by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
“How are you today?” one of your mom friends asks as she passes you in the hallway of your sons’ elementary school.
You fire back the typical, expected response. “Doing well,” you say, even though, if one were to open up the heart of you, one would see that you are not, in fact, doing well. But it’s too complicated. Too raw. You don’t know her well enough. These are the excuses you offer yourself as you pass by, on your way back home with 4-year-old twins clutching a stroller holding a 19-month-old.
The truth is, you’re incredibly lonely.
Not lonely in the sense of your marriage is rocky or your relationships with your kids aren’t healthy or you have nobody and no one on the planet. You are lonely in one sense only: You are a parent of young children.
It’s so hard being a parent of young children.
It’s hard to find time for practically anything, especially socializing, because all your time is consumed with kids, and all your nights are consumed with making sure they get enough sleep, and all your days are consumed with signing school folders and folding clothes and tidying up a house that gets ransacked in half an hour of kids being home and often doesn’t even take that long to look like a thief broke in and rifled through all the art supplies.
You don’t have much opportunity to make friends or cultivate friendships, because it’s too much work to get everyone packed up in the car, and then, when you’ve finally got the little ones strapped in and ready to go, you don’t really feel like going anymore, because one fought you for half an hour on which shoes he wanted to wear, and one of the older ones is still MIA, in the house packing up all his stuff, because he wants to take a thousand Pokemon cards with him, even though you’ve tried to explain that the kids at your friends’ house aren’t old enough to be interested in Pokemon, and another just shouted that he hates you, because you’re making him buckle his seat belt, which he always has to do, and he’d apparently rather die. Or maybe just run away.
So it’s a very lonely place where you find yourself, because no one has time to talk, except about what’s simmering on the surface, and you get really used to exchanging those pleasantries like “Hey, let’s get together soon,” and then it never happens, because life is busy and parenting is hard and sleep looks a little more inviting at this point. And before you know it, you realize that the only real friends you have are a 19-month-old and two 4-year-olds, because the others are in school and no one ever calls you anymore, not even your sister, and you don’t go anywhere, because you’re not all that big on play dates, and who needs friends anyway? That’s what you’ll tell yourself, because you’d rather not think about what you’re missing.
This stage of parenting is hard. It really is.
Kids are constantly talking to you, and you’re constantly talking back to them, trying to address discipline issues, trying to discuss what’s happening tomorrow, trying to shush them while you go over logistics with your partner, because the only time they really want to talk to you is the moment you say, “Let’s talk about that real quick” with another adult.
This stage of parenting has attitudes and dirty socks and kids trying to fight over who gets to have technology time on the iPad first, and there’s limiting of screens and trying to get them all outside for enough hours in the day so you can actually breathe without someone breathing back into your mouth, and there’s feeding them and feeding them and feeding them again, because this is pretty much the story of your life. And when the day is all done, you’ll sit on the edge of your bed, staring at a nick in your wall that one of the kids put there accidentally with his foot, and you’ll wonder what in the world you were thinking, having all these kids.
Sure, it’s a whirlwind. You’ve heard it said—the days are long, but the years are short. You’ve seen it in motion, because how is it, exactly, that he’s now 9 years old? How it is, exactly that you’re now in your thirties? How is it, exactly, that you’ve gone three months without calling your sister?
Time flies. And yet doesn’t. It’s a mystery to every parent on earth.
You feel lonely, because not only do you never get out, but no one ever talks about the hard parts of parenting. They just all make it look easy. Which makes you feel a little guilty. And probably them, too. Because, really, they’re just like you.
Your body aches when you get up in the morning and when you go to bed at night, because kids will smash you like a steam roller and then hit reverse and do it again. And, also, it’s not easy getting older. Your bones will sometimes feel like they’re coming apart.
