by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
Sometimes I am astounded by how long it takes me to write stories.
I’m actually a pretty fast writer. I write fiction for at least two hours every day (I would gladly write for longer if I had the hours to spare), and when I’m in a rough-draft season, which is my get-it-out-as-fast-as-I-can mode, I can log between 11,000 and 13,000 words a day. But when I’m in a final-draft season—my make-sure-this-is-perfect mode and where I’m parked right now—I only log about 2,500 words a day.
What this means is that one Fairendale book can take me at least three months—sometimes longer—from brainstorm to final draft. And after that, there’s an editing season, a compiling season and a fact-checking season to make sure there are no inconsistencies with all the stories.
Sometimes I would like to be done with the particular story I’m working on yesterday (that’s not a typo. I know I’m using past and future tense in the same sentence, but it’s really how I feel sometimes).
I have a son who is the most persistent person on the planet. I’m not talking about the one who argues for hours about whether or not he should be given a second chance to have technology time because he went over on his time yesterday. I’m talking about my 6-year-old, who will work on a first-grade math sheet until he’s red in the face, because he doesn’t want help, he wants to figure it out himself.
I admire this about him. I hate homework in the first place (but that’s a conversation for another day), but I enjoy that I get to see his persistence in action every day at about 3 p.m. He will tap his pencil against his mouth, tilt his head, and turn the worksheet upside down to try to figure out how many quarters there would be in two rectangles. It takes him time to do these worksheets, but when he’s finished, I can tell that his sense of accomplishment and empowerment has grown.
I’ve learned, in my years as an author, that it’s much the same for my writing projects. I know how much work it takes to finish a project as involved as Fairendale. I know how it can sometimes seem to drag on and on without an end in sight. I also know that if I give up, like I want to do some days, if I’m being honest, I will never know that sense of accomplishment and fulfillment that comes from producing something that has the potential to change lives in some small way.
The best things in life, you see, take a lot of time and patience. It’s the same with raising our children, the same with raising ourselves, the same with raising our careers or aspirations.
So take your time. Enjoy your journey. Observe and soak in and revel.
by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
Today he turns 6, this second boy who stole my heart.
It’s hard to believe he is that old. Every time I look at him now I see a boy, not even little anymore. Just a boy with skinny little legs and big feet and a smile that can light the whole house on fire.
Time has flown so fast I want to grab it all back. I want to savor it right now, this moment. I want to hold him while he will still let me, but the problem is, I don’t ever want to let him go.
This weekend we cut a cookie cake and played Spider-Man games and watched him open presents like LEGOs instead of baby blocks, and I kept thinking about how these last six years have gone and how the next six will go, and I feel sad and glad and scared and excited all at the same time.
He is one of the most remarkable children I have ever known.
Just the other day, when I was in the middle of beating myself up about a to-do list largely left undone, with the potential to derail a whole week’s plans, in walked my boy, just home from school, with a yellow flower he’d made and another he’d picked. He was grinning.
“I know you’re working,” he said. “But this is for you.”
He kissed me and wrapped his arms around me in a tight hug, and then he was gone.
For six years I have watched this boy grow into his name. Asa. Healer.
For six years he has been healing holes in our home.
///
We didn’t even know if it was the right time to try for another baby.
Four months before, I had lost my grandmother, and I was still reeling from her death, weeping every time someone mentioned the name grandma, even though she was called Memaw.
And, at the heart of it, I was afraid I could not love another child as deeply as I loved the first. Most mothers of one child worry about this, because, until it happens, we cannot imagine how a heart can expand its body borders so it’s wide enough to hold multiple children.
But then I took that pregnancy test, and it said no, and I cried, afraid we wouldn’t be able to have another baby because so many friends couldn’t.
That when I knew just how desperately I wanted another.
Two weeks later I took another pregnancy test, convinced the first one was wrong because I could hardly climb out of bed in the morning and I fell asleep while my 18-month-old was eating his lunch even though the choking fear was right up there with the drowning fear and the getting-hit-by-a-car fear, ever-present in my mind.
This time the test said yes and I smiled a little, knowing already who he would be.
He would be called Asa. Healer. Zane. Everything that is good and beautiful.
