by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
Just a few days ago, I got a precious letter from a reader, thanking me for one of my essays. She found it because she was looking, because she’d just lost two babies, twins, and she needed some comfort.
I have written many versions of this story, about the daughter who died before I could meet her, because writing is my way of working through something hard and unthinkable and tragic. Writing is my way of finding my feet again.
The day they wheeled me into the operating room, where they sucked a dead baby from my uterus in the same way they take live ones from the women who don’t want them, I wrote the pain onto my phone until the anesthesia knocked me out. And then I started writing again as soon as I woke, when the agony of an empty womb ran red and bled through my fog.
I wrote in all the days after. All the months after. All the years after.
And now, three years later, there is a woman searching for comfort, and she finds my words, and she feels less alone in her sorrow, even though we are thousands of miles apart.
We count it all joy.
We count it all joy that a day as sorrowful as that one could do this: Heal another heart, or at least some small piece of it.
///
The year I turned eleven a letter came in the mail for my mother. It told her secrets she had known for years but didn’t dare believe, because even in the humiliation, even in the shame, even in the disappointment, she still loved.
The letter told a story of a man and a woman and a child and a baby on the way. It told the truth of heartache and betrayal. It told the future of a single mother.
She didn’t feel brave enough to become what the letter said she must, but she did. She filed for divorce and bought a house with the last of her savings and got a second job so she could raise her kids on her own.
It wasn’t all neat and pretty, because she was lonely and heartsick and sad, and sometimes it was near impossible to see a way out of the mess. But she put one foot in front of the other and marched on, like a heroic woman warrior, because she had three kids who needed food and shelter and both a mother and a father—and she would play the father for a time.
There came a woman, years later, who visited her Sunday school class, who broke into tears when the leader asked for prayer requests, who could barely say what she needed to say about leaving a husband and two kids to feed and not really knowing how or if she would make it on her own.
And my remarkable mother knew the answer to this woman’s wondering.
Yes, she said. Yes, you can make it. And here is how.
The real miracle of it is that my mother, in comforting another woman who had lived the same story, found her way fully into forgiveness.
We count it all joy.
///
It’s not easy, this counting it all joy—because there is a baby who died, and there is a husband who is husband no longer, and how can this dark night turn to sun-bright day?
Maybe it’s hard to see from the suffering side of it, that our pain will one day, months or years or decades from now, be used to comfort another ripped-in-two heart. Maybe it doesn’t seem fair that we would have to endure death and divorce and abandonment and shame and disappointment and fear and pain and anxiety and heartbreak so that one day down the road we can walk someone else through their own.
Maybe we wouldn’t choose it for ourselves, not in a million years.
But all those maybes don’t change the truth: that our sorrow places, those chasms cut with knives that plunge deep, are the very places we can be filled with the deepest joy. Of course it’s hard, and of course it’s unwanted, and of course we would never dream of asking for the opportunity to suffer, but this is life and this is unfair and this is what happens when we choose to risk and love and live.
In the sorrow places we learn how to live with our hearts wide open. Our lives wide open. Our selves wide open.
We learn how to count it all joy.
///
When my third son was born, our pediatrician, an amazing, empathic man, breezed into the room and shook my husband’s hand, pulling him into an embrace, because he was, genuinely, so excited that another Toalson boy had slipped into the world. And then, when the congratulations were done, he took out his devices to look over the baby.
The air in the room shifted when he listened to my boy’s heart. He tried to act like it wasn’t a big deal, but I could see the alarm in his eyes.
“It sounds like there’s a murmur,” he said, and he looked at my husband, not me, because he knew, he knew what those words would do to me. “It’s probably just one of the valves that hasn’t closed up yet. Sometimes that happens. It’ll likely correct itself.” He put his devices away and then said, like an afterthought, “Come see me in another week so we can make sure.”
It didn’t correct itself.
He referred us to a specialist, and it was two weeks of dreaming about a boy whose lips turned blue while I watched and there was absolutely nothing I could do about it. Two weeks of agony, waiting for that appointment, waiting for someone to tell me if something was wrong with my baby boy’s heart.