You have to deal with arguing and sassing and kids growing teeth at the same time other kids are losing teeth and what should you do about the tooth fairy, and should you let them believe in Santa Claus, and should you tell them about their grandparents and divorce and what that even means? You have to deal with the craziness of impulsiveness like trying to walk up stairs with roller blades on and trying to dig a hole to the earth’s mantle in your backyard and deciding it would be fun to fly with a skateboard off the back porch. You’re dealing with extravagant messes, because kids are slobs.
You’re also battling guilt, all the time. You feel guilty for not spending enough time with your kids, and you feel guilty for spending too much time with your kids, because your partner needs you, too, and you’re feeling guilty about pursuing a career outside the home, or you’re feeling guilty about not pursing a career outside the home, or you’re feeling guilty about not breastfeeding or not co-sleeping or that one time or four thousand times you yelled. You try to achieve balance, but it’s always just out of reach.
You’re exhausted. You’re too young to be this exhausted, but the fact is, you are. You make it to the end of the day, and that’s really saying something.
You encounter important decisions—should I make them this for breakfast? Should I talk to the teacher about a bully? Should I send my child to school, or should I homeschool? Should I quit working, or should I keep working?
You’re watching some friends get divorced and others take a break, or flourishing in a way that doesn’t really seem possible for you and your partner right now. How do they do it? What happened to the others? Will it happen to you?
You’re probably thinking, in the back of your mind, that you’ll only ever be Mom. Who are you, apart from your kids? The Before Kids you seems like another person entirely. (And she probably is.) You wonder if you will ever “find yourself” again. You wonder if anyone remembers your name, outside of Parent.
But one day? This stage of life will only be a memory.
It’s true that in your reality, as it is today, you will sometimes want to tie your kids up or just pretend they’re not even here, shaking the house loose from its foundation. Sometimes you’ll feel a bit too close to crazy, because there’s no one to talk to, and as soon as you get on the phone with a friend, the clowns are hanging from the drapes and opening the refrigerator (even though you cleaned up breakfast five minutes ago), and you won’t be able to ignore the three pounds of grapes eaten in one sitting this time, because there are still three days of lunches that must be made. They’re playing with the plunger in a toilet that probably wasn’t flushed, so you’ll have to hang up before your friend even answers.
This is a hard, lonely stage of life. It will seem like it’s never-ending. It will feel like your kids will always be this challenging, that these fights with the 9-year-old about the restrictions on technology time will always happen, that these disagreements about the way your house is the lamest house ever will always be the way of things. It can feel like you’ll always have trouble with the 4-year-old attitude and that you’ll always be wiping snot and changing diapers and trying to get a good night’s sleep for once in your life.
But you won’t. This stage of life will pass. And when it does, you’ll only have your memories.
So let’s make them good. And full. And way bigger than the loneliness we feel for a small moment in time.
This is an excerpt from Dear Blank: Letters to Humanity, which does not yet have a release date. For more of my essays and memoir writings, visit Wing Chair Musings.
by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
If you’ve followed me for long, you know that I have six boys all born within a span of eight years. The oldest is now nine, and the two who fall beneath him are seven and six. They’re the only ones in school right now, so when they’re out for the summer, we make it a highly creative summer—because teaching them creativity is important to me.
I’ve talked about this before, but this summer my older boys and I created some picture books. We haven’t finished the digitizing part of it all, but we’ve finished the drawings and the writing and will be working on putting the final touches on it so we can give some out as Christmas gifts this year. If you’re my family, pretend you didn’t read that.
When I first started the project with my boys this summer, I pretty much had my own ideas about the way things would go. I would write the story, they would draw the pictures. I chose to do this, because young children, while great at coming up with imaginative concepts, aren’t always great at putting words to the paper, and I wanted them to see how I took one of their concepts and turned it into a full story using description, dialogue and conflict. Picture books are the perfect short example of this.
But what I wasn’t expecting was for them to come back, after I’d read the completed whole story to them, and say, “I think it would be better if we did this.” And I certainly didn’t expect them to be right.
