by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
Tonight, over dinner, I had to talk to my boys about cancer.
It’s been pressing on my mind all day—the text from my sister-in-law. A week ago my brother, who never goes to doctors, went to a doctor. He woke up with a black veil over his left eye. He was nauseated to the point of disability. When he tried to walk, the world tilted, spun, and lost its sense of order.
They found a tumor.
It’s cancer.
Brain cancer.
In less than a week he’ll have brain surgery and begin chemotherapy. Everything is uncertain.
He could die, my 8-year-old said. Yes. He could.
He’ll be sick, won’t he, my 7-year-old said. Yes. He will.
Will it damage his brain? my 10-year-old asked. Maybe. We hope not.
What if they don’t get it all?
Will it spread?
Will it happen to me?
So many of their questions I could not answer. It’s cancer. It’s unpredictable. It has no pattern, no measurable origin, no certain outcome.
Our dinner ended very quietly, like a reverent prayer. And fifteen minutes later, when they had all done their after-dinner chores without a single complaint, they were blissfully screeching on the trampoline out back.
I closed my eyes and listened to how predictably life goes on.
(Photo by Mario Calvo on Unsplash)
by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
I walk into his bedroom, checking on him for the seventh time, interrupting my writing to do it, which means I’m already annoyed. Put out. A touch angry.
Maybe I waited too long to come in here, but there he is, sitting in the middle of a pile of clothes and their hangers. I feel the rage in my shoulders; haven’t I told him a thousand times to stay out of closets and drawers and his brothers’ beds?
My heart sinks to my toes, and I shake my head. His eyes stare wide, because he knows, he knows he’s in trouble for this, and then I see the worst of it: a wet spot on the pillow that no longer has a case because he stripped it off before he did his deed.
Did you pee on your pillow? I say.
Yeah, he says, and he doesn’t even look the least bit remorseful, just grins up at me like this is something to be proud of, this peeing on a pillow he’ll sleep on soon. It’s all I can do to pick him up and take him to the potty instead of throwing all those books across the room in a rage, because it’s every single day, every single day that I’m battling twins. It’s relentless and exhausting and, sometimes, way too much.
The tears run hot and wild on the way back from the potty. I put him in his playpen without a word and close the door, because I don’t even want to know what happens next. All the way back to my room I can feel the dam breaking, the one that’s been piling for too long, the one that ends in I don’t want to be the mother of twins anymore.
I never asked for twins, and yet, there they are, in the next room, tearing everything apart.
Especially me.
///
It was three months after losing a baby that we got pregnant again.
The baby-losing had left a hole so wide and deep it felt like it could only be filled with a new baby. So when I took that pregnancy test and it said yes, my heart healed the tiniest little bit.
We waited weeks to even go to the doctor, because the last baby had died at nine weeks and we didn’t know it until the twelfth week, and I wanted to make sure this one lived before I got my hopes up. Except my hopes flew high the minute I saw a positive test. Tentative and yet solid.
My husband came with me for the first appointment, because I could barely lift my head I was so sick—but mostly because the last appointment, when the screen showed a baby had died, I sat on an examination table alone, and he did not want me to do it again, if this one was not alive. My doctor’s nurse practitioner brought that familiar, bulky machine into the bright-white room, and it only took a second to see the two where there had ever been only one. We were shocked and excited and terrified, all sorts of emotions fighting their way to the middle of our hearts.
We had no idea what we were in for.
///
No one does, really, when they’re having a baby. Babies are unpredictable beings. But this was different, because there were two. We really had no idea.
No one told us how hard it would be. No one told us there would be days we wished we could give one away, and we knew which one it would be. No one told us there would be whole months where we questioned our ability to keep on keeping on, where someone’s You’re such great parents. I don’t know how you do it, would make us burst into tears, because we knew we weren’t “doing it.” No one told us we’d live with those daily thoughts that sounded a lot like They’re so cute, I’m so lucky I get to have twins, What’s cooler than this? and also like I give up and someone please take one of them and I wish I hadn’t had them.
