by Rachel Toalson | Messy Mondays
This week kicks off Library Lovers’ Month, and if you know me and my family at all, you know that one thing we love to do is read together. We read before nap time, when one of the 3-year-old twins will pick out two picture books and I’ll read a few chapters from the middle grade novel we’re wading through (current pick is Echo, by Pam Munoz Ryan). We read audio books while doing chores, when we don’t feel like listening to the kids complain about our ‘90s Pandora station and how it is “really hurting our ears because this is the worst music ever. Seriously. Minecraft music is much better.”
We read during bath time and laugh about Shel Silverstein’s bizarre poetry. We read before bed.
This kids and I head out to the library at least once a week, because libraries are magical places for children. Some of my fondest memories as a kid were the ones where my mother set us loose in the local library and told us to pick out enough books to last us a week, and, of course, I’d pick more. I love libraries so much that, early on, I set one up in my own house. Boys share three to a bedroom, but we have a library, because we have our priorities straight.
With all those trips to the library come, inevitably, lost books.
There are so many things that never happened before I had kids. Overdrawing my account (I can’t even add correctly anymore). Leaving something important at a store (I’ll leave the box of diapers, but at least I have all my kids). Accruing a regular library fine.
I’m convinced we’re some of the biggest supporters of our local library, which is all well and good, except that when I pay for a book, I like to keep it. Instead, library books that are fortunate enough to come home with my kids fall into a giant black hole that is my boys’ bedroom.
Ha. Who am I kidding? The whole house is a black hole.
I’ve found library books in some pretty weird (or maybe just annoying) places. Like
In the car.
I know. That’s not so very hard to believe. We do, after all, drive to the library, and boy are always reading on the way back home, because once they get home they’ll find better things to do, like dump out all the LEGOs and come in and out the front door ten thousand times and decide they want wear the Spider-Man costume, no they want to wear Iron man, no they think they’d rather go as a SWAT team member with red silk gloves and a Robin Hood hat, and they forget all about reading the books or, more importantly, where they last saw them. My boys are the worst at leaving books in the car, which are sure to get trampled by a billion feet next time we load up, but, hey, at least they’ll have a book for the five-minute trip to the store. Win.
In the laundry hamper.
Maybe they were reading the book in the bathroom when they took their clothes off, and, because they were finished with it, they weren’t all that bothered when the book got caught in their sleeves, and then they didn’t notice the hard corners sticking out when they actually put their clothes in the hamper. It’s not all that far-fetched. I mean, the only thing they really pay attention to is the answer to “What time is dinner” or its twin, “What are we having for dinner?” But, hey, boys? A laundry hamper is most definitely not the place for books. I feel compelled to replace these Pokemon Ruby and Sapphire books for the simple fact that they smell like wet dog and rotten Fritos.
In the trash can.
This is most likely the work of the 3-year-old twins. They are, you see, some of the biggest instigators in my house. If a brother says he really likes the song playing through the speakers, the 3-year-old will sneak up to the iPhone and “accidentally” turn it off. If a brother says “Please stop copying me” a 3-year-old will do exactly the opposite for hours on end. If a brother says he really likes this book he’s reading and then he happens to leave that very book unattended for half a second, well, there it goes in a stainless steel container with last night’s chicken bones, somebody’s old toast covered in jam and their baby brother’s most recent fully loaded diaper.
In the refrigerator.
Book preservation? A book and a snack? Someone mistook bookshelf for fridge shelf? It’s anyone’s guess.
I know what you’re thinking. Hey, at least your kids love reading. (Or maybe you’re thinking, hey, you need to get a handle on your kids, in which case I’m not really interested in anything you have to say.) Exactly. At least they love reading.
I suppose if library fines are the price I have to pay for kids who will read to stave off boredom, then I’ll take it.
But if you can’t get your book back on the designated library shelf, I swear…
by Rachel Toalson | Messy Mondays
I recently made a few waves with an essay I’d written in response to a friend venting to me about how her girlfriends kept saying that their husbands were going to babysit their kids so they could have a girls’ night out. Apparently, it struck a deep nerve.
I feel like there’s something more that needs saying, so indulge me for a moment while I work it all out.
My husband is not a babysitter because he’s a parent. We’ve already established that. But how about we break this down a little, so, at its simplest, it looks something like this:
A parent knows what he’s doing.
It seems that not only have we, as a society, gotten so used to seeing mom as the sole caretaker of her children, but we have also gotten used to believing dad is an incompetent caretaker.