Here’s the thing. I could have said, “You know what, smarty pants? I know more about storytelling than you do, because I’ve been doing this a long time.” But the truth is, children are so much closer to their imagination than we are. I remember what that was like. I had whole worlds built in my imagination when I was a kid. I’ve tried to find them now, and they’re nowhere around. I have new worlds, of course, but I suspect that these new worlds aren’t quite as vivid as those worlds I had when I was a kid.
So the best way to create with kids? Listen to them. Let them be experts. Give them permission to lead. Sometimes, of course, they won’t know quite as much about our craft as we do. But when we’re in the beginning stages, when we’re still shaping that invention? Children have a lot of valuable things to say, and if we dismiss them, we’re missing out on something spectacular.
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If you don’t have kids or don’t plan on having kids, don’t think that you’re off the hook from this particular concept. There are children everywhere. We can always learn something from them. Seek them out. Invite them into your home and your creative endeavors. And watch how your imagination blooms.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this inside look at my life and the lives and inspiration of 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.
by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
Some days I know the truth, and some days it gets buried so far beneath those old lies I can hardly remember its echo.
This morning I woke up feeling out of sorts. Not unexpected, since there is a baby who had trouble sleeping. Since there was a brain that just wouldn’t turn off. Since there is work and anxiety and worry that has, lately, followed me right into sleep.
But this was something different. Something deeper.
This was me. This was my body. This was lie, a pair of them, rising up from the graveyard, where I thought I’d buried them for good long, long ago.
You see, I wrote an essay that got a whole lot of publicity, and here came all those haters, and their voices stirred those ghosts from their graves. While I was sleeping, the corpses came walking, and when I looked in the mirror this morning, they opened their mouths to speak.
Six weeks you’ve had, they said. Six weeks you’ve had to lose that belly. AND IT IS STILL HERE.
And then they smiled with their rotten teeth and told me the worst part of it all.
Unbeautiful, they said. This is unbeautiful. You are unbeautiful.
I could not argue. Not right now. Not today.
Because today, this moment, their words feel true.
///
The first time I heard their voices, I was too young to know them for what they were.
But I listened to commercials and all those teen magazines and the Hollywood ideal of thin and pretty, and I stopped eating lunch when I was 12. I stopped eating breakfast when I was a freshman in high school. I stopped eating the last meal of the day my first day of college, because, for the first time in my life, there was no one to monitor what I ate or didn’t eat.
I thought I could get away with it and that I would finally reach my target weight, which was bony and completely devoid of any vestige of fat, but I had a roommate who cared. She noticed my rapidly dropping weight and dragged me to dinner at a dining hall every chance she got.
So it wasn’t long before I started purging those suppers.
I would walk with her to the dining hall and eat whatever I wanted, and then, when she was preoccupied with our friends across the hall, I would slip off to the bathroom and do what needed to be done.
When she noticed, I made my excuses. Something I ate made me sick. Stress. A virus, maybe.
She didn’t buy it, so the next stop was laxatives, because that was easier to hide. It was my course load, the pressure to make good grades, the stressful news job that kept me in the bathroom all the time. Laxatives got me through the rest of that semester.
Anorexia got easier when I moved off campus. I kept cans of green beans in the pantry, and the days I felt especially hungry, I’d allow myself one can a day. My roommates were too busy to notice.
Then I met my husband, and there came a night when he left a note on my computer at the newspaper office.
Skinny does not equal beautiful, it said.
I looked at his note every time I sat down in my office chair and every time I got up to leave. I looked at it so often that I started to maybe just a little bit believe it. Some days that became most days that became almost every day. For a time.
That simple note rescued me before my heart could stop from the sickness, but there are other ways to die than the physical ones, and I was already well on my way, gripped by the claws of anorexia and bulimia.
///
Today is a reckoning day, six weeks postpartum, a day when I will visit my doctor again and stand on that scale. A scale that will tell me how much I have left to lose. A scale that will tell me, just a little bit, who I am now.