We kept telling ourselves it would get easier. We believed it, too. After that foggy first year we hardly remember anymore, we told ourselves it would be easier because they would be older and could feed themselves. Except then they were mobile and there were two babies to keep safe and out of things and entertained so they didn’t tear the whole house down around us.
There were two drinks to pour and two drinks to keep on trays so they weren’t knocked to the floor where they’d make two big puddles of milk we’d have to clean up. There were four hands throwing food on the floor. There were two babies to change and two babies breaking into bathrooms to unravel whole rolls of expensive eco-friendly toilet paper into a now-stopped-up toilet and two babies turning on water faucets so they run for an hour before we even noticed. There were two babies tearing out the pages of books and two babies climbing out of cribs and two babies taking off diapers to play with poop. There were two babies getting into closets and drawers and pulling the stuffing out of stuffed animals and making holes in walls bigger and locking themselves in bathrooms.
Now there’s potty training and twice the accidents and twice the frustration and twice the I-just-peed-on-the-floor-because-I-felt-like-it-even-though-I-know-betters, and some days I honestly don’t want to do it anymore.
It doesn’t get easier the older they get. I know this now. There will always be two of them going through the same developmental stage, and, my God, I did not ask for this.
///
That first night home from the hospital, where they’d spent twenty days in neonatal intensive care for being born six weeks early, we tried assigning a twin to each of us, my husband and me. But then they both woke up at the same time for a feeding, and neither of us got sleep enough to take care of the three other boys who needed us, too.
The next night we parceled out shifts, with one parent taking the 11:30 p.m. and midnight feedings and the other taking the 2:30 and 3 a.m. feedings, and the first parent taking the 5:30 and 6 a.m. feedings. Except we’d start feeding one, and the other would wake up and scream to be fed. They were slow eaters, and the first one would take forty-five minutes to finish three ounces, and the second one would scream for forty-five minutes until he got his food, and neither of us slept, again. Every time I listened to those babies crying, my heart started crying, too, because it was already too too much.
We had tried to avoid it, because I wanted to hold my babies, but we finally, for the sake of sanity, caved to feeding them both at the same time in a swing and spent the rest of that year sticking bottles into mouths and counting down to when feeding time would be over, because we were overwhelmed and exhausted.
And then hard never left.
It didn’t take us long to know and understand that nothing about twins would ever, ever be easy.
///
Almost every time we take our twins out in public, at least one person will ask if they’re twins, even though they look exactly alike. Yes, we’ll say, they’re twins, and it never fails what they’ll say next:
So cute, they say. I always wanted twins.
My husband and I will look at each other.
No. You didn’t, our eyes say to each other. You want the idea of twins, but you don’t want twins. Trust us. But we smile politely and say, yeah, twins are really fun, because they are really fun sometimes, and then other times they’re maddening and crazy and way too much to manage.
A whole lot of the time they are crazy-makers.
Twins are the hardest challenge I have ever faced in parenting, and I would never wish them upon anyone. It sounds terrible all packaged like that, but it’s true.
People also like to tell me all the time that they had kids who were really close together—almost like twins. I have done that, too, with Boy 2 only fourteen months older than Boy 3, but it is not the same as twins. Not the same at all.
My twins beat me and break me and bust me all up inside, and sometimes I don’t even know how to handle all the hard they bring to a life. Sometimes I don’t even want to.
///
Last spring my brother and sister-in-law announced that they were pregnant with twins. I felt excited for them, of course, because they’d waited so long to have a baby, just one. But I also felt afraid, because I know how tough twins are, how tempers can fly and anger can follow one in and out of rooms for days on end, without explanation.
