good to go. You want to wear your batman costume (that’s a few sizes too small) out to dinner tonight? Don’t forget your cape! I exercise this lack of care in most cases. I do make the rare exception for a handful of special events or for family pictures, otherwise, I don’t care.
2. I don’t care when you have an emotional melt-down in the middle of the grocery store.
My lack of care in this case is not so much directed at my child as it is at the other shoppers. I don’t care that the horrible noises my child is making are disturbing your perfect shopping trip. I don’t care if you have opinions or thoughts about why my child is having a meltdown or what I could have done to prevent it. I don’t care about what kind of parent you think I am. My child is obviously having a problem, whether it’s making a scene so he can get what he wants, or that he’s legitimately sad, upset, frustrated, overwhelmed, and is still learning how to handle his emotions. I either need all of my emotional resources focused on helping him through his emotions, or to steel myself against giving into an unhealthy request for attention, and either way, I don’t have any cares left to give you Ms. Disapproving Glare lady. Sorry. Not sorry.
3. I don’t care if you say inappropriate or embarrassing things.
Go ahead. Make your uncensored observations about the world around you. Yes, daddy’s belly is getting big. Yes, that is a hairy man over there. Yes, that lady is wearing a LOT of makeup. Oh, you are test-driving some interesting new words there. Go ahead and take them for a spin. Words can be powerful. What a wonder it is to speak and to watch the room react. You just said one word and the whole place became alive with chatter, laughter and gasps. I might give you some mild corrections/suggestions for now, but there’s no way I can explain to you in this moment the complexity and importance of good, healthy communication. I’m just going to have to demonstrate it for you over time and hope that you catch on, the way that you caught on to my, not-so-healthy speech patterns.
4. I don’t care if you accidentally break, spill or destroy things.
You tried SO hard to carry that cup of milk from the table to the kitchen sink. You made it a whole 3 feet before you spilled it all. Good job! You wanted so badly to bring me my favorite coffee mug, but your fingers don’t work sometimes and it shattered into thousands of pieces against the tile floor. It’s the thought that counts. You peed all over the carpet, instead of into the toilet which is just 10 little baby steps away from where you’re standing. You wanted to practice your throwing inside this time, with rocks you found outside. You didn’t realize, as you jumped on top of my head, that I was wearing my glasses, and they crunched under your butt. I don’t care. Okay, I care… but not so much that I freak out. These things are just things. This is the first and one of the most important lessons I want to teach you WHEN things break, and they will break. I can only teach this to you if I don’t blow my top. In time we’ll get to those lessons about motor skills, appropriate uses of items, and not jumping on daddy’s head.
5. I don’t care that you NEVER use toys/games /things according to the instructions.
Yes, you can mix the Star Wars Legos with the Lord of the Rings Legos, they totally go together. Sure, you can make up your own rules to Monopoly, collect all of the money, have multiple player tokens and own all of the houses. You’re right, the plastic pipes holding together that soccer net do come apart and make excellent swords. As a matter of fact, yes, all of the long stick-like things are actually swords. While I appreciate the imagination required to invent games and build toys that children will enjoy, I hold a much, much higher appreciation for the imagination my child uses when the toys stop being things that have a single function, and become tools that he can use in a world he has invented.
Don’t spend your care on things that don’t pay off.
I hope this gives you permission not to care. I hope that letting go of some of these things helps you to discover a deeper appreciation for and understanding of your kids, and the way they interact with the world around them as they learn and grow. I hope you laugh more. Our kids are hilarious in their lack of experience, knowledge and coordination. Enjoy it while it lasts. The more we are able to stop caring about trivial things, the more care we can give to the things that really matter.
What do you not care about?
Do you have examples of things you’ve simply stopped caring about? We’d love to hear about them. Leave a comment and let us know about the hill (or hills) you’ve abandoned.
by Rachel Toalson | General Blog
She walks through the door, this woman I haven’t seen in eight months but have known for years, because I’m sitting here waiting to do an interview for my job, and she says, “Oh my God. Don’t tell me you’re pregnant again.”
And it’s obvious that my six-months swelling belly is not the bloating of a meal gone wrong.
I just smile and wait for the words I know will come, and she doesn’t disappoint me.
“Don’t you know by now how this happens?” she says.