Already, just a few weeks in, this baby was healing my heart, glowing new life in the space my Memaw had taken with her. I knew she would want me to be happy, even in grief. And so I let myself be, waiting to meet another little piece of perfection that might carry her generosity or her spirit or that infectious laugh (It was the laugh he would carry on).
///
He doesn’t even know all the ways he has healed.
In our home, this second boy is the one who comes home from school and tells each one of his stays-at-home brothers how much he missed them while he was away. He is the one who will catch me unaware when I am lost in thought, washing the dishes that never seem to ever be done, and tell me, “You’re doing such a great job doing those dishes, Mama,” and make me actually want to do them. He is the one who will open doors for his brothers and turn on light switches for the ones too short to reach them and comfort his baby brother when he’s crying.
He has more friends than I can keep up with, and he’s the example his teacher uses for a helpful spirit and a kind heart, and he’s more often than not an objective mediator between his fist-fighting brothers.
When I asked him today what he’s been put on this earth to do, his answer was simple and lovely, an honest picture of who he is at heart.
“To help people,” he said.
Yes. Of course. He has been living into that purpose since he was born.
///
He slid into the world after six hours of labor and three good pushes. He was the easiest labor of all.
When they put him in my arms, though, I thought they’d made a mistake. This isn’t my baby, I thought. He doesn’t look anything like the other one.
That mama bond with the first was instantaneous and deep, and I realized later it was because looking at him was like looking into a time-machine mirror of me as a baby.
But this second one, he had blue eyes that would stay blue and the full lips of his daddy and no hair and red splotches all over his body from a labor quick and jarring.
I worried that I would not be able to love him after all.
But I shouldn’t have worried. My love bloomed and uncurled over those days and weeks and months that followed his birthing day.
It was easy to love him. He smiled before any of the others, and he let me hold him as much as I wanted, and there was something in those eyes that could give such courage to an overwhelmed-mama heart.
When his older brother threw a fit because he was tired of sharing Mama’s attention, my baby waited calmly to be fed, like it was really no big deal. When my belly started growing with baby number 3 five months after he was born, he just watched in awe and excitement that there would be another baby. When his mama could not play blocks with him because she had to feed the new baby, even though he was still a baby, he did not fuss or throw blocks in anger like his older brother would have done in his place. He just came to sit by me, kissing his brother’s forehead and waiting for the time when Mama would be free to play.
He is the easiest boy I’ve ever had.
///
There is a danger in this easy.
Sometimes we forget that he has needs, too, because he is kind and calm and flexible and unworried and sweet, a personality that often gets lost in all our crazy. Sometimes we forget that he has his own plans, because he is so good at following everyone else’s. Sometimes we forget that he should not always be expected to act like who he is.
We’ve tried to remind him of this every now and then, because the danger in going with the flow and doing what you’re told all the time and always behaving in the way that’s expected is that you never get to try out rebellion.
Rebellion can be good for us, when used well. It can teach us that we are loved not just for our abilities and our behaviors but for just being us. It can teach us that we are accepted for who we are and not who others expect us to be. It can teach us that we have room to make mistakes, too.
Encouraging rebellion in this precious boy has taken intention and hard work, because he’s the kid who’s happy to stand in front of his whole school and accept that Star award for exemplary behavior and obedience.
But this year I have watched him grow from a boy who had to make sure he was doing everything perfectly right before he tried anything new to a boy who just leaps into the unknown. I have watched him decide for himself that his art is good. I have watched him test limits and slide into a new understanding of what it means to grow up and make his own decisions. And through it all he has remained a healer. Everything that is good and beautiful.
How beautiful it’s been.
Happy birthday, sweet Asa. I am so glad you are mine.
This is an excerpt from We Count it All Joy: Essays, which will release in spring 2017.
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by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
I am one of the poor and fatherless ones.
According to the statistics, I should have turned my angst toward drugs. I should have run with the racy crowd. I should have dropped out of school and skipped college altogether and raised my parcel of kids on my own. Instead, I graduated at the top of my class and then became a first-generation college graduate and then married young and had a parcel of kids I would raise with an amazing, loving, creative, one-of-a-kind man.
But all those accomplishments don’t mean I escaped without deep-seated scars and a lifetime of insecurity and a wounded heart that bled at the slightest puncture.