I knew that there are days when you feel strung so tight you know you can’t take one more thing because of the ringer your twins wrapped you around this morning, and then you’ll open a door to walls and a floor and two babies, who were supposed to be sleeping all this time, covered in poop. And there are days when you think it might be getting easier, and then a twin climbs over the gate barring the upstairs and pulls half the books in the library down before you can get to him, and you’re so busy picking up all those books you forget there’s another unsupervised one downstairs, and before you can make it back down, he’s pulled out the entire economy package of four hundred Band Aids and stuck them all to the bathroom floor. And there are days when one will run out the back door without shoes and you’re trying to chase him to get those shoes on and the other one will see his chance and run out the front door someone forgot to barricade-lock, and he’s halfway down the street before you even notice he’s gone.
There are days when, for a split second, you wonder if you should just let him go.
I couldn’t very well tell them all this, though, so I voiced my congratulations and then encouraged them to find help. I took pictures of poop walls and emptied-onto-the-floor closets so we could laugh about all those twinanigans that happen every other minute of a day and race a parent toward breakdown.
The day before Father’s Day, my sister-in-law went into labor twenty weeks early, and doctors couldn’t stop it, and she delivered them, two boys, and held them and watched them claw for breath they could not find because they had only the tiniest beginnings of lungs. And then she watched them die.
That night, I hugged my two babies a little tighter.
///
I know what a blessing every child is. I do.
I know what it’s like to lose a baby. I have.
I know how it feels to watch a child fall so sick he might die. He almost did.
I know what it’s like. I know.
I know the incredible gift of five healthy boys, the gift of another on the way, the gift of a home filled with wild, untamable boys. And I remember it all when they’re finally asleep and I can breathe again.
It’s just that during those waking moments, when a twin is pulling everything in sight off a counter because I haven’t had time to put away what his brothers stacked there, and another twin has found the pencil his older brother used for homework and is now marking all over the pages of a library book, I forget. There is not enough of me, and I forget.
I forget that one twin’s name means “swift and honorable,” how one day he will be strong and solid and mighty, how he is all of that now, bundled in a sometimes-unmanageable 2-year-old boy. I forget that the other twin’s name means “God remembers,” because he was a gift in the losing, two blessings that took away the one curse, how he shows love’s nature in his very being. He is all of this now, bundled in a sometimes-difficult 2-year-old boy. And even though mothering twins may be the hardest parenting challenge I’ve ever been given to date, I know, too, that they are tearing me apart every single minute of every single day.
They are the ones who pull those words from my lips: I just can’t do this life anymore.
This is a good place to be, I think—because it’s only when we can’t do this life anymore that we give an inch more to Another who can do it much better for us. I can’t do it is another door into surrender.
I can choose to raise these twins all on my own power and patience, and I will fail every time. Or I can choose to raise them on the power and patience of Another. I can drink from the well that will never run dry, and I will see victory every time.
I know what happens when I choose my own, limited power and patience. I think about how nice it would be to give one away, or I wish I hadn’t had them, or I see in a clouded way that covers all the sunshine they’ve brought into a mama life. Double laughter. Double joy. Double love, not just double trouble.
Clear eyes can see it better than clouded ones. So this day, I choose to see.
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 This is Now Photography.)
by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
I have a quote attached to my cork board right above my desk, and it reads:
“My wish for you is that you continue. Continue to be who you are, to astonish a mean world with your acts of kindness.”
—Maya Angelou
During my writing sessions, I often find my eyes wandering to this quote. It reminds me to write my truth. When I read an unfavorable review, this quote reminds me to keep on creating. When I receive an ugly email or a vicious note, this quote reminds me to continue being exactly who I am. When I feel alone, this quote bolsters me in my wilderness.
I had the privilege of hearing Maya Angelou speak when I was in college. In fact, I had the privilege of covering her speech for the student newspaper, which means I got to shake her hand and look in her eyes and be changed by this brief meeting. It was one of my favorite moments in life, because Angelou has always been a hero of mine. I’m sure she didn’t remember a 19-year-old girl after leaving the Texas State University campus, but I will remember that meeting for the rest of my life.
She was a pillar of beauty, strength, grace, forgiveness. She exuded love by her very being.
To be like her. To be courageous enough to be who I am, to astonish a mean world with acts of kindness. To simply continue.
How do we do this?
