by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
So much of what I do, as a mother, goes unseen.
I plan our healthy meals and read the labels of everything I put in my shopping cart, to make sure our home stays toxin-free, and I mix our own cleaners and make note of when we’ll need to reorder those essential oils we use for healing. I carve out a schedule that protects our family playing time, and I craft a budget that means we have food and shelter for another month, and I make sure all the art supplies stay stocked.
I manage Amazon subscriptions for ingredient-approved vitamins and count them out every single day and line them up next to my boys’ breakfast plates, and instead of “thank you” I hear about how they didn’t want these scrambled eggs this morning because all their friends get to eat cereal for breakfast, and why can’t they?
I clear out their closets when their old clothes are too small, and I buy them new underwear when the old ones cut off circulation and I buy new socks when the old ones have too many holes, and the only thing I hear for it is how they wanted red socks instead of the white ones I bought.
I turn off lights and flush toilets and remind them to brush their teeth and mend their blankets and find their lost library books and read stories until my throat hurts and send them back to bed a thousand times every single night, and I don’t even think they notice.
There are so many days I can feel downright invisible.
Welcome to being a mother.
///
When I was eleven years old, my mom slapped a magnet dry-erase calendar on the front of our white refrigerator.
“Dish schedule,” she said.
Our names were written on it in black, Jarrod, Rachel, Ashley and Mom switching places on all the squares. Every month she sat down with a school calendar and the dry-erase one and wrote our names on the schedule in a way that wouldn’t interfere with our lives.
The schedule got more complicated when we got to high school, because there were volleyball games and every-night-of-the-week practices and football games with the marching band and National Honor Society and Wednesday night church and homework after all that.
I didn’t appreciate all the hard work that went into a schedule as complicated as that. All I did was resent that I had to wash dishes two nights a week.
I resented that I worked so hard at school all day and then slaved away at volleyball practice and rode a bus to the pick-up point and finally got home after dark to finish what homework I couldn’t do on the bus, because I cared about handwriting and the bus was too bouncy, and then I still had to do the dishes.
So unfair.
My tunnel vision didn’t let me see that she worked all day, much harder than I ever did at school, and then she cooked dinner and tried to keep it warm for me and drove to meet the bus and stayed near while I finished my homework so I’d have help if I needed it and, on top of all that, she planned meals for the month and did all the shopping and budgeted our very limited resources and wrote out a schedule for doing dishes so one person was not overburdened with the responsibility.
She was a mother.
She was invisible, too.
///
Now that I have children of my own, I know exactly how selfish children can be. I know how thankless motherhood is. I know how no matter what we do behind the scenes, there is still more they want us to do.
It’s simply the nature of children. I know this. They don’t see their own selfishness or the way those ill-timed complaints can make a mama not ever want to cook a hot breakfast for them ever again or how just the thought of tackling eight loads of laundry that come back every week is enough to keep her in bed when the alarm chimes.
They only wonder why they’re having oatmeal again when today was supposed to be pancake-day. They don’t see that Mama ran out of time to flip pancakes because she had to turn every male shirt right-side out before sorting it into laundry piles she’ll spend all day washing. It’s completely, developmentally normal for them to not make those connections yet.
Someday they will.
But that means nothing for this day, this day you stripped all his sheets and blankets and spent half the day he was at school vacuuming and washing and putting a bed back together because he woke up with ant bites all over his legs and you’re afraid there might be ants in his bed because they were eating popcorn up here yesterday even though it’s against the rules. This day he comes out of his room complaining that his blanket is still a little wet.
This day when you loaded the washer with that first pile holding his Spider-Man shirt, because you were sure he’d want to wear it on his birthday, and there’s just enough time to wash and dry it before he has to leave for school. This day he comes down the stairs crying about how he can’t find his workout clothes to wear on his birthday, and you know they’re lying at the bottom of another pile you planned to wash later today. This day you woke up to find three lights left on all night and you can’t help but mentally calculate how much that’s going to cost you.
The promise of someday does not make this day any easier.
///
After I married and had an apartment of my own, my mom came visiting with a box.
“What’s that?” I said, because I had just finished unpacking, and I hadn’t missed anything important.
“All your old stories,” she said.
“What stories?” I said.
“The ones you wrote when you were little,” she said, and she pulled out one that imagined what I would do if I had a million dollars. I’d written it when I was 7. I’d buy a car, and I wouldn’t share with my brother, I’d written. We laughed about it.