We see this everywhere. We see it in the public men’s restrooms that have no changing station included, because men, of course, would not know how to change a diaper. We see it in the lack of paternity leave at most businesses (maternity leave’s not much better, but that’s another subject for another day), as if no father in his right mind would want to spend those early weeks helping his partner and acclimating himself to this new dynamic of family. We see it in our TV shows and our movies and our commentary on clueless celebrity dads who carry their children all wrong (who of us really knows what we’re doing the first time out of the gate, anyway?).
So maybe this is where the real problem lies, why both men and women express outrage at seeing men put on pedestals for taking responsibility as a parent—because, the truth is, men don’t want to be there. They don’t want to be held up as an exception when they’re just loving their kids the best way they know how, and some days that’s taking care of the explosion that happened in their six-month-old’s pants, and some days that’s mopping up the puke that happened in the hall, and some days that’s teaching a kid to ride a bike or roller blade or drive.
Of course we want to thank them for their contribution. Of course we want to acknowledge that they’re doing a great job as a parent, same as we are. Of course we want to make sure they know how beautiful it is to see a dad loving their kids with his time.
But what our “Dad’s babysitting tonight” and our “Your wife is so fortunate to have a helper like you” does is it unconsciously undermines who men are as parents. Babysitters and helpers don’t know their children. Babysitters and helpers don’t have to stick around. Babysitters and helpers don’t make decisions about what to do with the kid who’s getting beat up in school or how to handle the not-turning-in-homework conundrum and where to put the baby until he’s sleeping through the night.
Husband and I are fortunate enough to split our days down the middle (Not everyone is able to do this. That’s okay. Our schedule is not the point of this essay, so don’t get lost here.). We do things differently as parents, though we share the same core philosophies. The kids know what to expect when a parent takes over the parenting shift. They know that I don’t like a lot of noise, so if they want to wrestle or play freeze tag, they better do it out back. They know their daddy doesn’t care about noise as much as I do, so they know they can play music through the loudspeakers and try to talk over the music if they want. They know their daddy makes them read stories in the home library while I prefer they read in their rooms with me, on my lap. They know they can probably get away with some things when Husband’s on duty that I would never tolerate, and vice versa. We have different preferences because we’re different people. Our kids adjust accordingly.
But just because we do things differently doesn’t mean I’m a better parent than he is. It doesn’t mean he has no idea what he’s doing. In my house, Daddy knows what to do when a kid stubs his toe on the curb, and he knows where the school papers belong (recycling or keep-it-forever?), and he knows how to read a story so a 3-year-old will pay attention. He knows how to teach kids about multiplication tables and metaphors and the proper way to dance “Whip It Nae Nae,” and the deeper things, like love and honor and respect and grit and perseverance and identity.
It seems that we’ve traveled a little too far down this path of Dad as the joke, Dad as little more than useless, Dad as a bungling idiot. It’s time to change this perception, too.
I know men who don’t have sole custody of their kids, and they want nothing more than to be more than a babysitter for their kids. I know men who stay at home while their wives work full-time, and they want nothing more than to be seen as competent caregivers. I know men who are serious about their parenting and just want to be seen as responsible dads.
DADS KNOW WHAT THEY’RE DOING, SOCIETY. We should let them do it.
by Rachel Toalson | Messy Mondays
Today is a day we celebrate a great man of history who envisioned a lofty dream for America, one of peace and love and equality, spread to every corner of the world. While I love the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. I have to admit that I’d forgotten it was a holiday until I woke up at 4 in the morning and couldn’t get back to sleep, so I thought I’d check my email and then happened to read the note from my kids’ principal reminding me that school was out for the day. Yay! My favorite.
I lay in bed, trying desperately to get back to sleep, while Husband clearly didn’t have any trouble ignoring my insomnia, judging by the noises coming from his mouth and nose. So, naturally, I started thinking about my own dreams. I ran through them, writing dreams, book dreams, music dreams, dreams for my kids, dreams for Husband, and when I’d listed them all in my much-too-busy-for-4-a.m.-head, I thought about the one I want most right now. It’s a little sad and simple, but it’s a big one all the same: Get a decent nights’ sleep for once.
You might say I’ll probably never have a decent nights’ sleep, because I have six kids, and kids become teenagers and teenagers become adults and I’ll never stop worrying about them until the day I die. Okay. That’s fair. But let me just explain here that it’s not often that worry or anxiety, thankfully, keeps me up at night. Usually because I’m so exhausted by the time I get to fall into bed that sleep comes easily. That old saying “asleep before your head hit the pillow?” That’s me.