Someone much more skilled in the interview process than I was at 19 can help out here. Bill Moyers, an American journalist, once asked Angelou some vital questions:
Moyers: Do you belong anywhere?
Angelou: I haven’t yet.
Moyers: Do you belong to anyone?
Angelou: More and more. I mean, I belong to myself. I’m very proud of that. I am very concerned about how I look at Maya. I like Maya very much. I like the humor and courage very much. And when I find myself acting in a way that isn’t…that doesn’t please me—then I have to deal with that.
This is it. This is what I saw as an inexperienced 19-year-old, meeting Maya Angelou for the first time. This is what I saw all over her written works, which I have read and re-read over the course of my life. She belonged to herself. The whole world could come against her—and, in fact, it tried many times—and she would still stand on her two feet and say, “I am still here, continuing.”
Every day, when I drop my sons off at school, I hug them tightly and say, “Have a wonderful day. Remember who you are. Strong, kind, courageous, and mostly my son.” This is their mission: to continue being who they are.
Some things in this world don’t make the least bit of sense. People rail against the choices we make in our lives. Criticism knocks our knees out from under us. Circumstances beat us down. Life is hard. In a perfect life, cancer doesn’t come out of the blue and steal the seemingly endless future of someone you love. Hate mail doesn’t sail through the cyber waves. There is no violence.
But this is not a perfect world. Sometimes it is incredibly difficult to continue—continue loving, continue spreading kindness, continue being who we are.
But my wish, like Angelou’s, is for you to continue. Continue to be who you are, to shock—no, astonish—the world with your acts of kindness and mercy and grace. With your love.
This is how you will belong to yourself.
(Photo by John Baker on Unsplash)
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 Xan Griffin on Unsplash)
by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
I heard it first in a call from the school psychologist, summoned to get to the bottom of an eight-year-old’s acting-out behavior in the classroom two months ago (he was only seven years old when this journey began). But I heard it again in a face-to-face debrief meeting with his current teacher and the school principal and the psychologist, and it’s the weight of those ugly words, “I’m not as happy as I used to be” and “Nobody ever listens to me” and “I never seem to do the right thing,” collected during an interview between my son and the psychologist, that burn my eyes and the back of my nose.
I try to blink the tears away before all those other calm-and-composed women notice, but I can’t do it, because it’s my boy, eight years old, and this was not supposed to happen.
Depression was not supposed to happen.
One of the women runs off to get tissues, and I wonder if it’s bad enough to make my eco-friendly makeup run, because it’s easier to worry about the way a face looks than about the way depression looks.
These hormones, I say, with a little laugh.
And even though I’m eight months pregnant, it’s not the hormones, not really. It’s a little boy’s words. No mama expects depression in the boy she has loved and adored and cared for and watched and played games with and read to and hugged and kissed, every chance she gets, for eight years and counting.
And yet, it is here.
///
Once upon a time in this mama’s child life, there was a boy who exploded with anger, who never wanted anyone to see him cry, even though he was a sensitive boy. This boy worked hard, from a young age, to break free from the grip of darkness.
But there were reasons: there was a dad missing from those most formative years; how does a boy learn to be a man when there is no father to show him? There was a missed-one who called sporadically, making promises that he hardly ever kept; the boy believed them all, because he loved the one who had left, and every time a promise stood broken, the boy crawled deeper into himself, and darkness gained another foothold. There was a mom forced to work multiple jobs just to make ends meet. There were three moves in three years, three starting-overs, three make-new-friends challenges, three learn-how-to-survive-now changes.
One day, when the boy was eleven, he complained of burning pain in his stomach, and his mama took him to the hospital, and doctors found ulcers eating up the belly of a child. His mama called in the troops, a counselor and his teachers at school and the family he loved.
She did her part.
But depression is a tough disease to beat.
///
I know this. I am terrified of it.
I saw the way depression could twist a temper and send it flying out of control. I saw the way it could whisper irrational solutions into the heart of another child. I saw the way it could send a body to bed for days on end. Sometimes forever.
And now, here is my boy, facing this monster.
