by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
Periodically throughout the year, Husband and I will walk around our house with a box or a trash bag, whatever is needed, and get rid of things. We do this because with six children, our house could easily become overwhelmed with toys, stickers, art supplies, rocks our sons decided to collect on the way home today, or, most recently, acorns that brought into our house the delightful acorn weevil larvae, hatched into our empty banana bowl. Good thing it was empty.
I’ve always been a person who feels stressed and suffocated in cluttered places. I like to have space. This is a personality thing, but psychology and neurology are both fields that have conducted studies about simplification. What research suggests is that when we simplify our homes and, hence, our lives, we find more energy, more pleasure and calmer attitudes. We also can create better without clutter. We can make decisions better without clutter. We can become better people without clutter.
There is this space on one of my kitchen counters, where my sons who go to school pile their school things. They have folders and papers and agendas and sometimes even random pencils, and, instead of putting these things in the designated places—because there are designated places—they pile them all into a precarious mountain that will most likely fall when one of them runs past it too quickly. Which is pretty much guaranteed in our home.
Every evening, when I’m done with my work, I have the pleasure of entering the kitchen, and the first thing I see is this pile. By this time, the pile has been knocked over several times, which means the papers are not so neatly stacked as they were, if they ever were, but are more like pinwheels, turned in ever direction. When I see this pile, my throat closes up a little. Clutter makes it hard to breathe.
But I’m not even just talking about the physical clutter of our lives. I’m talking about the schedule clutter of our lives, too. We live in such a fast-paced world, one where we find it necessary to do everything and be everywhere and keep going until we can’t go anymore. This is the road to success, right?
Wrong.
What simplification of our lives and homes does is it opens in us space enough to think more clearly and deeply, to spend more time discovering ourselves and the people around us, to sit outside on the back porch and linger over a dinner that all the kids complained about but ate anyway.
Our minds need space to consider important decisions in business and family and personal life. Our bodies need space to stretch out and move and not puncture our foot on an errant toy wherever we step (we’re still working on that one). Our lives need space to dream and create and grow.
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Earlier this week, I was working on the layout of one of my books. I was struck by the small amount of white space—when you’re laying out text in a text-heavy book, you don’t want a whole lot of white space, because it represents wasted space, or, in other words, wasted paper. But as I stared at the little bit of white space in my book, I thought about the white space in our lives. We need that white space. We need it more than the text.
In the next few weeks, Husband and I will be doing another purge of our house, because our oldest has a birthday in a few days, and Christmas is coming up. Grandparents have a really hard time not buying toys for all of our boys. So old toys will be donated or thrown away if they have no more life left.
This is a sad thing (everybody will miss that Buzz Lightyear with a missing leg), but it is also a wonderful one. We get to teach our boys what it looks like to intentionally create white space in their lives. We get to demonstrate for them just how much simplifying our home and our lives can open wells of creativity, connection, passion, and wonder.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this inside look at my life and my perspective on clutter. Every Friday, I publish a short personal essay that includes a valuable takeaway. For more of my essays and memoir writings, visit Wing Chair Musings.
by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
I watch my boy from where I sit, his back curved just the littlest bit while his head hangs over the Star Wars book he’s reading, and I marvel at how his brow is missing the soft spot between eye and forehead, how his face has thinned out of the baby cheeks and chin, how his mouth moves in silent speaking while he is so lost in the world of a book.
My boy is no more a baby, but he will always be my baby.
In twelve days he will celebrate ten years since his birth day, that day when my body bore down and his body tore through, a day when boy became first son and girl-woman became Mama.
“I know how I was made, Mama,” he said three years ago on his day, when I set that birthday brownie-cupcake in front of him. “God took a piece of your heart and made me.”
He has a gift with words and truth and insight, this one, because he saw it exactly right. All my sons, all these babies, are a piece of my heart walking and jumping and racing around outside my body, and it’s scary and risky and agonizing to let loose those heart strings so they can learn to walk on their own, but this is how they settle into their becoming. This is how they transform into young men and young women. This is how they learn to live.
The love between a mama and her boy is wide and deep and strong enough to knock us all flat. What I have learned of love, what I have learned of grace and forgiveness and joy, what I have learned of life I could not have foretold that chilly night in November, four days before Thanksgiving that year.
I have never been the same.