I hate that this is so.
All this time I’ve stayed away from the scale, because I said it didn’t matter, and I meant it this time. I really did. Because he’s my last baby, and I just wanted to enjoy him without worrying about what I look like. And that’s exactly what I did.
Until now.
I dressed for the morning. Those after-pregnancy transition jeans fit. A transition shirt hid the pooch.
I got my hopes up, I guess.
And then I walk in the doctor’s office and I step on the scale and I see how much weight is left, and I thought it would be different, not as much, and those voices start their howling.
Guess you should have tried harder, they say.
Guess you should have exercised more, they say.
Guess you should have worried about it a little more often, instead of indulging in your son, they say.
I try to swallow the disappointment, and then the nurse takes me to a room with a mirror, and I have to look at my body before I wrap a flimsy sheet of paper around it, and I can’t help it. I turn away, because I don’t want to look.
I know what’s there.
Sagging skin that may or may not shrink back this time, because this is the sixth time. Lines that mark my midsection and a belly button that’s hardly even a belly button anymore it’s been stretched and pulled and rearranged so often.
Those voices grab all of it and fling it right back in my face. Right back in my heart.
This is what unbeautiful feels like.
///
Just after the first was born, I did not know how a woman’s body worked. So when he slid out and my belly turned to mush, I cried.
It wasn’t supposed to be like this. I wasn’t supposed to look like this.
Our first day home from the hospital, when my body had only spent thirty-six hours recovering from a thirteen-hour labor, I went for a walk, because exercise has always been my crutch.
Three weeks after he was born, I was out running, with a uterus that hadn’t even fully shrunk and hips that were only just sliding back into place and joints that could not really take the jarring pressure of a five-mile run.
So when I injured myself, because my body wasn’t ready for what I was demanding of it, when I had to take six more weeks off from exercising, I simply quit eating. I pretended I wasn’t hungry. I let my husband finish off those meals people so kindly dropped by.
And then one day he shook me by the shoulders. You have to eat, he said. This isn’t the way to do it.
And I knew he was right. But it was so hard. So hard. Because every time I looked in the mirror, what I saw was unbeautiful.
Anorexia and bulimia make it hard to see anything else.
///
So this is what unbeautiful feels like.
It feels sad and sharp and hard and achy and impossible and shocking.
Most of all it is shocking.
We can go whole years knowing and believing and living the truth, and then one thing, one tiny little thing, can raise the dead and make them walk again.
It happens for many reasons, this feeling unbeautiful. It happens because someone says an insensitive comment about our bodies that hits us right where it hurts. It happens because we live in a society that tells us skinny equals beautiful and don’t you dare argue. It happens because we look in the mirror and the body looking back is not the one we think we need or want.
Unbeautiful, the kind that makes us starve or cut and bleed or stick a finger down our throat, it is a sickness. An addiction. There is no cure.
There is only one day at a time.
Every day we are offered the choice to look in the mirror and shake our fists at those living-again lies and say, No. I don’t believe you. This body is not unbeautiful. It is strong. It is amazing. It is the loveliest beautiful there ever, ever was.
Because this is the truth.
So after my doctor finishes her examination and releases me and walks from the room, I return to the mirror, and I dress again and then snap a picture, because I want to remember.
I want to remember the day I looked at my body and finally, finally, finally said out loud, if only to myself, what was true.
This body, I say. I am so very proud of what it has done. It has housed and carried and nourished six boys and a girl we will meet in glory. So what if there is still an after-belly six weeks later? THIS BODY HAS DONE SOMETHING AMAZING AND BEAUTIFUL. It needs to revel in that. So I will let it take its time.
And I mean it.
Those corpses, the anorexia and bulimia that have breathed down my neck all morning, start crawling back to their graves, because you know what?
They know, too.