There were Little House on the Prairie imitations and the story about a girl miraculously walking again to save her friends from danger and another scrawled out on 93 sheets of notebook paper the summer I went to visit my dad.
“I didn’t know you kept all these,” I said.
My mom smiled. “Of course I did.”
Of course she did. They were pieces of me she loved. They were pieces that proved her love.
And she is a mother.
///
There is a drawer in my closet where I keep my kids’ drawings and old writing notebooks they’ve filled with words and loose papers with quirky doodles filling corners.
My boys don’t know the drawer is there.
My 8-year-old doesn’t know that when he slipped his note under our bedroom door, the one that says he feels angry when we tell him it’s bedtime before he’s ready to go to bed, the one that bears a picture of a boy with a red face and smoke coming out of his ears, the note went into that drawer. My 6-year-old doesn’t know that when he wrote a kindergarten essay in school about how he knows his mom loves him when she reads to him, his essay went into that drawer. My 4-year-old doesn’t know that when the amazing fox picture he drew disappeared from his drawing binder it went into that drawer.
They don’t know all the ways I love them, because they are only children who believe love looks mostly like hugs and kisses and sweet snuggles. They don’t know yet that it mostly looks like time and service and invisibility.
What I am still learning in my mother journey is that sometimes the greatest acts of love are the ones that whisper instead of shout.
A storage container with writing treasures shoved under our mom’s bed.
A dish schedule that honored our time over her own.
A ride to early-morning volleyball practices, even though she worked late.
I want to be that kind of great.
It comes welling up in me, every now and then, when I’m tired and frustrated and annoyed that I can’t seem to find a minute to myself. I want to be noticed. Acknowledged. Appreciated.
I forget that invisibility is better than alone.
I get to be a mama. I get to love my children through olive oil brushed over broccoli and a sprinkling of sea salt. I get to love them by sitting down and coloring a picture of Lightning McQueen with them, even though a thousand other responsibilities are calling my name. I get to love them with a secret drawer that holds treasures more valuable than what sits in my bank account.
I get to be loved by his bursting into the room while I’m working just so he can give me a missed-you kiss. I get to be loved by the flower he brings me, because its beauty reminded him of me, and I get to watch it curl up while I’m writing. I get to be loved in his request to be carried downstairs, just like old times, even though he’s so much heavier now and fully capable of walking himself.
We get to be loved in a million silent ways, and we get to love in a million silent ways.
Welcome to being a mother.
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
Today I’m doing something a teeny bit different. I’m talking about a book, because, well, everybody knows I love to read. Reading is a definite part of my life, just as much as my kids are. And this book actually has to do with my kids.
Geek Parenting: What Joffrey, Jor-El, Maleficent, and the McFlys Teach Us about Raising a Family, by Stephen H. Segal and Valya Lupescu was a really entertaining and fun read about what parents can learn from families in pop culture. Segal and Lupescu took everyday television shows, movies, and books and dissected what the families looked like in them, and then pulled out one important pillar of parenting that we could learn from those families.
The book included people like Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader, Stewie and Lois (from Family Guy), Thor, Loki and Odin, Dorothy and Auntie Em and many more. It’s a compilation of mini-essays, which I appreciated, because I could digest a few of them at a time before my kids started trying to take apart the steam cleaner I accidentally left unattended in the living room corner. The mini-essays were perfect for busy parents who have opportunistic children. And by opportunistic children I mean twins who wait until your back is turned before they pick up the dreaded plunger and go to town on a brown-water toilet that won’t flush.
What I liked most about Geek Parenting was the range of material the authors drew from. Some of the movies or books were older (like the movie Teen Wolf), which made me want to go watch them again, some were new, which meant I didn’t really know what they were talking about since I stopped watching television a few years ago. But, regardless, the lessons were always fun and wise.
What I also liked about this book is that I was reminded just how much we can learn from pop culture. Sometimes I get in these weird moods where I can feel guilty about reading instead of spending valuable time with my children. Or I can feel like Husband and I wasted our date night watching the latest episode of “Once.” But the opportunity to learn is everywhere. The only thing we really need is an open mind. Also, I am now less apologetic about my bookish nature, because I’m going to write a book like this someday.
[Tweet “The opportunity to learn is everywhere. The only thing we really need is an open mind.”]