I got all of this, too. And those scars and insecurities and the wounded heart showed up in things like anorexia and bulimia and perfectionism and isolation and fear and anxiety that chased me through whole days and weeks and months but did not yet have a name.
Then something miraculous happened. Those babies began to slip into my world, and I began to find all my missing pieces. I began to heal.
This was unexpected. It was extraordinary.
It is one of the loveliest parts of my mother journey.
///
It all began nine years ago, when a Valentine’s Day pregnancy test told me what I wanted and feared most: there would be a baby.
I was young, just two years married to my husband, and those eating disorders felt too near, and the self-image insecurities hid just beneath the surface of an ever-rising scale. It was hard to watch those numbers adding up over days and weeks and months, hard to watch a belly rounding, even though it held a precious treasure, because I’d worked so hard to make it remain flat and as close to perfect as humanly possible. It was hard not to think about what that belly might look like later, after a baby no longer hid in its dark, because looks were still important, and skinny still equaled beautiful, and maybe I could be beautiful now, with a belly swelling around new life, but would I be beautiful later?
And then he was here on a cold evening in November, and he locked eyes with me and his held words my husband had tried to say, over and over and over again: You are loved because you are you. And the you you are is beautiful.
So all those days after, when people brought meals and I tried to count calories, sometimes not eating at all, when I logged eight-mile runs every day because I was trying so desperately to get that figure back, I had only to pick up my baby and look into those eyes so aware, so intelligent even then, so indiscriminately loving from the very beginning, to know the truth: Beauty does not live in a body but in a heart.
And he would grow and show me in a million more ways these nine years he’s been mine—in pictures he’d snap with an old camera, even though I was still in pajamas and didn’t have any makeup on, “just because you’re beautiful;” in that knock on our bedroom door when we’ve closed up for the night, just because “I forgot to give you another kiss;” in the smile he wears when I dress up for a date with his daddy.
It took the eyes of a child to show me just how beautiful a woman could be, in her love for a child.
And so these days after having another baby, these days when a stomach needs shrinking once more and it takes more time, because it’s the fifth time, I don’t worry or stress or obsess like I would have done all those years ago.
Because I know I am loved for more than just beauty.
And I know I am beautiful just because I am me.
///
The second one met me with a compassionate heart and his daddy’s blue eyes and all those emotions that took us by storm when his brother felt hurt or when he felt alone or when he accidentally broke something that was important to him or someone else, like the paper monster named Xerxes his brother was building.
He burned all my bridges down.
Because every time tears turned blue eyes to glass, I heard the voice from my past:
I’ll give you something to cry about.
Big girls don’t cry.
Don’t be weak–like her–and cry about something as insignificant as this.
Something as insignificant as someone else’s dog getting run over or a handicapped child unable to cross the street by himself or an old man out to dinner alone, still wearing that wedding ring.
I looked at my sweet boy with his so sweet heart, and I called that voice’s bluff.
Because I learned from a little boy the beauty of emotion, the way feelings can heal a broken world, how tears can wet a dry ground and bring forth something new and green and marvelous, how big emotions can walk us deeper into life. And every time I reached my arms out to my cares-a-whole-lot-about-everything boy, I felt those pieces of my soul shift and the empty spaces fill, because he was me and I was him, and the emotion was a gift, not a curse like I had been told once upon a time.
I let it go, and I learned to live.
I could cry without shame.
I could hope without disappointment.
I could love with abandon.
I could live.
///
The third slid into our lives on a late afternoon in July, and he had the eyes of the first and the heart of the second and a lion’s share of courage and daring and trust.
All those growing days he was the little brother who wanted to be just like his bigger brothers, so he flipped off couches at 18 months and hung upside down off monkey bars when he was 2 and jumped off moving swings when he was 3, and I watched it all with trepidation mixed with hope, because he, too, was finding pieces of my soul that had gone missing.
Mine had been a forced courage all my life, a measured courage that only tried what I knew I’d be good at, because failure always waited for that one little mistake, that one not-quite, that one whoops, and if I failed, who would I be then? I would not be a daughter they could be proud of or a wife he could be proud of or a mother they could be proud of.