No, I don’t. Would you please enlighten me? Because, good Lord, who wants six accidents like I’ve got? (This is what I sometimes want to say.)
I usually try to take these comments with good humor and lots and lots of patience, because I know people are just trying to make conversation and they think it’s funny and they don’t know how many times I’ve heard it before.
But now that we are entrenched in our fifth pregnancy, the comments happen nearly every time I encounter someone I haven’t seen in a while.
“You’re pregnant every time I see you,” someone else says today, and I just shake my head and flash my obligatory smile and wait for the next punch.
And it comes, just like I thought it would, from a guy who flippantly remarks, “Yeah, my wife and I believe in family planning.”
And it’s this misconception right here that makes me want to shout it from the rooftops: Just because we have a large family doesn’t mean we didn’t family plan.
Sure, maybe we didn’t plan the traditional ways, with birth control pills and barriers and prevent-a pregnancy cups, but there are other ways to family plan, like counting days and taking temperatures and being careful.
It may be news to many, but every one of our six babies was planned (well, except for the extra twin we didn’t anticipate).
I know it’s hard to believe that a family in our day and age and a society like this one would choose to have six children, and maybe it seems a little crazy (it is) and wildly expensive (yes), but we did. And even though there are days I wonder if we really were crazy and I shudder to think about our grocery bill in a few years and I cringe beneath the insensitive comments of other people, I wouldn’t change a thing about our lives.
I used to be one of the most annoying control freaks a person could ever be. I used to think a clean and tidy house was a non-negotiable. I used to walk through life distracted to the best parts—all those tiny little pieces I needed a child to show me.
Now I’m the mama who can’t keep up with school paperwork and says who cares, and I’m the mama paying library fines every few weeks, and I’m the mama stepping over a discarded shoe and laughing about how this one is here and the other is clear across the room, balancing on the edge of a couch top, and how in the world did that happen? Now I’m the mama who will slide down stairs in an oversized box just for a laugh from my boys, even though I almost break my back. I’m the mama who laughs myself silly at an ABC song boys recorded and turned slow motion. I’m the mama who stops on the walk to school so we can observe the way those squished earthworms look like a J and an L and an S and an e, and who cares if we’re late?
I like this person I’ve become.
So to all the people who feel the need to comment on how maybe we need to take our hands off each other until we can figure out where babies come from; and the ones who say we sure have a huge family and “better you than me,” like having a large family is some kind of curse; and the ones who want to educate us on their ideas about family planning, I say thank you.
Thank you for reminding me just how amazing my nontraditional-according-to-numbers family really is.
Thank you for helping me realize more clearly and firmly and surely that this is who I want to be, a mother of six boys, a woman losing a grip on her ordered-just-so life.
Thank you for showing me that this is family planning at its best.
Rachel is a writer, poet, editor and musician who is raising five (going on six) boys to love books and poetry and music and art and the wild outdoors—all the best bits of life. She shares her fiction and nonfiction writings over at her blog, and, when she’s not buried in a writing journal or a new song or a kid crisis at home, she enjoys reading Cormac McCarthy, Toni Morrison, William Faulkner and the poetry of Rilke. Follow her on Twitter @racheltoalson.
by Rachel Toalson | General Blog
Here we are, sitting around a table, listing our highs and lows of the day.
And the oldest, 7 years old, he doesn’t want to tell us the low, because it’s something that, even now, makes his eyes water, but we coax it out with gentle words and open hearts.
He tells us how he lost the battle with his anger today, how he threw a pencil clear across the room (no one was hit), how he had to sit out 10 minutes of recess for his failure.
He hangs his head, like he’s ashamed of this mistake he made hours ago, and then he says, Sometimes I forget how to handle my anger.
I don’t like to see that hanging head and those watery eyes and this failure he can’t seem to shake, so I remind him we all make mistakes and we all try to be good and we all forget sometimes.
He just shakes his head, like he’s the only one who ever made a mistake as bad as this one.
So I tell him about his uncle, who was sent to the principal’s office in first grade because he refused to sit on the reading rug like his teacher said; and I tell him about his aunt, who was sent to the principal as a kindergartener because she cut her best friend’s hair when she was supposed to be cutting paper; and I tell him about me, the time I left school as a high school senior without signing out because I had a bum knee and athletics was the last class of the day and my coach never took attendance—except for that day I left early.