The authors presented a parenting style that Husband and I adopted several years ago, so it wasn’t that I learned so much about parenting. It was more that I learned to appreciate the things that we already do and the lessons that we can learn from screens and pages if we only take the time to look.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this inside look at my life and family and what I’m reading. 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 the familiar smell of his skin, the way it stretches across his back, just waiting for my touch;
it’s his arms wrapping all the way around me, even when I’ve been a little crazy and weepy and anxious;
it’s his voice, filling the house with music always.
It’s the way he keeps hope when I can’t seem to find mine
the way he believes in the me I was created to be when I’m acting like a not-so-nice version of the whole
the way he trusts me with something as fragile as his heart.
He’s there beside me, watching “The Walking Dead” when I go to sleep in the evening, and he’s there, breathing his own dreams, when I open my eyes.
This man with curly black hair and six days’ chin-and-cheek stubble and pure and devoted love is mine, a gift of the greatest significance.
I call him husband. Lover. Friend.
///
Eleven years ago we stood in an old historical church, beneath dim lighting that turned eyes to diamonds, and we said those vows we wrote each other, and we meant them with every in-love breath we took before speaking.
I looked like Cinderella, in white with a crown, and we talked about dreams coming true and love that could light a whole world and happily ever after. We walked hand-in-hand to the building next door, on a path where deer watched our every step, as if protecting our way. And then we danced and visited and he ate and I talked, and the time came to drive to a hotel where we shook our way into the married life.
Dawn broke and he could not find the wallet he needed to board the plane for our honeymoon trip to Disney World, and a groomsman waited for a ride to the airport with us, the newlywed, and this just wasn’t at all what I’d expected twelve hours married.
It was the first time I realized that marriage did not start on a mountaintop like I’d thought. It started here at the bottom of a peak, and it was an uphill climb to make those two lives full of 21 years of beliefs and ways of living and separate ideas fit cleanly together.
It was going to take some work.
///
There are days we love well, and there are days we don’t.
Because even after more than a decade, we are still learning pieces of each other we didn’t know before, like how sometimes all he needs is one encouraging word to believe he can conquer the whole world in a day, like how his heart does not beat so much as sing for all the music bound up in every inch of his body, like how he prefers his frozen yogurt with hot fudge and peanut butter cups and butterfinger crumbs and Reese’s pieces poured liberally on top.
Like how he can capture the attention of boys for hours at a time with old when-Daddy-was-a-little-boy stories and how sometimes he puts plates with food scraps in the sink side instead of the disposal side and how he tries hard to hide his anxiety but it’s still there, even though he never shows he worries at all.
There are days we are each other’s best friend, but there are also days we are each other’s worst enemy.
And maybe we don’t always like each other (because what friends always do?) and maybe sometimes what we do annoys the other, and maybe sometimes we wonder what we could possibly have been thinking all those years ago, but there is something that threads through all those bad days and good days alike.
It is love and it is forgiveness and it is belonging.
It is forever.
No matter how many days we have logged forgetting what we knew surely 13 years ago, no matter how many weeks scream exactly the opposite, no matter how many months we ask the hard questions in the hidden parts of our minds, there is a truth we know: we were made for each other.
His positivity made for my negativity. His acceptance made for my perfectionism. His dreaming made for my realism.
His eyes made for my body. My words made for his heart. His soul made for mine.
Even on the worst of days, this truth lights the dark.
///
It didn’t take us long to find our first fight.
He worked as a youth and music minister at a church on weekends and a personal banker on weekdays while I spent my days writing stories at the city’s largest newspaper. There came a day when we planned to take care of some errands, because the church had handed him his monthly check that morning and we needed to deposit it so we could pay some bills. Except when he opened the planner where he thought he’d put it, that check wasn’t there.
Rent was due in two days, and we didn’t have the money in our account to pay it, without that check. And my mind ran fast from no money to no home to trying to keep a marriage together on the streets.
I sprawled on our shared bed like the whole world was ending while he searched the entire house and still didn’t find it, and he didn’t know all the words that swam through my head that day.
He can’t keep track of a check. He can’t take care of us. How will I live with this?
For richer or poorer, is this what those vows meant? Because I didn’t know if I could do it.
///
Those thoughts can feel like a fire, burning love on its altar, because there are expectations we hold like they are life and death.
Of course this shared life will never be perfectly wonderful, because we are two different people with two different backgrounds and two different personalities, and who can ever be fully themselves all the time, every day? Of course they will not be able to measure up to who we thought they’d be. Neither do we. Of course there are days we’ll think it’s just easier to throw in the towel, because we are human and we don’t always love like we should.