///
He slid into the world late, when the sky was pitch black, and it was a perfect, by-the-books birth, with a perfect, rosy-cheeked baby and a perfect love all the way from the beginning. And then they released him to two young parents who didn’t know what to do with a seven-pound, fifteen-ounce baby except let him steal our hearts and wreck our existence.
We laid him in a Peter Rabbit bassinet that first night, after reading him a bedtime story, and then his daddy and I found sleep to the sound of a new being breathing just beside our bed.
I woke before he did for that early, early morning feeding, and he was still sleeping soundly, but the darkness, all above his bassinet, was moving, swirling, like something lived in the dark, something sinister and sharp and full of a death that did not steal breath but something greater—life. I picked up my baby boy and held him in my arms, and I prayed while he fed, and when he was done I held him and prayed some more, and when my arms got too tired to hold him anymore, I laid him in the bassinet, but I didn’t stop praying until the first shards of light reached right through my window, until that twirling dark lifted from the corners of the room, until the fingers that fought to reach an innocent baby’s form had completely disappeared.
It was my first all-night vigil for this boy whose name means Jehovah has heard.
It would not be my last.
///
A couple of years ago that feel like just a few weeks ago, I tossed and turned and prayed and listened and tried hard to find my way out of a confusion too dark to see through. My boy had spent three days in school suspension for choosing to act outside of who he is, and I was sick to my stomach and sick at heart, trying desperately to crawl my way toward understanding.
I tried to find the words that came so easily all those years ago, at my first all-night vigil, but the only words that would come sounded more like, Help. Please. Over and over and over again.
He was too big to hold in my arms all night, but I held him in my heart.
It happened only weeks after announcing we were expecting boy number six, when all those people filled a comment box with those words, I guess you’re just really good at raising boys, but here was my firstborn, the boy who first stole my heart, proving them all wrong.
There was more he had to teach me here, this child who has always been strong-willed and creative and a wild hurricane of love.
Sometimes our parenting journey takes us right up against the places where it feels like we don’t know what we’re doing and it feels like we are not enough or we were never enough or we will never be enough and it feels like we are failing in a midnight where all the stars have gone out. Sometimes we need to stall here and stay a while.
Because our children will show us the way back out.
///
The day before Thanksgiving that year he was born, we raced him to a children’s ER, because he hadn’t produced a wet or dirty diaper in twelve hours.
Your milk will come in, my mother had told me the day we brought him home and I could not even pump an ounce and could not say for sure that my baby was eating anything at all.
I sat in the emergency room, holding my 4-day-old, watching the way he slept so peacefully even though my whole body shook with the knowing that he could have died from his dehydration. They called us back and woke him with a needle, trying to find purchase in a tiny vein so they could hydrate him again with clear white fluid. He cried and screamed and writhed on a table while they poked the bottom of his foot and then his arm and then another hand and then, after all the others slid out of their grasp, the largest vein in his forehead.
I watched my baby, hooked up to a hydration drip, and I noticed the way those glassy eyes stared at the nurse whose face hung over him, how he searched the room for his mama when he realized her face wasn’t the right one, and I cried and cried and could not stop crying. My body had failed him already, four days in. I had failed him already, four days in.
It would take all the days after for him to set me straight. I had not failed him, not really, because I was still his mama, and that was all he needed. I loved him and he loved me and that was enough.
///
Love always has been and always will be enough.
Even on the days when strong will met frustration. Even on the days we yelled and said those words we didn’t mean. Even on the days we walked bruised and bloodied and broken for all the mistakes we made.
Every mistake, every failure, every less-than-ideal moment was remaking me. It was not just this boy who slid from a womb ten years ago. It was me, too.
A child, this child, and all his little brothers living inside my home have led me deeper into the way. They have drawn me closer to the Way. So it is not just his birthday we will celebrate in twelve days. It is my birth-anew day, too.
As hard as this journey has been, the ways he has taken apart all our parenting philosophies and rearranged them completely, the times we have walked shaky and unsure off the ledge into a boy-world, I would not trade it for all the ease and predictability and certainty in the world.
Sure, there have been days when he has raged and I have thrown my rage to meet his and we both bled through tears and words and wonderings, but I would not give away those days, those opportunities he has given me to practice asking forgiveness and limp toward a better vision for parenting, because they have taught me about humility and grace and freedom.