I would put my older boys down for their nap, and I would hold my newborn while I should have been sleeping, because sleep was the least important thing in the world if I had to say goodbye. I would pull him into bed with me at night, because I was so afraid it would be the last night. I would cook dinner, holding him in my arms, my tears dropping into the chicken noodle soup.
And then, finally, finally, finally, came the appointment. I took my infant into the room while my husband stayed with our other two sons in the decked-out waiting room full of toys. This was a heart doctor for children with heart defects. The waiting room was amazingly entertaining.
I sat beside the doctor and her assistant, who was there to hold down the babies who decided they didn’t want to do an echocardiogram. She warned me I might have to help hold him down, but my boy slept right through it.
He slept through a doctor pointing out all the perfection, running her finger along the lines of arteries that pumped and pulled blood. He slept through a mama sobbing because of the incredible, miraculous beating of a tiny little heart, pulsing on a screen, lighting up with red and blue, the colors of life. He slept through a mama sobbing harder, if possible, when the doctor said, “Perfectly healthy. Nothing to worry about here.”
“I’m sorry,” I kept saying. “I’m sorry. It’s just…”
I couldn’t even find the words for something so big and yet so small, but the doctor understood. Of course she did. She sees it all the time, these tiny veins and tiny organs and tiny perfection pieces keeping a baby alive. She patted me on the arm and sent me out the door with the words, “Go enjoy your healthy baby boy.”
And I did.
A year later, a friend’s daughter was born with what doctors suspected was a murmur. I knew what it was like. I knew the agony of waiting and the torture of anxiety and the way worry can take a whole birthing day and wring the life right out of it.
So I shared my story. I let her know she was not alone in her fear, that someone else had walked her shoes, that she was not forgotten or unseen but known in her suffering.
We count it all joy.
///
There is a catch here, too. Of course there is.
We can suffer in silence. We can crawl into our shells and pretend life is grand and we have not a care in the world, and we can show them that worry and anxiety and suffering do not touch us.
We can grieve secretly, alone, in our closed-off places.
It’s more comfortable there, because our shells are thick and dark and hidden, and “they” don’t have to know that we questioned the purpose of life when our baby died, and “they” don’t have to know that we worried we would not make it as a single mom of three kids, and “they” don’t have to know that we doubted the very existence of God in the moments we thought our boy could die.
Or we can set those secrets free. We can let our sorrow loose to light up the world, transform it completely. The beautiful piece of sorrow is that the darker it looks on this side of it, the brighter it turns on the got-through-it side.
How do we let loose our sorrow?
We share. We tell our stories. We carry on.
We’re not the first or the last to walk through this specific sorrow space, but it is only in our sharing that we see clearly that we are never alone. That we can bear each other’s burdens. That we can heal, together.
That we can count it all joy.
This is an excerpt from We Count it All Joy, a book of essays. For more of Rachel’s writings, visit her Reader Library page, where you can get a couple of books for free.
(Photo by Maria Shanina on Unsplash)
by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
It is difficult being a strong woman.
To have our opinions, which are not always the “right and proper” opinions, to assert these opinions, to be dismissed for them; to be passionate about the things we are passionate about; to step out into the wilderness that holds no shred of similarity to the popular way of things embraced by the tribe—it is not without its dangers.
There are days my insides have burned liquid from the passion of my purpose, and there are days my insides have frozen solid because I don’t know if I should say what needs to be said—I have watched too many strong women get knocked to their knees, and I don’t know if I have what it takes to get back on my feet when the same comes for me.
Strong women brave the consequences of their strength. There is never a shortage of critics and judgment and misunderstanding leveled at strong women, because women, historically, have been shoved into neat and pretty—convenient—boxes. Stay here, stay silent, stay small.