He comes from a different background than the boy of my youth, but there are still so many pieces in the puzzle of anger turned inward. There is his intelligence, high above his grade level so he feels unchallenged and different and, much of the time, alone. There is his introversion in a house of four, going on five, brothers, where he is hard-pressed to get a word in edgewise, where he can hardly ever find a place of his own. There is his intuition and his sensitivity and his boredom in a traditional classroom and his dreams and his expectations and his behavior and his big emotions and his inability to do anything acceptable, at least from his own perspective. It’s no wonder we are here.
It’s no wonder he has fallen into this pit.
I am scared to death that he will not be able to find his way back out.
///
One day, that once-upon-a-time boy was riding in the backseat on the way to a counselor’s appointment. He was eleven years old, and he already felt crazy, misunderstood, damaged, and this trip proved what he had known all along. There was something wrong with him, something no one could fix.
What if no one could fix it?
He knew the reason he was here: he’d let it slip that he was going to jump off a bridge, and a friend had told. He didn’t know if he’d ever feel like not jumping off a bridge.
And maybe he wouldn’t have really done it when it came down to it and he peered from the top of a bridge and thought about how much it would hurt to fly, but it didn’t matter, at least not that day. Because a mama had seen the look in his eyes, and she recognized it, and she made sure to help him in all the ways she could. Counseling. Time. Love.
///
It was hard to see it, what my son’s psychologist found. My boy didn’t stay in bed for days on end, and he didn’t lose any of his boy-energy. He didn’t cry endlessly or isolate himself or lose all interest in life. He just had a short fuse, and he exploded in anger and acted impulsively when anger got the best of him.
There were days when he would open wide and let a mama and daddy see straight to his soul, where he wrestled with thoughts like No one really likes me and I don’t belong in this family and I should never have been born. There were days when he sat happily with his brothers playing a game of chess or Battleship or Jenga, and he would crack jokes and smile widely and laugh until his stomach hurt. And then there were other days when he clamped tight, and he sat listening to an audio book for hours on end and immersed himself in creating detailed Twister Man comics and bent over his desk putting together and taking apart and putting together again all those LEGO creations.
It didn’t seem all that unusual, but we weren’t looking for depression.
This is the kind of thing that can smack a parent in the face and heart and deep, deep down in the gut—because there was another boy who fell into the pit of depression, pushed from behind by a broken family. And we’re not a broken family, but we’re all broken parents, and what if we caused it? What if our boy never quite recovers because we are still here? What if healing is too far for our love and support and acceptance to reach?
How do I keep him from doing what those others of my past have done?
I don’t know. Maybe I never will.
///
No one else was up that night I was reading in the living room and the boy from once upon a time slid past me into the bathroom that could never be locked because the door didn’t close all the way.
He was eighteen, I was seventeen. It was another year when a dad had disappeared, just after a call had come telling us he’d been in a work accident, trapped under a tractor that had very nearly crushed him, and then there was nothing, for months on end. We did not know whether he was alive or dead. It was a year when a boy would graduate and life waited and he did not know if he was up to the challenge, even though he was brilliant and talented and could have grabbed any job he wanted. It was a year when a boy would be leaving, growing up, becoming a man, and he wasn’t quite sure he knew how.
He was holed up in the bathroom for forty-five minutes or more, and then he walked back out with wraps around his wrists that he tried to hide. I didn’t make a sound, but I couldn’t breathe from where I sat on the blue-flowered couch. I tried to forget what I had seen, tried to concentrate on the open book in my lap, tried to settle what I knew but didn’t want to know.
Still, the tears came hot and thick. I knew what he’d done, what he’d attempted, and hadn’t I tried it myself a thousand times, in more subtle ways—starving myself, going whole days and weeks without eating not just because I wanted to be thin but because I wanted them to watch me wasting away? It was the easiest way for me to die.
This was the easiest way for him to die, too.
Something about depression wraps around an ankle and grows like the silence of an evening. It never lets you go.
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This is not what I want for my son.