If all we ever do is see the ways he does not measure up to our expectations, how this marriage does not measure up to our idea of happy, how these days spent together are not anything like we’d imagined them to be, we will never make it. Maybe it will take a year or five or fifteen, but that crumbling will catch up, and we will be burned in the fire of discontent.
The truth of marriage is that not every day is beautiful and smooth and light-filled. Some days are ugly and thorny and full of a dark where thoughts and attitudes and beliefs will trip us up, and we will wonder if this one is really The One. But there is a part of love that doesn’t make the least bit of sense, and sometimes we just have to keep climbing, arm locked in arm, up the so-hard hill to forever, because the top of the world is still waiting, and it is still for us.
We can’t look down or back. We only look at each other, and when we see those eyes that still, even today, shine like diamonds, we know.
We know that sometimes love is not a victory march or a kiss that takes away the pain of a lifetime or 30 years of adoration and trust and beauty. Sometimes love looks like showing up on a day we don’t really want to, sticking around when it feels too hard, lifting that cold and broken hallelujah for the years logged behind and the ones left ahead.
This is pressing on toward real love.
///
One day he and all our other band mates quit their full-time jobs. Because we were going to travel, we were going to see the world, we were going to share our music with all who would listen.
Except there was a baby already and another on the way. So I held on to what steady income I had, because we needed something, some way to pay bills, and my job was flexible and allowed travel, so it made sense that I’d be the one to stay.
Year after year after year I spent working a job and caring for a baby and then two and three and five, traveling with our music in all the margins, and my dream to write sat stiffening under the weight of impossibility. There was no time to pursue my dream, because we were pursuing his, and someone needed to collect a steady income.
And then one day I sat exploding in a prayer session, because my dream had stayed in its place, under an increasing weight, for too too long, and I felt the cold bitterness that came with knowing it might not ever be my time. The strength of my resentment surprised me.
If this was for better or for worse, what would I choose from here?
///
It was a whole week of arguing, what felt like one big fight that was really lots of little ones, and we were drowning under the overwhelm of brand new twins added to three other littles, and we walked through the house out of sync and exhausted and wound up too tight. And then came the night it was all too much, and I slammed the bedroom door and he walked out the front and I heard the car rev and those tires squeal, and I thought it was the last we’d see of him.
Because it was a night like that when it was the last we saw of my dad.
We come from a long line of divorce, generations of people giving up on each other, people walking out on each other, people choosing others over their beloved, and what makes us any different? Those anniversaries visit me in subtle ways I can hardly name, like shadows I can’t shake, fourteen years for my parents, fewer for his.
What makes us any different?
I cried into my pillow that too-much-fighting night, and it felt like hours but was really only minutes before he came back and wrapped me in his arms and said the words it always comes back to. I love you. I sat up in our bed and I faced him and my fears, and I told him what I think about when those years of our parents come and go, and he looked at me and pressed my hand and said, We are not them. Their story is not our story.
We come from these backgrounds, and we carry around these cracked hearts, and we feel those pasts like they somehow tell our futures, but the truth is we make our own stories. We are not what has come before. We are not even what comes after, at least not right now. We are who we are in this moment right here, this moment where we choose love and forgiveness and reconciliation or we choose to turn our backs and let marriage fold in on itself.
We are our own story, and just because our parents only made it fourteen years doesn’t mean our love has the same expiration date or that it holds an ending at all.
Our love story is full of its own twists and turns and whole years of unexpected, but it is ours to make and choose.
And so today, eight days from marking thirteen years of love and work, I remember that I would choose it all over again, this love that is hard and wild and strong and brave, this love that burns away all the pieces of two lives that don’t belong to the one, this love that walks us steady toward the top of forever.
I choose him still. Now. Always.
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
I have an amazing friend who runs an amazing company called Handcrafted HoneyBee, which makes personal care products that are, you guessed it, amazing. Husband and I are pretty big sticklers for choosing healthy personal care products–not only for our own health but for the health of our planet.
My friend, amazing woman she is, creates all her own recipes for things like soap and deodorant and chapstick and face masks—but she doesn’t stop there. She takes it one step further. She creates kits that allow girls and boys to make their own products if they want to. Talk about empowering kids.