I tell him about how the principal called my mom and how she was waiting for me when I got home and how I had to make a formal apology for breaking the rules and how I had to spend three days in ISS, In School Suspension.
I tell him I know what it’s like to not do the right thing.
Sometimes, in the heat of those discipline moments, when we’re trying to teach them that no one can ever be perfectly good and that we’re all just learning how to be the best versions of ourselves and that we know what it’s like because we’ve been there, too, we forget that they don’t know our stories like we do.
And if we don’t share those stories, our words are just words.
They get in these situations that seem so trivial to us, but they can feel like the end of the world to them, because he threw a pencil and failed, once more, to get a handle on his anger before acting. We know it’s not the end of the world, not even close, because we’ve been there before. We’ve thrown that pencil in a million different ways.
But they don’t know we’ve been there before and that we made it out alive.
So maybe instead of just focusing on those moments of teaching a better way and reviewing those Laws of Anger and Alternatives to Anger, we give them an opportunity to know and understand and truly believe they’re not alone in their failures.
Because there was that time you called a boy an ugly name, because you were embarrassed and angry and vengeful, and you had to write a note of apology to him and your teacher. And there was that time their uncle yelled something out the window of a bus on the way to a football game, and the band director made him sit out of marching two whole games because of it. And there was that time their great-aunt lined up those onion pieces she’d saved from lunch, all of them shaped like boots, and walked them back and forth across her desk to her own theme song while the teacher was talking, and she was marched down to the principal’s office to make that call home.
Sometimes knowing they came from a long line of people who made mistakes and lived through them helps them better understand that they can live through their own failures, too, that life is not about being perfect but is about still standing tall on the other side of those mistakes.
My boy is quiet for a long time after all this story-telling, and then he smiles and says, Well, at least I didn’t get In School Suspension, and his daddy and I laugh.
Sometimes stories can help us find that brighter side, too.
Rachel is a writer, poet, editor and musician who is raising five (going on six) boys to love books and poetry and music and art and the wild outdoors—all the best bits of life. She shares her fiction and nonfiction writings over at her blog, and, when she’s not buried in a writing journal or a new song or a kid crisis at home, she enjoys reading Cormac McCarthy, Toni Morrison, William Faulkner and the poetry of Rilke. Follow her on Twitter @racheltoalson.
by Rachel Toalson | General Blog
I just have to say it: I’m not a big fan of unsolicited parenting advice.
I believe in seeking wisdom for our parenting journey (because who of us really knows what we’re doing?), by reading parenting books or parenting articles or talking with friends who have walked in our shoes, and I do all of that.
But it seems like being pregnant or becoming a brand new mom or rising through the ranks of a toddler parent or adolescent parent or teenager parent suddenly gives people permission (because they’re already raised their kids or they’re in a stage above yours or they think they know all there is to know about parenting) to tell you how to raise your children.
Maybe it’s because most of the unsolicited advice I’ve gotten has been contrary to the way I know is right for my children, or maybe it’s because most of the people who have doled out that advice have done it just to say I’m doing it all wrong, but I don’t often heed what people say when I’ve never asked for their advice in the first place.
Just to be clear, I’m not talking about the friend you talk to most every day or the ones you swap parenting battle stories with or the ones who hold multiple degrees in child development or work as child therapists or are experts in parenting with respect and teaching children emotional intelligence (I’ll take unsolicited advice from you any day!).
I’m talking about the lady who watches your son melt down at the playground because it’s time to go and he’s not ready to go, the one who cuts her eyes at you and says, “What that boy really needs is some discipline,” and what she really means is a good old spanking.
I’m talking about the one who thinks that just because “cry it out” worked for her three children, who are grown with no psychological problems, it works for yours, too, because people who soothe instead of let babies “cry it out” are really just spoiling their children, and later on those children will be ill-equipped to face this unfair world and you’ll regret you ever picked them up to soothe them, because that was the time they could have learned all about life not being fair.
I’m talking about all the others who believe they raised their children right and so have something to say about you raising yours right, even though their children were never your children.