Two months ago, at the height of his behavioral issues at school, his daddy and I found a counselor for him. Every week he sits in a room full of toys and he plays and talks and maybe, just a little, heals. And yet today, when I am sitting in that school room, with all those women who don’t know him like I do, I listen to them talk about helping him through transitions with a timer and providing him a cool-down place for his big emotions, but all I can hear are those words on repeat in my mind.
My son is depressed. My son is depressed. My son is depressed.
What if?
What if he doesn’t beat it?
What if there are darker days ahead?
What if there is suicide?
All these questions can tie a mama in great big, tight knots, but they are the wrong questions for this day, for today. The question today is: What can I do to help my son?
It’s a question without a simple answer. Spend more one-on-one time with him. Pursue a hobby together. Understand and accept and fully embrace him, without changing him.
Sometimes part of beating depression away, for a time, is teaching an eight-year-old boy what to do with his anger, how to rise above it, how to feel it and not be afraid of it, how to crawl all the way through it and stand back up on the other side. If all we’re told is that our anger is unjustified or wrong or unacceptable, we will do the only thing left. We will turn it inward, and the darkness will get another grip on our heels.
He is a boy with anger huddled somewhere deep inside him, and we must do the work of digging it out, letting it out, dragging out that darkness to the light of day. Every day. Every moment. Every encounter.
We cannot just hope it will change. We cannot pretend it doesn’t exist. We cannot hide it. These hearts of our children are worth more than saving face.
And so we sign him up for that extra help at school, and we show up every week to those counseling sessions, and we do everything we can at home to help heal a heart whole.
And there is Another who speaks life into the places where darkness has swallowed the light. There is Another who carries truth into the hearts of men and women and little boys and whole generations. There is Another who lifts their heads and breaks those chains of depression every time they clamp tight. My son knows and loves this Another.
And there will come a day—I know there will—when my boy will beat this disease. It will not beat him—because he has a future and a hope, and it is good and bright and beautiful.
This is enough for today.
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 Evan Dennis on Unsplash)
by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
Time has been holding my hand these last few weeks.
Not in the way of an intimate friend, but in the way of an impatient parent trying to drag a slow-to-get-ready-child out the door so they won’t be late.
It’s not the last stage of pregnancy that makes me feel so brittle and bruised. Not really. It’s the birthday coming up that I don’t want to mark, because I don’t like marking my climbing age anymore.
I know I can’t possibly always have seen birthdays like this, because I was a really young child once, and every really young child dreams of growing up someday. But for as long as I can remember, I have hated growig older.
It’s not the birthdays, exactly. It’s their number, the way they creep around every year, the way they whisper things like time is running out and you haven’t done enough with the years you’ve been given and you should be further along the writer path than you are today.
Birthdays, for a long time now, have looked down on me in disappointment, tallying up those years and stretching their hand across all my past, as if to say, This is all there is?
Yes. This is all there is. I wanted it to be more, but time was never exactly kind, and days rushed toward dark, and weeks ran toward months, and whole years, when I didn’t really know what I was doing or where I was going or who I even was, slipped right through my fingers.
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I don’t know exactly when those birthdays began breathing down my neck. Maybe it was the ninth one, when I blew out candles on a ballerina cake my mother had ordered before an instructor told me I was too “chunky” to continue lessons with her; a day when my friends and family all surrounded me except for the one who had missed so many other days like this one; a day when “chunky” got all tangled up around “gone;” a day when I used my wish to say, Let him come home. Or maybe it was the twelfth one, when I stood on our front porch waiting for my whole invited class to show up and only a few did; a day when there was no call or note or card from the missing one; a day when there were no candles to wish upon, because I was too old or maybe she was too strapped; a day when I still made my wish on the first star in the sky: I wish I could be pretty so he would come home.
Or maybe it was the twenty-fifth one, when I had just quit a dream-come-true newspaper job to follow my husband on a church-planting adventure, a day when I decided I would spend my time writing, a day when I peed on a stick and it said yes, a day when I still made my wish on the candles my husband lined up on a cake he’d made himself: I wish I could publish a book.