The problem is that I have never liked boxes, they way they press in on all sides and make it hard to breathe, the way they cut off the light with a darkness that feels inescapable, the way they smell of dust and fear and the death of what had lived. So though I know what a strong will and heart and mind can do to a woman’s reputation, I choose to step out of the box, tape it up, and toss it back at the ones who would like me to remain curled up inside it, silent and small.
I will not be silent. I will not be small.
(Photo by Ryan Moreno on Unsplash)
by Rachel Toalson | Crash Test Parents, Wing Chair Musings featured
I don’t know if I’ve ever faced a harder challenge in my parenting years than raising twins.
Maybe it’s because our twins came near the end of the line of boys and they see all their older brothers do, and they expect that life will be exactly like that for them.
Except there are two of them.
Oh, you want to drink out of a big-boy cup because your older brother did it when he was 2? I’m sorry. There are two of you. You want to sit free at the table instead of strapped into your chairs because all your brothers did it when they were almost 3? I’m sorry. There are two of you. What? You want me to leave the baby gate on your door open because you haven’t yet figured out how to climb over it (it’s coming)? I’m sorry. In case you haven’t noticed, THERE ARE TWO OF YOU.
Our twins are identical, two sides of the same egg. Nature’s gift, doctors say. One is left-handed, one is right-handed. They complete each other.
That’s part of the problem. What one doesn’t think of, the other does. What one is afraid to do, the other will try. It’s like having four toddler wrecking balls walking around the house, scheming about what they can destroy next. I imagine their conversations go a little something like this:
Twin 1: Hey. Hey, brother. Mama’s not watching. Remember how she told us not to touch this computer? She’ll never know if we do. Where is she?
Twin 2: She’s in the bathroom. Remember what we did last time she was in the bathroom?
Twin 1: Oh, man. That was fun. But back to this computer. She’ll never know. I just can’t figure out how to open it.
Twin 2: Like this. But how do you turn it on?
Twin 1: Easy. I’ve seen Daddy press this button right here.
Twin 2: There it is.
[Mama comes back into the room with the baby she just changed.]
Twin 1: Close it, close it, close it!
Twin 2: Walk away. Not too fast, not too slow. Just enough to look like we weren’t doing anything. And make sure you wear the wide eyes. She thinks they’re cute.
I love my twins. Of course I do. It’s just that they were completely unexpected.
If I could have read a primer two years ago, this is what it might have said: Every parent of twins needs…
1. An extra dose of patience.
You will need this for many things. You will need it for the stranger at the store who asks to see your amazing bundles of joy and, after looking at their angelic sleeping faces, declares she “always wanted twins” and you want to say, “Oh, really? Then take mine,” because one was up screaming at 3 a.m. and as soon as you got him calmed down two hours later the other one woke up screaming, and as soon as you got that one calmed down an hour later all the other boys were up asking for breakfast. Which woke up the twins, who were also hungry. Again.
You will need this extra dose of patience for when they learn to talk and there are so.many.words and so.many.whys and so many demands for everything under the sun. You will need it for the potty training and the big-boy-bed transitions and the constant fighting from dawn until dusk.
You will need it for the times you were helping one out of his pajamas and into his day clothes and you return back downstairs to find all the jackets removed from your poetry books and spread across the living room floor like a special carpet for toddler feet, for the six thousandth time (You should probably just put those books away, Mama. Far, far away.).
2. Good decision-making skills.
These will come into play those times they both wake up at 3 a.m. because they’re hungry. Which one do you feed first? (Answer: You’ll figure out a way to feed both.)
You’ll need these skills when one twin is in the downstairs bathroom playing with a plunger in a potty you specifically remember your older boy didn’t flush five minutes ago when he stunk it up and the other is in his bathroom upstairs finger painting the mirror with a whole tube of eco-friendly toothpaste. Which do you get first? (Answer: The toilet one. Toothpaste is much easier to clean than the mess an overzealous plunger in a pile of poo can make.)
You’ll need them when the one who’s known for wandering does exactly that, moves from his nap time place while you take a minute or five for a shower, because it’s been four days since the last one, and you walk out to find him playing with the computer he’s been told 50 billion times to leave alone and, in his panic to close it, he deletes the 1,500 words you wrote this morning before kids got up. What do you do? (Answer: Cry.)