So, since we seem to live in this age where people believe it “takes a village to raise a child” means they can weigh in (without being asked) on how you raise yours, I wanted to highlight the unsolicited (and solicited) parenting advice I find the most helpful and give us all permission to toss the rest.
1. It makes me a better parent. It equips me with practical tools that help me understand my children in their various developmental stages and encourages me to mold their personalities and temperaments and tendencies not in a way that is easiest for me but in a way that is the best representation of who they were made to be.
2. It honors and embraces who children are. One of the most important pieces of parenting advice that I’ve gotten in all my soliciting (never the unsolicited, unfortunately) is to accept who my children are already. It’s not easy, when one is strong-willed and it would be easier if he weren’t; and one is highly sensitive and cries about the least little thing, and it would be easier if he weren’t; and one is active and daring and full of courage, and it would be easier if he weren’t; and one wants to do everything for himself, even though he’s only 2, and it would be easier if he didn’t; and one is afraid of the dark and wants to sleep in the doorway instead of his bed, and it would be easier if he didn’t. The most helpful advice encourages me to honor who my children are instead of telling me how I should be changing them into more acceptable people.
3. It fills me with a sense of empowerment, not inefficiency. So much of the unsolicited advice is given in a way that makes parents feel like we’re failing as parents, just because we’re not doing it this one particular way that works for all children of all ages at all times. The best parenting advice acknowledges that every child is different and that I, as a parent, know my child best and already possess the ability to raise them right.
4. It doesn’t throw out terms like “entitled” or “helicopter” or “spoiled” or “they have to learn life isn’t fair.” These are old-fashioned terms that really have no applicable value whatsoever, since they’ve been used since before the turn of the 20th century. (Surprised? See our book review on The Myth of the Spoiled Child, by Alfie Kohn for more information.)
5. It doesn’t make assumptions about who parents are. So much of parenting advice, especially the unsolicited kind, comes from people who don’t really know our family or our children, who only see them every other month or on birthdays or at the store that one time they had their meltdown because it was 1 p.m. and they hadn’t had anything to eat or drink since 8 a.m.
The other day I was checking out at the store with one boy loudly crying that he wanted to spend more time than I allowed looking at the toys and two other boys physically fighting over who got to fly like Superman on the bottom rack of the cart.
The woman checking me out handed me my receipt and caught my eye and smiled.
“Three boys is such a blessing,” she said.
I didn’t tell her that there were two more at home driving their daddy crazy or that, look, my boys are fighting or that they don’t always act like a blessing.
I just smiled back and said, “Yes. They are,” and then walked out the door with my blessings crying and fighting.
Sometimes the best unsolicited advice is just a reminder that these little people really are amazing.
The rest of it, well, we can just let it slide in one ear and right back out the other, smiling our brightest thank-you smile.
They don’t have to know we weren’t listening.
Rachel is a writer, poet, editor and musician who is raising five boys to love books and poetry and music and art and the wild outdoors—all the best bits of life. She shares her fiction and nonfiction writings over at her blog, and, when she’s not buried in a writing journal or a new song or a kid crisis at home, she enjoys reading Cormac McCarthy, Toni Morrison, William Faulkner and the poetry of Rilke. Follow her on Twitter @racheltoalson.
by Rachel Toalson | General Blog
When I started my parenting journey, I did not realize I would have five children. Three was the “reasonable” number we’d decided on when we had that first conversation about our married futures and what our family might look like someday.
I don’t really know what happened. We changed our minds. We were surprised (at least by the extra twin). We were…a little crazy, maybe?
I didn’t expect so many children to call me Mama.
But what I really didn’t expect was for all of them to be boys.
When the sonogram proved the first one was a boy, I remember thinking, “I don’t even know what to do with boys. I won’t be able to fix their hair or play with dolls or read girly stories like Anne of Green Gables or The Little Princess or Little House on the Prairie.” I, once the official French braider for my high school volleyball team, was good at that stuff.
I remember thinking, “I don’t know if I’ll be any good at boys.”
Now, seven years later, with five of them destroying my house on a minute-by-minute basis, I have no idea what I would even do with a girl.
But even still, there are some elusive mysteries about this so-different gender that confound me to this day.
I thought I might celebrate my boys by sharing some. (Note: Some of them might be cross-gender, but I just wouldn’t know.)