Lest you get too excited about this brilliant company, I must warn you that the products you purchase will cause you to do some unexpected things. Husband washes his hand fifty-three times a day now, just to smell the pleasant aroma of eucalyptus spearmint. I disappear into my room every evening to “put on my face mask” and frighten kids away from my bedroom door because I’M TRYING TO READ. The boys won’t give me kisses anymore, because they just applied their black cherry chapstick and they don’t want my lips to take any of it with them.
But probably the most uncouth things you’ll do center around the deodorant. I’ve been making my own deodorant for about three years, because I’m weird like that. I have never been able to get mine to smell as divine as Handcrafted HoneyBee’s. I actually like the way I smell now when I’ve just done fifty burpees.
Here are some reasons why you might not want to try Handcrafted HoneyBee’s deodorant:
1. You’ll go around smelling each other’s armpits.
My friend sent Husband and me a trial size of the deodorant, which comes with five different scents: tweed and spice, coconut and mango, rose and lavender, eucalyptus and spearmint and lemongrass and patchouli. So it’s not unusual to see Husband and me, in the early morning hours, sniffing each other’s armpits and saying, “I like that one a lot,” because, well, they smell really, really good.
2. Your kids will ask to smell your armpits.
This is slightly worse than Reason Number 1, because everybody knows kids are like leeches. If they smell something they like—especially something that smells like FOOD—they’ll never want to leave it, and you’ll have a kid hanging under your pit for the rest of the day (because the smell lasts a LONG time).
This has been the problem every time I wear the coconut mango deodorant. The smell reminds me of a book—Treasure Island to be exact. When I wear coconut mango, I feel like I’m on a tropical island, searching for treasure that may or may not come with dangerous pirates—but if it does come with dangerous pirates, I’m prepared. I have my deodorant.
The kids, however, are reminded every time I walk by that they haven’t eaten in fifteen minutes, and, man, they’re starving. What’s that yummy smell?
And, perhaps the most dangerous reason of all:
3. When Someone says, “What’s that smell?” you’ll make a complete fool of yourself.
“Squeaky wheel on the stroller,” you’ll say, or, more to the point, “It was one of the kids.” You’ll say this because you think you’ve been found out and that it wasn’t as silent but deadly as you thought. The Someone will look at you strangely, sniff the air, and say, “Smells a little like mango.” You’ll high-tail it out of there.
Hypothetically, of course.
All humor aside, the products at Handcrafted HoneyBee really are amazing. Each of the deodorants puts me in the middle of a book.
The eucalyptus and spearmint puts me right in the middle of The Jungle Book. Lavender and rose puts me in the middle of The Secret Garden. Tweed and spice, which is a pretty manly scent, puts me in Wuthering Heights, near the dangerously appealing Heathcliff, who smells oh so nice. Lemongrass and Patchouli doesn’t summon a book so much as a movie: none other than Mrs. Doubtfire, starring the late Robin Williams. It’s a clean, fresh scent that reminds of my house as a child. It does not, however, remind me of my house as an adult. That would need a scent far less…desirable.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this inside look at my life and an amazing company. 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
She turns 60 this week.
I have known her for just more than half of those years, and in the same way she has watched me grow from infant to toddler to teenager to adult with infants and toddlers of my own, so I have watched her grow.
I have watched those black-brown eyes she got from her quarter-Navajo great-grandmother, the same ones she gave to me, soften with the forgiveness of years spent working on it. I have watched the mouth she gave my sister smile without the weight of worry more than I ever did as a kid. I have watched her skin wrinkle into beauty lines that speak of wisdom and bravery and joy and a fierce determination that pulled her through all the hell of her past so she stands, today, a woman warrior.
A couple of weeks ago, we pulled off a surprise birthday party for her, and she walked through a closed door into a party room crammed full of close friends and family who love her.
She laughed about having no idea of these plans, because she thought everyone had forgotten she had a birthday coming up at all and had only just begun planning her own celebration. We went right along with her plans so she wouldn’t know our secret, and then we gathered a week early and shouted our surprise and laughed at her shock.
I don’t know if she knows it or not, but the surprise we yelled said much more than that one word.
How could someone forget a remarkable woman like you? it said.
I get to call her Mom.
///
My first memory of her is bright yellow, with orange and pink around the edges, like a brilliant sunrise. She is reading a book to us. She was always reading books to us, because this is what librarians do for their children.
She had a deep love for words, and she wanted to make sure her children loved them, too.