3. A rigorous workout regimen.
When one is running down the street because someone forgot to lock the deadbolt he can’t reach and another is going out back without shoes in 26-degree rain, you’ll want to be in tip-top shape for that. I recommend interval training. That way when they stop and change directions, you’ll be ready. You’ve done this a thousand times. Ski jumps. Football runs. All-out sprints.
When they slip, unnoticed (because they’re like ninjas), into the playroom while you’re wiping down the table after a ridiculously messy lunch, and both of them come out with their scooters, you’ll want to be able to wrestle those “cooters” from screaming, flailing bodies without hurting anyone.
And when one collapses in the middle of the park because it’s time to go and he’s not ready yet and the other thinks that just might work, you’ll need strong arms to carry thirty-two pounds of kicking and screaming twins back to the car, one tucked under each armpit.
4. Containment measures.
This would be things like strollers until they’re 3 and booster seats until they’re 4 and a baby gate on their door until they’re…15. Well, maybe 13.
It also means leashes at the city zoo on a packed day, even though you said you’d never use them and you can feel the disapproval of other people and you want to say, “Come talk to me when you have 2-year-old twins. These things have saved their lives 17 billion times, and that was before we even got out of the parking lot.”
Containment saves lives. And sanity.
Twins are great. And hard. And maddening. And great. And so hard.
They can disassemble an 8-year-old’s room of LEGO Star Wars ships in 3.1 seconds. They can disassemble a heart with one identical smile and a valiant try at saying “Uptown funk you up” that sounds like it should have come with a bleep.
There’s just nothing like them in the world. You’ll be so glad you get to be their mama.
Especially after they fall asleep.
This is an excerpt from Parenthood: Has Anyone Seen My Sanity?, the first book in the Crash Test Parents humor series. To get access to some all-new, never-before-published humor essays in two hilarious Crash Test Parents guides, visit the Crash Test Parents Reader Library page.
(Photo by Helen Montoya Photography.)
by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
All day long I’ve been checking comments and shaking my head and feeling distracted by this war happening online, on my space, so I didn’t get much work done.
Many of the comments are kind, but too many of them are not. So I sit down to my computer and get ready to fire back my responses. Something about how we should take care with our words and assumptions and especially strangers’ hearts.
My husband puts his hand on my arm. “It’s not worth it,” he says. “You can’t argue with people like that. You just have to ignore them.”
I scan the tirade one more time, and every single one of them pouring poison online holds up a “freedom of speech” card, claiming their right to share their opinion. And yes, it’s true. We do have the right to our own opinion. But just because we have the right to free speech and the freedom of expression, does that mean we should use it to air everything we think?
This is a harder question to answer.
///
When I was eleven years old, I stood outside the little Baptist church I attended on Wednesday nights and watched a friend play basketball with some of his older buddies.
Another girl watched, too. She had a crush on my friend, but he didn’t ever pay any attention to her, mostly because he had a crush on me. I didn’t see him as anything more than a friend, so I kept trying to bring them together. But my efforts didn’t work.
And there came a day when the youth leader called us all inside and the boys went one way and the girls went another, and my friend hugged me and said he was leaving early and wouldn’t see me again until school the next morning.
The girl was watching. The boys disappeared, and she turned to me and said, “You have a really pointy nose.” Then she walked away.
Maybe it wouldn’t have affected me as much if my dad hadn’t just left my family for another one. Maybe I wouldn’t have been as bothered if I hadn’t already been uncomfortable in my skin. Maybe I could have let it go if I hadn’t already been walking my way toward eating disorders and wishing I were different.
I can’t say for sure, because that wasn’t my reality then.
I tried to pretend her words hadn’t hurt me as much as they did. I tried to keep my fingers from tracing the shape of my nose. I tried to walk past the girls’ bathroom without ducking inside.
But I did go inside, and I stood looking at my nose in the mirror for five whole minutes, turning to examine it from every angle.