Stripping off clothes as soon as they walk through the door. They’re not allowed outside without clothes or only in their underwear, but that’s OK. They’ll just play inside in their underwear, or with nothing on at all, even though it’s a perfect afternoon for riding scooters or swinging or running laps around the cul-de-sac. They just want to be where they can wear the fewest clothes.
Leaving stripped clothes on the floor, no matter how many times I remind them where the laundry hamper is. Even though the shoes have an easy, designated place. Even though they know perfectly well how to hang shirts and fold shorts. Even though the hamper is two inches from where they dropped their discarded clothes.
Shoes worn out three weeks after I bought them. They run too fast or kick poles with friends at recess or use their toes as a scooter brake, even though there’s a perfectly efficient one attached to the back of their scooter.
Hysterical laughter anytime someone farts or pretends to. It never, ever, ever gets old. To them.
Pride in owning up to the fart, especially if it’s smelly. Even the 2-year-old twins are now saying “I tooted” and grinning about it. Apparently this is something to be immensely proud of.
Everything is a competition. Running down the stairs. Setting the table. Talking.
So.much.noise. We had to buy a megaphone just to be heard over the constant noise, because we were damaging our vocal chords just trying to yell instructions over the five competing voices that are somehow 20 times louder than ours.
Death-defying acts. Like jumping from the ninth stair onto the bottom floor of our house. Like swinging as high as they can possibly swing and then jumping from the height to see if they’ll land on their feet. Like hanging upside down from monkey bars I can’t even reach from the ground, while I stand “spotting” them, unsure of what I’ll do if their legs slip and they come bowling toward me.
Story times that don’t look like your average story times, because boys are standing on their heads and sitting on a tower of pillows, trying not to fall, and jumping from one couch to another. But they’re listening, somehow. I know. I’ve tested them just to be sure.
Total obsession with their boy-parts. “Stop playing with your penis.” I say this several times a day.
Butter knives snuck from the drawer for a quick sword-fighting match while I take a five-minute break in the bathroom upstairs.
Everything becomes a weapon. An empty paper towel roll, dug out of the recycling basket = a sword. A PVC pipe that’s supposed to be holding up the soccer net out back = a bazooka (they don’t even know what that is. They just shoot.) A scooter = a machine for smashing slower brothers’ toes.
Wet dog smell when they come back in from outside, even if it’s 40 degrees out there.
Bath time where soap misses the front of the hair and face, even though I’m right there to remind them. “I don’t care if I smell,” they say. Well, okay then.
No underwear in their drawers just three days after I’ve done laundry because they spent the last three days playing Captain Underpants and actually, for once, put all the underpants worn on their head in the laundry basket.
Nakedness. All the time. Everywhere. Company’s over? No matter. They’ll come of the bathroom naked anyway. Immediately after bath time, it takes at least five reminders for each of them to even locate their pajamas (in the same drawer they’re always in) and five more for them to actually put them on. I’m pretty sure this is just a 20-minute stalling technique meticulously planned to get them more naked time.
This is not an exhaustive list of all their wild and crazy, by any means.
But with all the nose-wrinkling smells and the heart-stopping tricks and the mess that follows them like Charlie Brown’s “Pig Pen,” there sure is a lot of love for their mama.
They love like little hurricanes, pulling up the roots of scars I’ve carried my whole life, smashing windows and walls so I’m brave enough to bare the very heart of me, tearing off a roof and twisting me toward a height I could never imagine.
I did not expect this, either.
What these years with boys have shown me is that I am a woman beloved times five.
And I wouldn’t trade that for an impeccably tidy house that smells nice all the time or a heart that beats calm or children who sit perfectly still and quiet at just a word or look from me.
I wouldn’t trade it for all the riches in the world, because I already have those riches, climbing across tables and hanging from ceiling fans and flipping off the used-to-look-nice couches in my home.
Riches beyond compare.
Rachel is a writer, poet, editor and musician who is raising five boys to love books and poetry and music and art and the wild outdoors—all the best bits of life. She shares her fiction and nonfiction writings over at her blog, and, when she’s not buried in a writing journal or a new song or a kid crisis at home, she enjoys reading Cormac McCarthy, Toni Morrison, William Faulkner and the poetry of Rilke. Follow her on Twitter @racheltoalson.