Sure, I used to watch the 2-year-old nursery where all those kids sat on their designated seats while my boy climbed onto the one he’d already chosen before the teachers pointed out a different one, and I would wonder how the other kids could be so obedient and well-behaved and calm, but I would not wish a perfectly obedient, minds-all-the-time child in his place, because he has taught me acceptance and joy and great, deep-down belly laughter.
Sure, there would be days when he walked out the door and threw back those words, I’m going to run away, and I wanted to let him, but the truth is I would chase him down to the ends of the earth, because he has taught me how to love in all the hardest places, and I DON’T WANT TO STOP LEARNING.
The only time my boy was ever easy was when he was a newborn baby, but I’m glad. What he has taught me in his challenge whispers truth about a mama’s strength, so much greater than she knows, and a mama’s hope, so much wider than she can see, and a mama’s great love, so much deeper than she could ever understand.
Thank God he is alive. Thank God he is mine.
Happy birthday, my sweet.
by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
A few months ago, I noticed during one of my many hours of reading that a small gray square blocked out part of the vision in my right eye. It wasn’t terrible. It blocked out the bottoms of gs or ys or anything that curled below the normal line. I freaked out, of course. I was in the middle of reading to my boys, and I felt the warm breath of anxiety blow out onto my neck and chest and upper arms. My knees nearly gave out. I couldn’t breathe for a minute, my eyes burned, my left arm went numb.
I’m familiar with these symptoms, of course. It’s not the first panic attack I’ve had in my life, although the first time it happened and I noticed it, I thought I was dying and headed straight back to the emergency room I’d just left. There’s nothing like a panic attack about the fact that you might be dying to make you feel like you actually are dying.
I have lived with anxiety all my life, although I didn’t really know what to call it way back when. I only knew that when my mom was more than five minutes late to pick me up after my middle school volleyball practice, my mouth would go dry, my eyes would gush and my brain would sort through all the information it could grasp so that I would survive—she was probably dead on the side of the road, but I would pick up the pieces. I would take care of my brother and sister, even though I was only eleven. I would quit school, get a job, make sure we could eat. But first I had to walk myself the six miles home. And I’d start.
And then she’d drive up, asking what in the world I was doing walking down a highway, and I would turn my face to the scene outside the passenger window so she wouldn’t notice my panicked crying or the way I was breathing all weird or the exhausted relief I felt on seeing her.
If Husband is a little late coming home and I don’t hear from him and he doesn’t answer his cell phone when I call, I panic. If bad news comes and we don’t know if we’ll be able to put food on our table this week, I panic. If I notice anything different about my moles or my vision or the way I happen to feel today, I panic.
Sometimes the anxiety drags me under. That happened a couple of weeks ago. I was on Sabbatical, not doing any writing. I was supposed to be relaxing, because it was my anniversary. I was supposed to be celebrating thirteen years of marriage, and all I could think about was the small gray square in my eye. I thought about it when I woke and when I made lunch and when I went to sleep at night. I tried to figure it out. I worried endlessly about the MRI my doctor ordered just to make sure everything was okay. I was sure it would be everything I feared most.
It wasn’t. But I spent hours and hours of my time worrying that it was. I could not stop the worry. It was a deep, dark ocean that reminded me of the same ocean I’d almost drowned in when I was 3. A rip tide caught me and pulled me out to sea. I still remember it like it happened yesterday. The brown salty water would cover me, and then it would spit me back out to look at the perfect blue sky and feel the burn of the sun on my face just long enough to think maybe I would make it, and then the sea would tear me back under.
Anxiety is the sea that tore me back under two weeks ago.
Everything is normal. It’s possible that anxiety is the reason for the small gray square. It’s even possible that I’ve imagined it, and now that I’ve imagined it, it won’t go away, because imagination is a powerful thing.
When anxiety pulls me under like it did a couple of weeks ago, my first response is to go into hiding. There is something shameful about not being able to handle your everyday circumstances when they’re this good. I have six children. There are many women who would give anything to have one. I have a loving husband. There are so many women who don’t. I have a roof over my head and food on my table today. Not everyone does.
But those things do not change the reality of anxiety for me. It is a brain imbalance, a deep, dark ocean with a rip tide I can’t out swim. No amount of convincing myself that I’m okay will make me okay. I am not okay. And this is okay.