Maybe it was all of them, because a tenth birthday came around, and he did not come home; and a thirteenth birthday came around, and my beauty, or lack of it, did not bring him home; and a twenty-sixth birthday came around, and I had not published a book.
Birthdays did not feel like friends at all, even to a 9-year-old girl. They felt like fingers pointing to all the ways I had disappointed time.
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I wish I could say it’s different this time around, but it’s not. The day after my birthday this year, my job will end. It’s the first time I have never worked for someone else. All that space feels more like an expectation, not a possibility. It’s hard to explain, except by saying this: there is a birthday climbing on my back and whispering in my ear, Another year older, and what have you done?
The answer is not much, and so this birthday takes my words and cackles and throws all those other years, when wishes didn’t come true, right back in my face. So when my husband asks if I want to celebrate with friends and family, I say no. Who wants to mark another year gone when there is nothing to show for it?
No published book, still. No job. Not even a family that is “put together” and “doing it” and functioning past the overwhelm that raises tempers and flings at each other words we don’t really mean.
Only an aching back, because kids have pulled all the joints out of whack. Only anxiety that still claws at a neck, even though we’re practicing meditation and exercising and learning to change our thoughts and I’m even popping a pill every day. Only a collection of dreams and wishes that never came true.
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When I was 8 years old I saw the movie The Goonies (still one of the best movies of all time), and I remember how, for days, I dreamt about all those skeletons. I would sit in the bathtub, and my mom would come check on me, and I would see a skeleton walking through the door. My little sister would be fast asleep in her bed when I came in, and I would see a skeleton lying between the pink sheet and the purple-striped blanket. I would imagine my dad, wherever he was in the world, slumped in a corner, in skeleton form, looking like One-Eyed-Willie, without the treasure waiting on a lost ship.
What I’d seen in a childhood movie had thrown reality at me, proven that one day we would all die, and one day we would all turn to skeletons like the ones Mikey and Bran and Mouth ran into. Death terrified me, because it looked like those brittle bones; sometimes it looked even scarier, like the wax figures lying in a casket. Neither one was what I wanted to be.
When I imagined getting older, I imagined death.
And just like that, a little girl broke off what should be a happy relationship with her birthday. She didn’t want to grow up. She didn’t want to get any older. She didn’t want to die.
///
So, you see, getting older has never been exactly easy for me. I was never the girl who couldn’t wait until she turned 10 or 16 or 21, because every one of those years felt like a step closer to death. And even this week, when another birthday has come and gone, it passed with more dread than excitement.
It’s silly, when we get down to the heart of it, that we fear getting older. We, especially women, can feel time ticking so loudly—this many years until I can no longer have a baby, this many years until my hair turns all gray, this many years until they will no longer think of me as “young.”
What does it really matter?
There is a great gift in getting older, too, a wisdom that begins to settle into our bones when we realize that life is not really about these little things—having a job or not, publishing a book or not, making a name for ourselves or not. Life is really about who we become in all these years. Who we become in our families and in our communities and in our selves.
Will we become people who believe accomplishment and accolades and just-right circumstances tell the whole story of who we are? Or will we become people who believe that our true worth is really tied to who we were created to be, who we already are when we peel away all the layers a world can wrap us in?
We are all born with a diamond down deep inside us, and the diamond is brilliant and visible for a time, and then the world covers it in a great heap of armor, and then we spend the rest of our years trying to uncover it again so we can see and know and believe the treasure we already are, without the qualifications and accomplishments tagging behind our name. And if getting older means uncovering more of that brilliance, one shovelful at a time, then I want to embrace age. Wisdom. Maturity.
So this year, on my day, I didn’t check for more gray hairs and moan about the wrinkles that have begun to gather around the corners of my eyes from smiling too much at my boys. I looked, instead, toward the gift that time holds out to me every single birthday: one more chunk of a diamond revealed.
And then I whispered my wish.
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 Annie Spratt on Unsplash)