This is what beautiful feels like.
by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
Recently, the family and I took a short trip to see my mom, who still lives in the hometown where I grew up. My mom and I got to talking one night about some of the stories I’m brainstorming right now, and she mentioned that she’d love to see a story about my great-grandfather, who, as a child, lived in a railroad car. This fascinated me, of course. He was a railroad man through and through, and, after spending some time in a war, he came back to help lay the railroads in Texas.
My mom kept a whole bunch of documents and old photos that show my great-grandfather and his brothers standing in front of the railroad car where he lived. She dug out some papers with facts like how long they lived there and what the railroad car was called and all their family members who came to visit them.
From this document, I learned that my great-grandfather had an uncle who was a newspaper man. He came to visit my great-grandfather’s family in the railroad car, which seemed to be significant because, on this visit, my great-great uncle would not get out of bed, claiming he had a crazy wife and didn’t want to go back home to all the madness in his life.
Now. All this was fascinating, and I’m currently doing research on railway cars and railroad tracks in Texas. But what was even more significant was the story that all this told about my family. Here was proof of our bend toward the melodramatic. We could trace the origins of it to my great-great uncle.
But the story also showed me my writing roots. I have a degree in journalism. It’s where I started my writing career. And to know that I had an great-great uncle who made a living as a journalist is further proof that I am exactly who I was made to be—and it proves where I’m going.
The past is often hard and painful for us to sift back through. I’m in the middle of writing a memoir that has, so far, taken seven months to write, because the past is much harder to write about than the fictional stories of people, at least for me. Some people think we should just let the past lie. But I believe that our past can show us not only who we’re meant to be, but where we’re going in our future.
That’s what all those old documents showed me as I sifted through them at my mom’s house. I had never met the people mentioned in some of the stories. They died before I was even born—some of them from really bizarre things, like the aunt who died from a squirrel bite. But they left me something—a path forward. They made it through their hard times and became better for them. That means I can, too.
What we can all learn from this is that our pasts have something to teach us, if we’re willing to mine them.
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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
I know how it is. I know how it goes. You just want to know what’s coming. You want to know if there’s something bad around the corner, or something good, because you don’t want to lose your heart to the bad, and you don’t want to lose your hope to the good, because there might be something bad coming after that.
The knowing means a calm and controlled and perfectly ordered life. If you don’t know, you can’t control.
It’s easy to understand. Because there is that past, when you were just a kid, or maybe more than a kid, when something happened, something completely dangerous and out of control, something unexpected and unwelcome, and you just want to make sure nothing like that will ever blindside you again.
And there could be something now, too. A too-empty bank account. A call you don’t want to get. A test. A job’s insecurity. A child. A big step into the black.
There is something frightening about the unknown. We try to leave it be, because we can’t change it anyway, when it all comes down to it, but then we care too much, we think too much, we fret and worry and agonize over all the details—surely there’s a formula that will tell us what’s waiting in the future so we can plan and plan some more.
It’s not easy living in this world of tension, where we aren’t really sure what’s next, whether we’re going to have to venture through sickening dark or blinding bright, and so we try not to. We try to figure it all out. We try to run it over in our minds, every possible situation sitting behind that what if, so at least we’ll be prepared. So at least if our plans don’t pan out we’ll have a backup plan. So we won’t hope unnecessarily and feel those hopes clanging to the ground when the universe throws its curveball.
But we know life doesn’t work that way. Because we just can’t plan for everything.
I did not plan on a layoff two days after I welcomed my sixth son into the world. I did not plan on being launched into my passion pursuits because there was nothing left to do but GO, hard, fast, without even considering its cost. I did not plan on loving so many boys around a dinner table so they could strip me of my control.
I did not even know how to put one foot in front of another.
And I cried and raged and shook a fist to the sky, because I just couldn’t see the end in it, I couldn’t see whether it would work or not, I couldn’t see all those possible outcomes, and it made my head ache with its impossibility, because I was just a small-town girl who grew up in a poor family, and all I knew was I didn’t want that for my boys, and I planned for everything, every single little thing, except I hadn’t planned on this, and here was a place where I could not possibly know everything.