Also, our kids have always been champion sleepers, ever since they were tiny babies. It was unusual for a Toalson baby not to sleep all the way through the night by, at the latest, eight weeks of age. It’s rare that any of the boys will wake in the middle of the night with nightmares or feeling sick, although it does happen on occasion. Besides, I’m not even talking about that kind of decent nights’ sleep. Because the truth is, those are more the exception than the rule, and of course I’m going to rub a boy’s back when he’s not feeling well, and of course I’m going to make sure they feel safe until they fall asleep, and of course I’ll hold that baby if his gums are hurting too much.
I’m talking about the nights I’m woken up for no other reason than the fact that I sleep with a lawnmower.
I can’t even count the number of times I’ve woken in the middle of the night and thought one of the neighbors had mistakenly set their yard guy as their alarm clock and then, when reason climbed back to its rightful place and I looked over at Husband, I saw the culprit.
There are nights when Husband will roll over and put his arm around me, and it’s one of my favorite things to momentarily wake up and feel his warmth. But woe to me if I don’t find sleep before he starts revving his motor, because I will have no hope of finding it for the rest of the night. Sometimes he’ll turn over on his stomach, which he says is better for the snoring thing, but I’d like to report that no, it’s not. It muffles the sound just a tad, but it definitely does not eliminate it.
That is one magnificent yard he’s mowing.
So, as we remember the contribution to history that Martin Luther King Jr. made, I’d like to ask the powers that be, to please, please, solve this snoring problem, because I did not sign up for a John Deere tractor chime on my alarm.
And then, just before pushing Husband onto his belly, I remembered that I’d recorded last night’s one-man performance, because Husband didn’t believe he could possibly be snoring as badly as he is. I stuck a headphone in my ear and played the recording. I was surprised to find that there were two lawn mowers in our room last night. I have no idea who the other one was.
I was too afraid to investigate. Instead, I just rolled over and went back to sleep.
by Rachel Toalson | Messy Mondays
So much for a yell-free year. I screwed that up at about 10 a.m. New Year’s Day.
Husband and I keep it no secret that we own a megaphone and use it frequently, because the noise six boys can make on a daily basis is like a thousand frightened elephants crashing through Stonehenge. The house trembles with the sound of it. And in order for our hourly instructions to be heard over all this trumpeting and stomping and crashing, we make sure our house is well stocked with Energizer D batteries and the megaphone is within reach of parent hands (definitely not kid hands. They don’t need any help in the louder department.).
So, on the rare occasion that the megaphone is nowhere to be found, or the batteries have run out and there are no more, yelling is necessary. Yelling to be heard above the voices of boys when they’re playing together. Yelling to be heard over their whispers, even, when they’re telling secrets (My kids are the loudest whisperers I’ve ever heard in my life). Yelling to get their attention, yelling to save them from dying, yelling to announce that dinner’s ready, because they surely won’t want to miss a single meal.
I’m not talking about this kind of yelling. This kind of yelling is necessary, at least in my home.
No, I’m talking about the kind of yelling that grabs the fire of anger and flings it at walls and doors and, mostly, kid-faces.
See, we’d been doing a whole lot of it in the last months of 2015. We’re not angry people, but boys, six of them, can quite often be maddening people. And, honestly, we were a little worn out. And we’d sometimes had enough of “whatever” before the kids had had enough. And there are a thousand excuses.
But when we looked around at our children during their two weeks (and an extra day!!!) off school, we realized (yet again) that yelling is not the answer. It’s true that sometimes we didn’t get enough sleep, because we had too much on our mind or the baby woke with a snot tree growing from his nose or the 9-year-old burst through our bedroom door at 3 a.m. to say his tummy hurt five seconds before yesterday’s pork chops splattered my face. It’s true that money’s tight right now and we’re building careers from the ground up and we’re balancing household responsibilities and we’re raising SIX BOYS who don’t often understand what it means to “just be quiet, please. For one second.”
I didn’t want to be that parent, though.
So we went around our table, asking boys what in the world we could possibly do besides yelling (even the necessary kind). How could we get their attention? What would make them stop and listen? How could we better express our momentary anger? What could boys do that might help parents do that might help boys do (because this parent-child relationship is a symbiotic cycle.)? We made our plan. We put it in place.
And still we failed on Day One.