And then I watched my daring, courageous, fire-cracker-of-a-boy try that bike without training wheels when he was too young for a bike without training wheels, and I watched him wobble and lose control and fall and then get right back on and do it again. I watched him try that back flip on a trampoline and land on his knees instead of his feet and get right back up and do it again. I watched him propel himself from the height of a swing so he flew for one second in time, but he miscalculated the landing, slipping all the way down the hill and landing on his behind and giggling hysterically about it before getting back up and doing it again.
It took the bravery of a 4-year-old to show me that trying and failing and trying again, in spite of the failure, is the real test of courage, not doing only what we know we’ve already mastered. He was still loved, even though he had failed.
I could fail, and it would not change how much I was loved.
I could fail, and it would not change who I was.
I could fail, and it would make me stronger.
///
The fourth and fifth came to us in late March, and they spent 21 days in the neonatal intensive care unit, testing the will and patience and trust of a mama and daddy, and then they came home and life blurred, the whole year flashing by without our really knowing what was happening.
We could do this, and we would prove it.
And then they turned 2, and they stripped our self-sufficiency right off the skin of our backs, and people came to us from our amazing community, offering their help, and the desperation answered for us. Yes. Please. Anything you want to do to help.
All my life I’d pushed away the help of others, because I could do life myself, alone, and if I couldn’t, then it was failure. It was not enough. It was shame on you.
Two babies changed it all.
Because we needed help from the people who came to sit with three so we could visit the other two stuck at the hospital. And we needed help from those couples who offered their presence so a strung-tight mama and daddy could have a few hours away, a date of sorts. And we needed help from all those people who gave us extra baby clothes and gift cards for baby things and casseroles stacked on refrigerator shelves.
Our babies did not care that we needed help or that we couldn’t do it on our own. They just loved.
It took the acceptance of two little boys to help me see it true: that asking for help was not weakness, a deficiency that proved our mistake in having so many.
It was strength, because we are all in this life together.
We all march on, together.
I was not alone, ever. Not even in this.
///
And now, this last baby, who slid into the world the day before my birthday. He has healed a heart, too, already, in his eighteen days of living, because there was a birthday, when he looked into my eyes and gave me another missing piece.
You see, I’ve never had a great relationship with birthdays, not just because of the getting older, but because, too, every birthday I waited on a call that did not come, from one I still loved even though he’d left. And this year on my birthday I sat in a hospital bed, just eight hours after delivering another beautiful boy, and I held that boy and kissed his lips and forgot all about that call, because here was a piece of perfection, and it was all I ever needed in this world.
Those birthdays used to come and go, and the silence spoke of another silence, of another Father who probably didn’t remember my birthday, either.
Except there was this: a boy born to me safe and healthy and ALIVE, even though we had wondered and worried about the alive part of it, because of a condition I developed in my liver this time around. A condition that might cause stillbirth.
That day before my birthday, all through the night and into the morning, I held a precious, costly gift, and he was ALIVE, and he stared at me and I stared at him, and I heard words that he could not speak and yet could, because a soul can connect and speak to another soul.
You have never been forgotten. You see? That’s what the voice said.
And I did see. I saw a tiny hand on a breast, and I saw eyes that might stay blue blinking hard and then fluttering into the peaceful sleep of a newborn on a mama’s chest, and I saw beauty and perfection and love in the rise and fall of a tiny chest, in the silk of a rounded cheek, in the cute curve of a nose.
I saw the love of a Father who could give new life in the hours before a birthday.
It took the presence of a newborn to remind me that I have never, not in the hardest of all my years, been forgotten.
And every year on the day that is my birthday linked to his, I will remember.
///
I did not know they would do this. I did not know the exhausting-yet-precious presence of six boys would heal me in the ways I have been healed. But they have.
There is a miracle in motherhood: that we become exactly who we were created to be in all their chafing and stretching and rounding off of our edges so we can see a world and ourselves more clearly.
It’s unexpected. It’s startling. It’s hard and intense and humbling.
And there is nothing more beautiful in all the world.
by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
We were just kids when you would follow me around wherever I went, and maybe I thought it was annoying at the time, because I didn’t really want a kid sister talking to all my friends and embarrassing me with all her questions and messing up my “popularity.” A kid sister could detract from popularity in the blink of an eye. (I had much to learn, you see.)