Yeah, I thought. Yeah, I see what she means. It is pointy.
If she thought it was pointy, how many other people did, too?
///
Even today, in my dark days, when I find myself unhappy with my appearance, her voice joins the others in their raucous chorus.
What does it matter? you might say. What does it matter what one little girl thought? What does it matter what other people think? You shouldn’t be so weak to care. You shouldn’t be so insecure about yourself that the words of another person can hurt you.
The problem is that we are all, at the heart of us, wired for connectivity. What exercising our freedom of speech and our right to our own opinions through personal attacks on other people does is it disconnects us from the human experience of community. It casts outside the circle the ones being attacked.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948. It was the first global expression of the basic human rights all people could claim. Freedom of speech was added as Article 19 in 1949. Article 19 said that “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.”
This idea of free speech and expression had been developing since the advent of the printing press. Traditionally, governments had limited printing opportunities to only those materials that the government agreed with. Because of this limitation, political ideas could not be freely debated.
Free speech and the free expression of ideas was originally a political, intellectual right, not a personal one meant to justify airing our opinion about everything.
Governments still restrict freedom of speech and expression based on the harm principle, which says that one’s freedom cannot be used to harm another. Some of those restrictions include libel, slander, hate speech, fighting words, and oppression. There are many others.
Article 19 also states that the freedom of speech and expression carries “special duties and responsibilities…for respect of the rights or reputation of others.”
This is the part we seem to have forgotten.
///
In college I worked as the editor-in-chief of the college newspaper. There were a few rotating cartoonists who would publish editorial cartoons with us.
One night a cartoonist turned in his cartoon, and I immediately had a bad feeling about it. In the cartoon, a professor stood at the front of the class. A bubble above him said, “Blah, blah, blah.” The students around him all had hostile expressions on their faces. Some were sleeping. A few were throwing things at him. One, I seem to remember, had a gun, though I’m not entirely sure my memory hasn’t fabricated this detail, perhaps made the cartoon worse than it really was because of what happened later.
I called the cartoonist to see if he had anything else he could send me.
“Why?” he said.
Because this one didn’t seem very respectful, I said.
“It’s not a real teacher,” he said. “It’s just a joke. It’s a humorous opinion.”
He said he had nothing else to give me, and I was two hours from deadline with nothing else to fill the space.
So I let it run.
The next afternoon, when I got to my office, my voice mailbox was full. My email was inundated. People were outraged by the cartoon. It shouldn’t have run.
It seemed that everyone but me knew who the professor was, because even though the name had been changed in the cartoon, the picture, they said, was a dead giveaway.
I had to not only submit a formal apology for letting something so insensitive print in the paper for which I was responsible, but I also had to fire a really good cartoonist who’d probably just been annoyed at a teacher for some reason or another and decided to lash out in the best way he knew how.
Just because we have freedom doesn’t mean we should use it.
///
With this freedom comes great responsibility.
We are responsible for our words and whether they build up or tear down. We are responsible for the hearts of one another.
In this day of computer communication, with our ever-increasing ability to comment anonymously all over the Internet, we have gotten really good at firing off responses, without really thinking about how, at the other end of our words, there is a real, breathing person.
We can’t see their face. We don’t know much about their lives. We assume the parts that are missing.
It’s easy to forget our responsibility.
I don’t have a problem with a friendly exchange of ideas, with a person who can respectfully disagree with what I have to say, someone who makes a good effort to convince me of his or her viewpoint without feeling the need to make it personal. But when someone starts attacking me or the members of my family, saying destructive, hurtful, dishonoring things they have no way of knowing for sure, that’s when they have lost their ability and their right to communicate with me.
What freedom of speech really means is expressing our opinions or viewpoints in a way that does not damage other people or people groups. It means carefully weighing our words and running them through a filter—is it kind? Is it true? Is it necessary?—and only speaking when our words pass the test. It means seeking harmony and peace even in disagreement.
We cannot claim our right if we do not exercise our responsibility.