It was in that same house, not long after this first memory, that I remember watching my dad disappear on his motorcycle, and I ran into the house and threw myself onto the bed I shared with my sister, sobbing in my 3-year-old hysterical way because I didn’t know when I would see him again.
She knelt by my side for as long as it took, just stroking my back while I cried. She didn’t try telling me it would be all right. She didn’t try telling me he would be back soon. She didn’t try telling me he was leaving for our good.
I would learn later it was because she didn’t know any of those answers herself. She just hoped. And prayed. And went on with her life, caring for the three of us on her own.
She is the strongest woman I know.
///
She knelt by my side for another crying, too.
It was the first time I’d had a boyfriend. We dated for a month, or maybe two, and I was in love with that golden skin and those blue eyes framed by thick black lashes and the way he threw a baseball from the mound.
And then he decided to date someone his own age, since I was two years younger, and I was heartbroken, sobbing once more into a pillow on my daybed.
She didn’t knock, just came on through without a word and knelt beside me and stroked my back. She didn’t tell me there would be others or that I would probably be glad of this breakup someday or that I was only 15. She only sat there, and after a long, long time, she told me stories from her own falling-in-love days, about the boy who had called into a radio station her junior year and dedicated a love song to her, and it was too much too soon; and about the brother of a friend she’d had a crush on since grade school and how he never liked her back; and about the others who didn’t seem quite right for her.
And by the end of it, I knew I wasn’t the only girl who’d ever had my heart broken like this.
She left my room, and I sat there in the growing dark, thinking about how this woman so beautiful and amazing had handed her heart to a man who had broken it in ways I couldn’t even imagine.
She is the greatest woman I know.
///
I was only 4 that morning we were on our way to church. We had just stepped out the front door when my mom said, Get in the car, kids. Be quiet, but be quick.
My brother and sister and I did as we were told without asking any questions, probably for the first time ever, and we locked those car doors behind us. There was danger in her voice.
We watched her disappear into the house and come back with a garden hoe. She rattled the branch of one of the trees that stood like a canopy over our yard, and something fell to the ground, something striped and long and thick. It writhed on the ground.
She started hacking, in her Sunday dress, chopping like her life depended on it. She saved us from snakes that morning.
She hunted other snakes, too.
The ulcers and sorrow and anger that chased my brother after my parents’ divorce, she hunted those snakes on her knees, praying ceaselessly for him. A boyfriend who asked me to marry him early on, one who held a look she knew too well, she hunted that snake with boundaries and limitations and refusals, knowing what would eventually happen—he would stray and I would leave for good (she was right).
The poverty that followed us like an unwanted dog, because she never could quite make ends meet with three hungry kids, she hunted that snake with a school librarian job on the weekdays and a candy-stocker job at the local store on the weekends.
There were some snakes she could not see, like the ones that waited for my sister in the dark closets of a friend’s house, and the ones that burrowed not-enough holes all through my own heart, and the ones that wrapped my brother tight and hard and closed to the men around him who might have taught him how to be a man.
But she tried with every single day of her life.
She is the bravest woman I know.
///
In sixth grade I signed up for band. In seventh grade I added volleyball and basketball and track, because I didn’t know what I most wanted to do. My mom let me throw myself into all of them. She worked all day and cleaned house in the afternoons and then sat an evening away in the stands, cheering and clapping and paying attention even on the nights I sat the bench.
In high school, there was marching band and state competitions and volleyball and track and softball and tennis, and I wonder how many of those she wanted to miss.
But she never did. She watched me direct the band as a drum major my junior and senior year, and she watched me braid the hair of my teammates in the year I had to sit volleyball out because of a knee surgery, and she drove all the way to a town 40 miles away on her only day off to watch me run the 300-meter hurdles, even though I purposely scratched the event because I was so terrified of the humiliations of tripping over hurdles.
She was there the day I made second chair in the state band, even though I wanted first. She was there the day I ran the 800-meter run for the first time, even though I gassed out by the end of the first lap, since I’d only ever run the 400, and I came in dead last. She was there the day I stood on a graduation stage in my silver robe, shaking through my valedictorian speech while all eyes were on me and the maroon hair I’d dyed the night before as a statement.
She let me be who I was, and she stuck around to watch the failures and the victories so she could love me through every one.
She is the kindest woman I know.
///
She is a piece of my history I am proud to call my own.