And I remember being on the playground in that tiny elementary school. I remember, first, the house across the street from the playground, and I remember running on the worn-out path around merry-go-round and Mom telling us to make sure you held on tight, because it was dangerous, and I remember the times you fell and the times we told our stories so we didn’t get in trouble. I remember swinging on the porch swing not even six feet from the place where Mom had chopped up the snakes that fell from a tree one Sunday morning, and I remember sitting beside you in a brand new church right down the street that held stained glass windows that gave it a sense of meaning and depth and beauty, even to kids.
I remember the white stone house and the room we shared and the way you’d always fall asleep before I did, because you were always a better sleeper, and you probably didn’t imagine the claws of Freddy Krueger tapping on your window and the giant wolves waiting for you right outside the room and the monsters that lived in the corner shadows and, especially, the closet. I remember coming back into my room and finding my Cabbage Patch dolls with lipstick smeared on their faces, because you’d gotten into Mom’s makeup and thought they needed a little help with the way their creepy faces looked. I remember returning to my room after school and finding my Barbies laid out on my bed, because you’d dunked them all in the toilet, thinking they needed their hair washed.
I remember singing to the kids Bible songs on a CD and trying to teach you harmony when you were too young to sing it, and how I felt when you unraveled all the tape and hid the destroyed result under your pillow so I wouldn’t find out. I remember singing “Teenagers in Love” and getting mad when you messed up the “oooh, oooh, wha-oooh, oooh.” I remember both of us always singing around the house while our brother played Mario on the Nintendo. I remember recording your crying on a tape recorder, because it sounded just like an ambulance, and the way we laughed about it for so long.
I remember moving to Ohio, walking to school in the snow that stayed for longer than we ever thought it would and the fun of throwing snowballs, and the time I threw a snowball that must have had a rock in it, because it made a giant knot on the middle of your forehead, and our brother and I convinced you to tell Mom you’d accidentally fallen on the way to school. I remember watching you that first day of school, walking into your downstairs first-grade classroom while I went upstairs to fourth grade. I remember sharing another room with you, this one with bunk beds because it was too small for anything else. I remember putting my hand on my Sally doll’s cool face, and I remember keeping it there until the voices in the next room faded and her face grew warm.
I remember moving back to Houston with you, for the year we lived with our grandmother, when we would get you in trouble by blaming you for the antics we pulled, even though everybody knew we were the brains behind the operation. I remember taking all the cushions off Memaw’s couch and flipping over the sides, with someone posted at the lookout (usually you) so we’d know when she got home and we could clean up real quick. I remember walking into Mom’s classroom at the end of a school day, and you’d already be there, because the second graders were walked to their respective places, but the fifth graders had freedom and took their time. I remember eating Poncho’s with you for our all-As report cards, back when schools gave incentives for that kind of thing.
I remember moving back to the place we first left, and this time we shared a room and a day bed, you on the trundle that pushed in beneath it. And by this time we were nearly the same size, so I remember you’d borrow clothes and we would borrow friends and you joined the marching band, and we fought like sisters do, and I couldn’t wait to leave our house.
And then I remember leaving, and, a week later, thinking that you were the one I missed most, and so I convinced you to come to my college, even though the same year you came was the year I met my husband, and I always felt a little bad about that—it was almost like it was a waste, because we couldn’t spend a whole lot of time together, since all my extra time was spent with him. It was just the beginning of a man taking the place of a sister. But what I would learn later is that a man can never replace a sister, because a sister is forever and a sister is blood and a sister will always be around, forever and ever, to understand without a word spoken. I remember hurting you and apologizing, and I remember trying to fix you up with the next best thing to my husband, because he really was a good man, and I wanted you to be happy. But you found your own good man in time.
There were so many things you did for me in those later years. It was you who planned the bridal shower, and it was you who planned my bachelorette party, when we all had to sleep on the floor, because my husband and I didn’t want to sleep on the brand new bed until we were sleeping on it together—silly now that I think about it (we all had sore backs the next morning), but you didn’t even blink an eye. You came the first day I had my first son and cleaned my house and cooked some meals and held the baby for a bit, and when you left, you hugged me and reminded me that I knew what I was doing, that I would make it, that everything would be okay.
Now you’re raising your own babies. And I just wanted to tell you, today, what I see:
I see a woman who has become a woman secure in her own skin. I see a mother who loves her children with a love that is fierce and true and wild and hopeful and forever. I see a devoted wife. I see someone who has overcome darkness and chosen to radiate light in her overcoming. I see someone who has taken in the fatherless and spoken a new name over their hearts. I see someone who is lovely and worthy and remarkable. I see someone I feel so proud not just to know but to also call Sister.