Our circumstances, you see, asked us to walk a plank and pray it wasn’t the end. That we wouldn’t fall. That we wouldn’t go under in shark-infested water.
And then we did.
We fell, and we went under, and the sharks circled, and we tried to catch our breath and fight back to the surface so we could see the sun again. And we did.
The thing is, when the unexpected comes sweeping in, uprooting all those old oaks and tearing the roof off our house and lifting all the random toys our kids left in the backyard so they shift and turn in the vortex, what we get to learn is that those old oaks can be made new, and that roof can be repaired and we didn’t really need the toys anyway.
Before life began to peel the control from my cramping fingers, I thought I needed to know everything. I thought I needed to examine every scenario, every last possibility, so I could just go on and expect the worst and rise again when it came, as it always would. I thought that was best.
But a lost job offered something startling in its hands: freedom.
I sank and I nearly drowned, and my hands were water-logged by the time I climbed back out of those waters, but I rose again completely out of control and unprepared and surprised, and I felt free.
Control keeps us from freedom.
Control says we have to wrap our arms around it or else (fill in the blank). Control says we have to grip this circumstance in won’t-let-go hands until we have wrestled to the death, even though we’re the ones who will do the dying. Control says we have to live on a plan that always knows what’s next.
Control is not telling us the truth.
You, dear one, don’t have to know everything. It’s safe to let go. Go on. Let go. Just open your hand. Pry your fingers loose, if you have to. Let the sparrow fly, and feel the weight of the world and all its possibilities leave your shoulders once and for all.
The truth is, we can’t know everything. Sometimes life will throw us a curveball, and the only thing we’ll be able to do is duck and cover, jump into those shark-infested waters for a time, because the pitches just keep coming, and the only way out is in and under. And sometimes we walk not a plank but a bridge, from one beautiful side to another, and we cannot know which it will be before we take the first step.
We can know that we will rise again. And we will rise stronger. Always, we will rise stronger.
But first we must fall.
This is an excerpt from Dear Blank: Letters to Humanity, which does not yet have a release date. For more of Rachel’s essays and memoir writings, visit Wing Chair Musings.
by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
When you have kids, you realize pretty early on that they have to eat three times a day, every single day, and that’s not counting snacks. We don’t do a whole lot of snacking in our house, but we do cook pretty much everything from scratch. This means that a lot of our time during the day is spent cooking or preparing meals.
The everyday-ness of it all can get pretty exhausting. Every morning, I’m wondering what in the world I’m going to cook that kids aren’t going to complain about before they’ve even tasted it. Every afternoon I’m trying to figure out how to spice up a peanut butter and jelly sandwich—or what we’re going to have if we forgot to make bread or we ran out of yeast. Husband does most of the dinner cooking, but when it is my turn, that’s always the worst meal.
I’d find myself dreading 4 o’clock and then 5 o’clock and I’d just want to order something in or maybe stick some cut carrots and grapes and sandwiches on a plate and call it a feast. But then I remembered that I could listen to audio books.
Audio books have pretty much saved breakfast and lunchtime and dinner in the Toalson home. I actually almost look forward to this time now, especially when I’m reading a book I only let myself listen to when I’m preparing meals. It’s amazing how stories can hook into your brain so that something as mundane as cooking (I realize that cooking isn’t mundane to everyone, so please don’t be offended by my choice of words. Some people think writing is mundane, but without it, I’m pretty sure I would die.) can become something exciting.
Right now, during my cooking times, I’m listening to Kate Atkinson’s A God in Ruins audiobook. During lunch preparation, when all my boys are cleaning up, we’re listening to Stuart Gibbs’s Space Case audiobook, which my boys love.
So the trick to finding pleasure in things we wouldn’t normally find pleasure in is to include in it something we enjoy—like listening to books.
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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.