There are many of us with mental health issues. Most of us go into hiding, because it’s not glamorous to admit that we worry incessantly or that we have really high highs and really low lows or that we couldn’t get out of bed today. This is not a person who is celebrated in our world. So we choose, instead, to hide. We choose, instead, to pretend that we have everything in our lives perfectly handled, everything under control, nothing really bothers us.
The problem is that our issues—which do not define us, by the way—will eventually catch up to us. The last couple of weeks have shown me that. I wake up and I can’t breathe. I take my 4-year-olds upstairs for their naps and my legs want to give out with the panic of the next possibility. I read a book, and I see a gray square that means I’m dying probably.
Here’s what I want you to know: We are not unacceptable people just because of our mental health issues. We don’t have to go into hiding. We don’t have to feel ashamed if we can’t make it through today without the help of a pill or a therapist or our own journaling practice. Life is hard. There is nothing harder. And sometimes our brains and our bodies and our emotions just can’t do it.
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Our mental health issues don’t define us. We may have bipolar disorder, but we are not bipolar. We may struggle with depression, but we are not depression. We may fight every single moment of every single day against the deep, dark sea of an anxiety disorder, but we are not that anxiety disorder. So we have no reason to hide away and pretend we are someone different, someone better, someone more acceptable to the world’s people.
Be brave. Tell your stories. Get the help you need without feeling like it’s shameful. And know that you’re not alone.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this inside look at my life and struggles. Every Friday, I publish a short blog on something personal that includes a valuable takeaway. For more of my essays and memoir writings, visit Wing Chair Musings.
by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
Husband and I recently celebrated thirteen years married. What did we do, you ask? We sat at home and cooked our own dinner and ate it while kids tried to talk all over each other and we didn’t say a word, just stared at each other with wide, overwhelmed eyes.
We started our married days honeymooning to Disney World. It was a magical place for a newly married couple, and many times that week people graciously let us cut to the front of the line, because they were so excited to see a happy couple like us out and about. There is no such thing as cutting in line anymore, because I am a parent, and kids do not like to wait. So who was served first at our homemade anniversary feast? That’s right. My children.
Husband and I used to have a date night twice a week. We’d go shopping, just to go shopping. We’d go see a movie if something looked good. We’d go house hunting, dreaming of the home we would one day buy. We’d sit in our room and play music together.
Now we have a date night twice a year, and one of those was not on our anniversary. Now we don’t go shopping unless we have no more food in our refrigerator and the kids are screaming that they’re starving. Now we try to sit in our room and play music together, and kids interrupt every song before it’s even started. I can’t even remember lyrics anymore.
This is marriage with children. It’s hard. It’s also really, really cool.
Every year, around our anniversary, Husband and I will retell our children the story of our engagement and wedding. Husband took me to the Nutcracker ballet. We were all decked out—me in a long red strapless dress I could probably only fit one thigh in now, him in a crisp black tuxedo. He took me up on stage after the show, where everybody could see us, which is actually the worst thing you could do to an introvert like me, but I didn’t care quite as much once he got down on one knee and popped the question. I could hear people in the audience saying “What did she say?” Husband must have raised his fist in a victory pump, because people started clapping and hooting. It was a great memory that brings a smile to our boys’ faces.
And then we’ll tell them about the wedding we had in an old historical church, me in a princess-cut dress, him in a crisp black tuxedo again. We’ll tell them about the path from the church to the reception area, and how deer came right up to us like I was living a real-life fairy tale. We’ll tell them about the dancing and the eating and the magnificent cake we shoved into each other’s faces.
And do you know what they hear? They hear love.
Do you know what we hear? We hear remember.
It’s true that marriage is hard. It’s true that it takes diligent work and extravagant dedication to fold two lives into one. It’s true that some days will be better than others.
Marriage with children is even harder. But children have brought a dynamic to our marriage that I can’t say with any certainty would have been there without them. We know each other better. We cling to each other more desperately, because we hold each other’s sanity in our hands. We chase our dreams and talk about the hard things of life and join together in the some of the most difficult and yet wonderful work there is: raising a new generation to know what marriage is really like. To know that marriage is worth all that hard work.