I am so thankful for who you are and what you have done in my life, because you have done a lot in my life, whether you know it for not. You have shown me what it means to love in unconditional ways, and you have shown me what it means to forgive a person who hurts you (I was quite a beast pre-wedding. I still feel like I should apologize for that.), and you have shown me what it means to sacrifice in order to make a special day an even more special day.
I don’t think in all my years or in all my searching, if I were, in fact, searching, I could ever find a sister quite as wonderful as you. Happy birthday, Sister. May you have many, many more.
This is an excerpt from Dear Blank: Letters to Humanity, which will release in fall 2017.
by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
It takes only a look from those evening sky eyes, so much like your daddy’s, before I’m lost in time, lost in space, lost in a world where only you and I exist. It takes only one sweet, joyful smile to send me reeling, end over end, in a twister of tears, for the growing up and the getting older and the never again. It takes only one slobbery kiss to crawl all the way down to my depths and remind me, This is it.
This is it. You are it. You are the last born son.
We knew it from the first moment we knew of you. You grew and you kicked and you formed so perfectly, so beautifully, so wonderfully, and I tried to enjoy every minute of your growing, before I’d even met you, because this was the last time.
It’s funny how a new baby comes into a family by storm, how those first few months feel blurry and unreal, and then, looking back, it’s hard to remember a time when new baby was no baby. I try to see what life was like before you, and it’s impossible to remember what I did with my nights but give you the last goodnight, sleep tight kiss. It’s impossible to remember what I did with my mornings but burrow my face into your belly to make you laugh. It’s impossible to remember afternoons without your curled up form, sleeping soundly in a crib.
Ours is not a complete family without you.
I know your brothers would agree. You are the light of their day, smiling no matter how the world is falling apart around you, calling to them when they pass you on their way to the refrigerator, missing them when they’re away at school. You are sunshine in a hurricane. You are morning song splitting a silent night. You are breath and hope and life and love and miracle.
I spent my birthday last year holding you, just three hours old, against my chest, and I did not think that I would ever put you down, because you were beautiful, and you were here and you were ALIVE and you were last.
And then we brought you home and you fit right in like the whole world had waited on you before it started turning again, in just the right way. Your brothers lived for one little smile, one little contagious laugh, one little hand pat on their leg. You looked around for them when they were gone, because the noise was a constant in your existence, and you did not know, exactly, what to do without it.
It’s hard to explain what you mean to me. But I will try.
That first moment in the hospital, you looked into my eyes, and you reminded me that I mattered, because you were born on the day before my birthday, and I’d always had a complicated relationship with birthdays, because there was always someone missing from mine, but you reminded me that my birthday mattered, that I mattered, and you have no idea what that did for me, my sweet. I was able to unfold in your first year of life in ways I had never done. I was able to dream truer and hope wider. I was able to, finally, live.
You are my last born son. You are the culmination of eight years of childbearing, a whole lifetime of longing. I have given my skin, my eyes, my nose, my mouth, my hair to all of you, some getting more of one than others. Mostly, though, I have given my heart, marveling at who you are and how beautiful this mothering is and what a wonder it is that you are all here, breathing, sleeping, living out loud in the very center of me.
But, you see, there is a sadness you brought with you (if, in the future, you happen to notice this sadness shaking my face, it is nothing to do with who you are). Because everything I watch you do will be the last time.
Your first smile—it was the last first smile I would see from one of my babies. Your first wobbling steps—it was the last first steps I’ll ever see from my own. That 2 a.m. feeding, the splendid silence of it, was the last 2 a.m. feeding I will experience.
It comes with being the last child, but it has nothing to do with who you are. You will see the sadness in my face the first day of kindergarten, but it has nothing to do with who you are. You will see the sadness in my smile when you walk the stage at your fifth-grade graduation ceremony, but it has nothing to do with how you’ve done or who you’ve grown to be. You will see the sadness in my pride the day you drive away from home, but it has nothing to do with who you have been beneath our roof.