We can tear ourselves up about something like this. We can believe we’re not good parents, because we slipped up that one time today, or those two times or those five thousand times. We can feel like maybe our kid is going to be forever messed up because we can’t seem to make it through a nighttime routine, with its getting out of bed a thousand times, without yelling at them to “JUST STAY PUT FOR GOD’S SAKE.” But the truth is, we’re only ever going to be good enough parents. That means we’re not ever going to be perfect. There are people who will tell us we should be perfect. They’re wrong.
It’s all well and good to make it our goal not to yell. It’s great to have a plan and put that plan in place. It’s great to take steps along the journey to where we want to be.
“We will never, ever, not even on our best days, be perfect at this parenting thing. Because we’re human. Because we’re raising humans.
So we can stop making ourselves feel so bad for being imperfect people. We can stop beating ourselves up for slipping up.
You know what we get to do when we yell in front of our kids because they’re losing their minds with the LEGOs, tossing them all up into the air like monkeys throwing poo, and we don’t really want to take down our ponytail tonight and feel the fourteen tiny little dragon-claw pieces spill out onto a floor and disappear to places where they’ll be found in the dead of night on a half-asleep trip to the bathroom? We get to show our kids what it looks like to make amends. We get to show them what it sounds like to offer an apology for a mistake we made (because yelling is a mistake in my personal parenting playbook). We get to show them that we aren’t perfect, so they don’t have to be perfect, either.
[Tweet “We’ll make plenty of mistakes in our parenting. Good thing imperfection fosters resilience.”]
I feel better already.
by Rachel Toalson | Messy Mondays
It used to be “I love you.” My boys used to say those words all the time, every time they saw me. They would come and kiss me and lay their head on me and wrap their arms around me and whisper the words in my ear, and I would melt every time. Or maybe that’s just how my mind remembers those early years of parenthood.
Whatever. All I know is lately that used-most-often phrase that used to melt me has been replaced by another that melts me in a completely different way: I’m hungry.
The other day we were leaving for the annual family Christmas party a whole 4.5 hours away, which was already ratcheting up the anxiety, because who in their right mind likes to be shut up with six boys in a car for 4.5 hours (one way!)
When Husband and I woke that morning, we decided, in an effort to preserve the relative cleanliness of our kitchen for when we returned late that evening, to grab something at the store for breakfast. Sure, we could have gotten up at 5 a.m. on a Saturday to leave on time for a Christmas party 4.5 hours away so we could have fed them breakfast in our kitchen, but we also wanted to arrive alive. And, honestly, we’d stayed up too late the night before catching up on Game of Thrones. So it was in the interest of all that we slept an extra hour and a half.
Still, we were feeling a little testy, which is usually the hangover of not-enough-sleep. So after we’d explained to the boys that we were going to pick something up for breakfast at the store and strapped them all in and turned on The Red Badge of Courage, because we’re a nerdy family that enjoys audio books, and the firstborn called from the backseat, “Okay, I’m ready to eat now,” when we weren’t even out of our neighborhood yet, we looked at each other and tried hard to tamp down the crazy. Sometimes crazy can’t be tamped, unfortunately.
“Oh,” Husband said. “Oh, you’re ready to eat right now. Well, I’ll see if I can stop at this tree and get something.”
The 9-year-old looked out the window. “But I thought we were going to eat.” And then, when he realized we were still in the middle of nowhere, because it had been 48 seconds since we left the driveway, his panic infused an extra “But I’m hungry!” just to make sure we knew.
As if we’ve ever NOT fed them. But this doesn’t matter to children, because they don’t know how to look back on all that has come before. They only know RIGHT NOW, not the other three thousand three hundred seventeen days they’ve been alive, when we fed them three (mostly) balanced meals a day and even (bonus!) two snacks.
All this talking was distracting me from the story. “Should I turn the story off?” I said.
“No,” the 9-year-old said. “It’s just that I’m hungry.” This caused a maddening chorus of “Me too” all around.
“I’ll see if I can pull over this H-E-B truck up ahead,” Husband said. “Maybe they’ll give us a sandwich.”
I shot a warning look at Husband. “There are no stores around right this second,” I said. “We’re not going to be able to stop until we get to a store. But don’t worry. We are going to feed you.”
“But I’m hungry!” the twins whined from just behind our seats. Clearly my words were not clear enough.
“We’ll feed you as soon as we can,” I said. “As soon as we can. Ass soon as we can.” That’s not a typo. Sometimes, when the crazy comes calling, I take it out on words so I don’t have to word-wound my kids.