I have watched her blossom into a loving grandmother, doting on all these boys (It’s the same feeling I had when you kids were born, she said after the first one slid into the world). And now that I am a mother, I know the courage and perseverance and determination it takes to be a good one, and I am so thankful she carried me in her womb and carried me through my growing-up years and carries me still into my mothering ones.
This woman, who kept every one of my earliest stories in a cardboard box under her bed, is the best mother I have ever known. I am who I am because of who she is.
She is a hero, a warrior with battle wounds and a purple heart and a legacy of love that saved the worlds of three people, and so many more, and it is in her heroism that she has taught me all about how to be the greatest mother—because great mothering does not live in being the greatest housekeeper or the greatest lunch-maker or the greatest provider or even the greatest teacher or discipliner.
Great mothering lives in being the biggest fan.
It means letting children be who they are instead of trying to change them to be who we want them to be, and it means guiding them gently in the way they should go instead of beating them toward our way with words or hands, and it means staying present in the failures and the victories and all the places in between.
It means being the person they most want to be, because we love and honor and cherish and teach and hold and accept.
This is my mother’s gift to me.
This is my mother’s gift to the world.
This is an excerpt from We Count it All Joy: a Collection of Essays, which does not yet have a publication date. For more of Rachel’s essays and memoir writings, visit Wing Chair Musings.
by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
Husband and I are winning at school.
I’m not trying to sound pompous or anything. I mean, the year just started. But our failing is pretty legendary. If you had seen us at the end of last school year, you’d know that we were the parents who stopped signing our kids’ folders in November. I hesitate to say this, because I don’t want to jinx us so early on in the year, but I’m incredibly proud of how we hit the ground running this year.
My boys have been in school for three whole weeks and we are still signing folders. If you knew how many folders there were, you would think this was quite an accomplishment, too. In fact, I’ll just tell you, so you can celebrate right along with us.
The fourth-grader has an agenda that needs to be signed when he finishes his homework and another folder that needs to be signed when I actually see his graded homework, which is a little up in the air, because he’s like the nutty professor and doesn’t always remember to bring this one home. The second grader has a book list that must be filled in with every single thing he wants to read in the afternoon, which is actually quite a lot. He also has an agenda that should be signed after his homework is completed. The first grader has a book folder, an agenda, and a behavior chart. I give out a lot of autographs every day.
Not only that, but in the first weeks of school, the boys inevitably come home with a billion papers I’ve already filled out, because, it turns out, the school’s online system, which I used so my hand wouldn’t get cramped up, isn’t displaying vital information correctly. So I had to fill out the papers with a pen anyway. It’s a good thing I had a little practice, because some of the questions are hard. Emergency contact number? I can’t hold numbers in my brain anymore.
I know it’s still early in the stages of the school year and that the papers will continue to exponentially increase, as will the signatures, but Husband and I created a solid system this year that includes a place for everything, a whole bunch of file folders to keep things safe and some new expectations on the boys.
Husband and I are creative people, and we spent a lot of time this year thinking about how to appear more successful at organization, because we didn’t want to further prove the fallacy that all creative people are unorganized. It’s mostly not true. So I went a little overboard on the office supplies. I filled a jar with pens, because our excuse last year was mostly that we couldn’t find a pen to sign anything and it was totally true. I labeled a file folder for homework, because the excuse, “My little brothers ate my homework” was actually a possibility in our house. This year, the homework and pens have moved where little hands can’t reach them.
And, probably most important of all, we’ve begun to expect our boys to not only pack up their things, which they did last year, but also make their own lunches. Sure, one is barely six and still has trouble distinguishing between a fruit and a vegetable (especially when it comes to tomatoes), but they’re smart kids and fully capable, as I suspect every kid is. Sometimes we make things harder on ourselves, when we could, instead, delegate a task to a perfectly competent kid.
[Tweet “We make things harder on ourselves when we could, instead, delegate a task to a competent kid.”]
So here are my best tips for winning at school:
1. Get organized, whatever that looks like for you. Maybe it’s not a billion working pens and a box of file folders. But find what works and do it.
2. Make kids do things for themselves. It’s empowering for kids to do things for themselves, no matter how much they complain about it at the time. I’d rather be playing too, kids. We all work together.
3. Designate a time for the signing of folders or checking of homework or whatever it is that needs doing. If the time isn’t designated, it won’t happen.
I’m sure Husband and I will be a little winded by the time November rolls around, but, for now, I’m determined to stay on top of things, and we are, thanks to file folders, a jar with pens that actually write and extra help from our fully capable boys.
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.