So even though we sent our children to bed on the night of our anniversary, with the full intention of doing what we always do—which is catching up on our favorite television shows—and the kids, thirty seconds after we’d pushed play, were back in our room for more hugs and kisses, I feel I can honestly say that these days are the best days so far.
Here’s what I’ve learned in thirteen years of marriage: the hardest places are the richest ground for love to grow and bloom.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this inside look at my life and family. Every Friday, I publish a short blog on something personal that includes a valuable takeaway. For more of my essays and memoir writings, visit Wing Chair Musings.
by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
It’s just a tiny thing, oval and white and smaller than the vitamins I swallow every single day, but I leave it on my desk and stare at it.
It’s not the enemy. The panic-lump in my throat is the enemy, and this tiny white oval could help. I know this. But still I can’t bring myself to touch it.
More than a week ago, my doctor called in a prescription for some of the symptoms I rattled off with an apologetic laugh—lump in my throat, difficulty breathing through some of my thoughts, constant, overwhelming worry about nothing and everything all at the same time—and assured me I was not alone, not even close, because so many people have to take these medications at one time or another.
Yes, but this is me, I thought. I am strong. I can handle it. I can get through all this without the help of a pill.
This is me, and I don’t take medication to make myself feel better, because I have faith and prayer and meditation and mindfulness and hope and joy and gratitude and love and family and…
So I let it sit on the pharmacy pick-up shelf long enough for them to restock it, like it didn’t belong to anybody in particular, and then I went to pick it up and they said they could have it ready in another 24 hours but no sooner because they would need to fill the prescription all over again. I waited another three days and then sent my husband to pick it up, because I could not face the eyes that would see this woman who needed a pill to feel normal.
Two days it sat on the dresser in my bedroom, waiting, and then, today, when that lump made it hard to even breathe, when my chest burned from the weight of the world, I took one pill out and turned it over in my hands and then let it clink back down to the bottom of an orange bottle.
I just can’t do it. I just can’t swallow this pill, because I can find my way out of this. I can. Because there is nothing wrong with me.
And if there were, what would they all think?
///
When I was eight years old, my teacher noticed I was squinting to read the words on the overhead projector, and then I was squinting at my neighbor’s page to copy her notes instead of bothering with the screen at all, and then I was holding multiplication flashcards and books and worksheets a little too close to my face.
She told my mom, who talked to the school nurse, who talked to my teacher and arranged an appointment to check my eyes.
It was a tumultuous time in my life then, because I hadn’t seen my dad for a year, and those absences explained by an out-of-state job that paid more money than he could possibly make in our little town stretched longer and longer every time he came home and left again. And somehow, in my little-girl mind, my dad’s absences had become tangled around my perfection or imperfection. Somehow it all depended on me.
Somehow I had to be perfect, and that would bring him home and keep him there for good. But now something was wrong with my eyes. I knew it before they told me, and I didn’t want anyone else to know.
I cried all the way to the nurse’s office, because I knew what this appointment would show. I cried standing there, with a little plastic spatula over my left eye, not even able to read the one big lone letter at the top. I cried all the way back out, because my eyes had failed me.
I would never be perfect, and maybe that meant my dad would never come home.
///
I looked for all the reasons not to take that pill. I called my doctor to ask if it was really safe, because I’m a natural person, and I’ve never had this problem before and I don’t like medication and there has to be another way, and why isn’t this anxiety going away on its own when I’m praying and meditating and working out my salvation and doing everything I’m supposed to do?
What is the source of your anxiety? she says.
So much sits like five-ton weights on my neck and chest and head and feet that drag slow steps and hands that hold too tight to control. I name all the things I know. Work. Kids. Home. Finances. Chores. Life. Life. Life.
That’s as far as I get. The hole widens in front of me, the lump presses against my vocal chords, the warm flush climbs up my arms. I stop, because I don’t want her to know I’m about to have a panic attack just thinking about it all. She says, Sometimes we need help.
Right before we hang up, she says, Take care of yourself.
OK, I say, even though what I really mean is, I’ll try, because I don’t know if taking care of myself is popping a pill or letting it sit with the other 59 of them in a bottle that tells me to swallow one twice a day. It’s another mark of imperfection, this failure of my mind and emotions.
And I don’t want anyone to know.
///
My junior high school was nine miles from the house I grew up in, so I had to ride a bus for an hour every day to get there and back.