Husband looked at me and shook his head, smiling. The boys were quiet until we got to the store. And then, of course, their daddy was taking too long. He was never going to come out. They were never going to eat again. They were going to die of starvation, before he got back out of the store. I told them to count the cars in the parking lot, but that took all of three minutes, because no one else was out this early on a Saturday.
Finally, finally, finally, Husband came out and saved the day. I guess they were too busy stuffing their faces with blueberry bagel to say thank you.
My boys are always hungry. There are six of them, and they aren’t even teenagers, but they can inhale two dozen eggs in a single morning and punctuate the inhale with an “I’m still hungry.” They can eat five pounds of chicken and not bat an eye. Two of them sneaking into the freezer while I’m otherwise occupied cleaning up the last mess somebody “askidentally” made can eat a 12-ounce bag of frozen broccoli—frozen—and still go looking for more. The most opened door in my home is the refrigerator one. They’re always looking for something else to pass the eating time.
Well, there’s nothing left, because the schools are STILL ON CHRISTMAS BREAK. They have eaten me out of house and home. I can actually see what color my pantry shelves are now, because they’re empty. The only good thing about it is I gave the refrigerator its first scrub-cleaning the other day, because it was the barest it’s ever been. There’s nothing left in our freezer. I have no idea what we’re going to have for dinner tonight. Looks like popcorn, some chia seeds and…a handful of old edamame the boys won’t touch once it reaches “leftover” status.
Thank God school starts back up tomorrow. Oh, also, hey, teenage years: Stay far away, please.
by Rachel Toalson | Messy Mondays, Wing Chair Musings featured
I have to get something off my chest for a minute. And it’s kind of a big something. So I’m sorry for the rant. But we live in a messy WORLD, too, not just a messy world.
You know what would be nice? It would be nice to live in a world where men didn’t get pushed up on a pedestal for “helping” take care of their children. It would be nice to live in a world where men take care of their children and it’s not considered exceptionally exceptional.
I get it. We live in a world that is still finding its way into gender equality, that is still fighting for equal rights for women in the workplace, because, go figure, some women choose to have a career outside of babies and children and home. We are still figuring all this out. Traditionally, men were the breadwinners and women the caretakers, and that meant men didn’t do such things as “taking care of the kids.” So this is a new thing for us. But I feel like maybe we should be farther along than we are.
Husband and I are very happily married. But, during prime working hours—6 a.m. to 5:30 p.m.—we split our parenting duties as if we’re single parents. Weekends and evenings we hang out together as a family, of course, but on the week days it’s one parent on six. I take the morning shift, cooking breakfast, fixing lunches, making sure kids brush their teeth and dress in appropriate clothing and get their shoes, walking them all to school, walking the three who aren’t in school back home, keeping twins out of mud and toilets, entertaining the baby, reading them stories, putting them all down for naps. Husband takes over at 12:30, while they’re sleeping. He wrestles with them and sends them outside to play and invites their friends over to play so there are twelve or thirteen kids in the house (my anxiety just went through the roof) and makes them do their homework. He knows where all the kids’ school papers go and he signs all their reading logs and he marks their behavior folders and he makes sure their lunch stuff gets put in the sink and washed for tomorrow. He feeds the baby and changes diapers and makes sure they clean up their toys before dinner so the house is somewhat tidy by the time the day is through, and then he cooks dinner.
This is not exceptional. This is called being a parent.
People are shocked that we do it this way. “Must be nice to have a husband who helps like that,” they say.
Well, I wasn’t the only one who decided to have six kids. I was not the only participant, either. Damn right he’s gonna help so I can work, too.
See, what my husband understands (and I guess this is where he’d be exceptional—because it seems there aren’t many who understand it) is that I am a better mother because of my work. Not everyone is. That’s okay. I am. He gets that, and he’s happy to make sure I get to pursue a career.
But when he’s watching the kids so I can hole up in my room and write a handful of essays that may or may not change lives, it’s not babysitting. When I go out once a month with my book club friends to talk about a book for all of five minutes and then talk about our lives for another three hours, THAT’S NOT BABYSITTING. When he decides to bake some chicken in the oven or organize some out-of-control papers or take the baby for a few hours while I get a little extra sleep, he’s not just “helping.” He’s PARENTING.
Friends and babysitters and full-time nannies help. Dads parent.
I’m glad we could set that straight.