You will be the last one who learns to drive a car and the last one who takes Algebra II and the last one who marches in the school band or sings in the choir or lines up on a football field. You will be the last one to go to the senior prom, and you will be the last one to pack your stuff and leave home. And so all along this growing up will be moments of such great pride and wonder, and they will be moments of profound sorrow and pain, too.
Soon, you will learn to wield a spoon, and you will learn to dress yourself, and you will learn to tie your own shoes, and there is a grief in this passing away, because what does a mother do when she has nothing left to do? When she is not needed anymore? When she is just an important person in a life instead of a vital, I-can’t-make-it-without-her person?
Well, she loves. She keeps on loving. She keeps on.
I know we’re a long way from those days of doing for yourself and walking to school on your own and leaving home for good, but here we are, in the blink of an eye, at your first birthday, and it’s the last first birthday I’ll experience with a child of my own. So it is a day of celebration, and it is a day of sadness. This evening I will pack away your clothes, which you outgrew weeks ago but which I’ve been slow to clear out, because it’s the last time. I will mail them to your cousin, and, meanwhile, you will keep growing up, never to stop, no matter how desperately I want you to stop, for just a small moment in time so I can preserve that gummy smile and commit it to memory forever and ever and ever, so I can remember the way you reach for me every time I come into a room because I’m your favorite person in the world, so I can watch you giggle and laugh and do a dance of your own when your brothers turn the music too loud. I don’t want the moments to go away, and, like every moment, they must.
So I guess what I want you to know on your birthday is this: You are perfect just the way you are. I love you with all the love I have in my heart. You are a wondrous ending point to our family with your great joy and wide smile and sweet nature.
Happy birthday, my love. You are mine for now.
by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
There is a boy in my home who moves effortlessly through the world.
When I say effortlessly, it is not to say that everything comes easily for him. He works hard at math and sometimes gets stuck on a vocabulary word, but effortlessly, in his case, means unbound and uninhibited.
He is a boy I will watch, mesmerized, as he breaks out into the silliest dance you’ve ever seen just to make everybody in the room laugh. He is a boy who will blow dramatic kisses, and, when I return them, mime all sorts of obstacles standing in the way between him and that floating-away kiss, making him look like an American Ninja Warrior in training. He is a boy who will turn a succession of forward flips all the way from his room to mine, to say goodnight, and then turn around and do the same all the way back to bed, because he just thought it would be fun.
He is the most uninhibited person I have ever known.
The other day, as he came in to tell me good night, he pretended like he was a zombie, turning his voice airy and squeezed up tight so I could better know what he was emulating. I laughed so hard. He makes my night.
What I love about all of this is that my son doesn’t care in the least what other people think. He moves through his world being who he is, and it doesn’t matter to him, at least not yet, if others think he’s strange or silly or a big clown. He is completely comfortable with who he is, and I know he’s only seven, but there’s so much I can learn from him.
Once we become aware of ourselves, we can’t forget ourselves. I have been aware of myself for a long time. I know I’m a sensitive person who will cry at the least little thing because life affects me profoundly. I know that at any given time in the course of a conversation or an interaction with another person, I have at least two storylines running in my head, and my brain is recording every single tiny detail so I can use it later. I know that when my husband forgets to text me when he gets somewhere he’s traveled, it can set up a whole current of anxiety that will carry me into a deep, black hole.
Sometimes I have apologized for these things I know about myself. I’m sorry I cry so much. I’m sorry I missed that thing you said because I was creating a fictional world in my head. I’m sorry I freak out about everything.
What my 7-year-old has taught me is that we must, instead, embrace who we are. We must move more like children—unbound, uninhibited, unapologetic about all the weird and quirky traits we have. Our weirdness is what makes this world hilarious and interesting and even beautiful.
Here’s what happens when you begin to live an uninhibited life:
- You begin to feel less limited, as if there are endless possibilities for who you are—not a single, neat, taped up box.
- You begin to understand that other people have their own quirks, and when you embrace yours, they have freedom to embrace theirs.
- You begin to love yourself. And that will impact every other area in your life.
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I have a post-it note stuck to my mirror, where I write every day at a makeshift standing desk. It says, “Be yourself, in kindness, in courage, and in love.” That post-it note reminds me to embrace who I am and live fearlessly.
Go be yourself, in kindness, in courage, and in love.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this look at living an inhibited life. 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.