In seventh grade I played volleyball and basketball and ran track and sat first-chair clarinet, and every afternoon one or all of these had practices I attended, and at the end of them, all of us who lived too far away to walk a highway home packed up into a bus and rode it to a drop-off spot where parents waited.
There was a day when I stepped off the bus at 6:30 p.m., just like I did every other weeknight, and I did not see my mom’s gray Ford Escort.
The drop-off point was an old post office, where, years before, when we’d lived in another house just down the way, we’d been walking our dog to check the mail and a car going too fast hit him so hard he spun circles in the middle of the road that ran between our house and the post office that closed every day at 4. This day I sat staring at that same highway, thinking of all the things that could have happened to my mom. Was she spinning in the middle of the road?
What if she had an accident coming here to pick me up? What if she was dead? What if it was my fault? Who would the three of us, my brother and sister and me, live with, since we hadn’t heard from or seen our dad in five years? How would I take care of my brother and sister? How would I take care of myself? Who would love us?
Just when I finally decided I’d walk the six miles home, she pulled into the drive, fifteen-minutes-that-felt-like-fifteen-hours late.
I stared out the window, all the way home, trying not to cry from my leftover what ifs tripping down the highway behind us.
///
I stare out the window now, trying not to cry, because I don’t want my husband or my little boys to see just how fragile I feel. We’re on our way to lead worship to a group of teenagers, and I feel like a fraud. We will sing about not being afraid and walking on deep waters with faith ready to be stretched, and here I am sinking in the rip tide of anxiety and fear.
I try to work out some of my feelings with my husband on the way. He tells me to try to put our problems in perspective with others’ problems. At least we’re not homeless, he says. At least we have healthy food in our refrigerator. At least none of our children are terminally ill.
The rock of anxiety shifts and grows and hardens. No, I say, because this doesn’t work for me. I feel more anxious now, because what if? What if we do find ourselves homeless? What if we don’t have healthy food in our refrigerator tomorrow? What if one of the boys suddenly becomes terminally ill and I have to watch them die?
He tells me to try to spin things in a positive light, try to nip my negative thoughts in the bud, but, no, this doesn’t work for me either. Every try and fail just makes me feel like more of a failure, because I can’t do it on my own, and God why can’t I?
What kind of person can’t choose joy and positivity and perspective on their own? How do you talk yourself out of a feeling when it’s a feeling you’ve walked with your whole life? Because I know I said I’ve never experienced this anxiety before, but it was a lie, just another attempt to prove there is nothing wrong with me.
What is it, then? he says. What specifically is it?
This is the question I can’t answer, so I just start crying instead. I can’t talk about this right now, I say, because we’ve pulled into the parking lot and it’s time to unload the kids and go plug in and do a sound check and then sing like the words wipe away all our troubles.
And because it’s everything.
It’s everything, all piled and tangled and curled into those weights with barbs and spikes that puncture every time something else goes wrong or could go wrong or might possibly go wrong in the next twenty years. And sure, we can tick off those gratitude lists and we can try to take every thought captive and we can post those 100 happy days pictures, but what happens when it doesn’t work, when our choosing doesn’t save a mind or a heart?
Sometimes we have paddled so far into the cavern we need help steering ourselves back out.
///
I grew up in two Southern Baptist churches. They were full of grace and hope and people who knew how to love a fatherless kid, or three of them.
Southern Baptist, though, is a religion full of rules. I’d set rules all my life for myself, and here were more that held a greater purpose, and, yes, of course, please sign me up, because keeping all these rules would finally, finally, finally make me perfect in one domain, even though my eyes were bad and I’d busted up my knee in high school volleyball and I’d broken a pinkie finger in softball that never healed straight.
I could be spiritually perfect, and that would have to do.
I constructed my perfect little life, keeping all those potential friends in my youth group at arms’ length, because if they came too close they would see all those hidden holes in my perfection, and I could not let them see. And then I graduated at the top of my class and rode a full scholarship to university, where, even though all those religion rules had begun weighing me down years ago, I signed up to continue in the Southern Baptist tradition on my own.
I led worship at the Baptist Student Ministry and attended the Baptist church they told me to attend so I could be a leader, and I sat under all those male preachers who said God was always enough and we had a Healer for all our sickness and that when we know Love we will not know fear. And I tried to make it true for me.