Freedom of speech has the ability to broaden our minds in astounding ways, introducing us to new ideas and uncomfortable viewpoints and enriching humanity’s full experience of life.
We just have to know how to use it.
This is an excerpt from We Count it All Joy, a book of essays. For more of Rachel’s writings, visit her Reader Library page, where you can get a couple of books for free.
(Photo by Gerson Repreza on Unsplash)
by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
A few months ago, my boys and I finished reading Roald Dahl’s Matilda. I had never read it before, so I was just as excited to reach that magical hour of stories as my children were, to see what Matilda would do next.
One of my boys’ favorite parts of the book was when Matilda slipped a newt into her principal’s drink—to get her back for being unkind to children all the time.
A newt is a semi-aquatic amphibian—it can live on land and in water. It adjusts to its surroundings and becomes what it needs to become in order to belong. The newt provided a stark contrast to Matilda, who did not blend in to her surroundings at all but was something of a rebel.
After we finished the book, I thought for a long time about this concept of becoming who we feel we need to become in order to fit in. I thought about the climate of the world and how there are lines everywhere, and if you’re not on one side or another, you’ll get torn apart—and also, if you’re on one side rather than another, you’ll get torn apart, too. We are unsafe everywhere, it seems.
Human nature begs to belong. It is wired into our brains and hearts. But it appears there is nowhere to belong in a place so polarized and disjointed.
My husband and I recently read Braving the Wilderness, by Brené Brown. One of the main themes of the book was the importance of belonging to ourselves.
Here’s what Brown says about it:
“Belonging to ourselves means being called to stand alone—to brave the wilderness of uncertainty, vulnerability, and criticism…
“Belonging so fully to yourself that you’re willing to stand alone is a wilderness—an untamed, unpredictable place of solitude and searching…
“True belonging is the spiritual practice of believing in and belonging to yourself so deeply that you can share your most authentic self with the world and find sacredness in both being a part of something and standing alone in the wilderness. True belonging doesn’t require you to change who you are; it requires you to be who you are.”
Sometimes belonging to ourselves means we’ll have to go out into the wilderness where it feels like we’re all alone; everyone else has jumped on a bandwagon of some kind or another. Sometimes it means we’ll have to step into the role of rebel and speak our mind, knowing that what we have to say won’t be popular. Sometimes belonging to ourselves demands more than we can give.
I often step into this wilderness—not perfectly. I look more like a colt who has just been born, just found her legs, just wobbled to her feet and begun to run because the only alternative is falling. It is not without fear that I walk into the wilderness—but something compels me. I must be who I am, which means I must do what must be done, which means I must brave the judgment, the criticism, the sometimes ugly face of disgust and vehement disagreement.
I must.
Many of my fiction stories examine people on the margins. I write about homeless children, about kids who grow up poor, about bullies and the bullied, about the mentally ill and vulnerable. I write about them, because their stories, like all our stories, deserve to be told. It is not always popular or easy. But it is what I must do, to be my authentic self.
It is not without great fear that I step off the path of least resistance. But courage is not the absence of fear. It is living with fear, embracing that fear, carrying it with you as you put one foot in front of the other.
May you be brave, bold, and steadfast in your journey to belong to yourself.
(Photo by Irina Kostenich on Unsplash)
by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
If you ever want to know how much you don’t know, just spend about a minute with a kid.
Do you think there were rattlesnakes in the water?
No. Water moccasins, maybe.
Are they poisonous?
Yes.
Do they just bite you if you’re in the water, or do they have to have a reason?
I think if you disturb the nest they’ll bite you [this information comes from an episode of “Lonesome Dove” that I remember my mother watching when I was a child. I was slightly traumatized by it.]
Where do they nest—in the shallow water or the deep end?
I don’t know.
How many nest together?
I don’t know.
Do they have families?
I don’t know.
Can you describe them to me?
How long does it take them to have babies?
How many babies do they have?
Do they lay eggs?
Are the eggs waterproof?
Turns out, I don’t know very much at all.