No one ever told me in those churches that there might be a chance my Healer wouldn’t heal the kind of sickness that stuck in the back of a throat and the corner of a mind. They only told me to have faith enough to move mountains, and this mountain wouldn’t move.
The mountain never moved. I suppose I didn’t have enough faith.
///
We are back home and the kids are in bed, and still I’m sitting here staring at a pill they said I shouldn’t need if I believed enough, staring at a piece of science they said proves my faith needs improving, staring at a tiny little thing they said tells a definitive story of my spirituality.
I have learned much in the years that roll between then and now. I have learned that there is a fear that can be known in Love, and it is called Anxiety. I have learned that we don’t get to choose our disorders, and no amount of faith or joy lists or gratitude tries can change the hold our disorders keep on us. I have learned that seeking help of any kind does not mean our faith or our God or our own hearts and minds have failed us.
I have learned that courage doesn’t always look like jumping out of a war-plane into enemy territory or rushing into a burning house or opening a heart to fix a vessel block. Sometimes it looks like facing one day and then another, because this is jumping from a war-plane into enemy territory. Sometimes it looks like braving the truth of our disorder and all the opinions and condemnation and misunderstandings that come with it, because this is rushing into a burning house and living to tell about it. Sometimes it looks like popping a pill and letting it work its magic in our mind, because this is our open-heart surgery.
I have learned that there is no shame in inviting medication into our journey toward healing. The world can make us feel like there is, but the world is not telling the truth. There is no shame here. There is only courage.
The Healer sends healing, and sometimes it looks like a miraculous mind makeover, but sometimes it looks like a no-less-miraculous tiny white oval.
So I swallow the pill, and I close my eyes, and I thank God for the help finding my way back to an even road, maybe for the first time in my life.
This is an excerpt from We Count it All Joy: Essays, which does not yet have a release date. For more of my essays, visit Wing Chair Musings.
by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
The other day, I was puttering around the kitchen, minding my own business, not even realizing that I was singing a song. I often do this, because I enjoy singing. I don’t usually plan to sing. It just happens.
My 7-year-old came into the kitchen, put his hands on his hips and said, “That’s not the way that song goes.” He then showed me how the song actually went. I laughed, of course. I often make songs my own—not just with the structure and feel of the song but also with lyrics. I like to make up my own lyrics when I can’t understand what the singers are actually saying.
My son said, “No, really. That’s how the song goes.”
I said, “I know. But I’ll sing it however I want.”
I didn’t realize, at the time, how profound these words would become. They tumbled about in my brain all day, until I realized something glaringly obvious but not often recognized by us.
There is a temptation we all feel when we see work we admire—-or even people we admire. We want to produce that kind of work. We want to be those kinds of people. When I read books I absolutely love, I want to write those kinds of books. When I hear music that moves me, I want to write that kind of music.
This happened several months ago, when I heard a song by Kelly Clarkson called “Piece By Piece.” I could have written this song. I should have written this song. She wrote it about my life. I wanted to write one just like it about my life. I tried. I tried for two weeks before I put the pen down and finally said, “This is not me. I don’t write like this.”
It happens to all of us. We see parents we admire whose kids do everything they say, and we want to be them. We see that person dressed to the nines, and here we are in workout clothes like we always are—-we want to be them. Or, if you’re like me, you see people who let things roll right off them—-no matter how devastating—-and you want to be them. I want to be unhindered by extravagant worry. I want to embrace whatever comes with a smile. I want to break free from the suffocating clutch of my anxiety.
But I am me, and they are them.
The best thing we can possibly do is be ourselves—neuroses and all. Weird and all. Hang-ups and all. Sure, we can always learn and grow—that’s why there’s an entire self-help market on the bookstore shelves. We don’t have to remain as we are—we can always improve.
But we can never be them. Because we are us.
[Tweet “Be who you are. It’s the best person you can be.”]
What we all have to offer the world is our unique individuality, our unique viewpoint, our unique contribution. Sing your song however you want to—it is your unique, valuable contribution to the world.
[Tweet “What we all have to offer the world is our unique individuality. Our unique contribution.”]
I hope you’ve enjoyed this inside look at my life and a moment of inspiration with my boys. Every Friday, I publish a short blog on something personal that includes a valuable takeaway. For more of my essays and memoir writings, visit Wing Chair Musings.
