by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
Time has been holding my hand these last few weeks.
Not in the way of an intimate friend, but in the way of an impatient parent trying to drag a slow-to-get-ready-child out the door so they won’t be late. It’s because of the birthday coming up that I don’t want to mark, because I don’t like marking my climbing age anymore.
I know I couldn’t have always seen birthdays like this, because I was a really young child once, and every really young child dreams of growing up someday. But for as long as I can remember, I have hated getting older.
It’s not the birthdays, exactly. It’s their number, the way they creep around every year, the way they whisper things like time is running out and you haven’t done enough with the years you’ve been given and you should be further along the writer path than you are today.
Birthdays, for a long time now, have looked down on me in disappointment, tallying up those years and stretching their hand across all my past, as if to say, This is all there is?
Yes. This is all there is.
I wanted it to be more, but time was never exactly kind, and days rushed toward dark, and weeks ran toward months, and whole years, when I didn’t really know what I was doing or where I was going or who I even was, slipped right through my fingers.
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I don’t know exactly when those birthdays began breathing down my neck.
Maybe it was the ninth one, when I blew out candles on a ballerina cake my mother had ordered before an instructor told me I was too “chunky” to continue lessons with her, a day when my friends and family all surrounded me except for the one who had missed so many other days like this one, a day when “chunky” got all tangled up around “gone,” a day when I used my wish to say, I wish he would come home.
Or maybe it was the twelfth one, when I stood on our front porch waiting for my whole invited class to show up and only a few did, a day when there was no call or note or card from the missing one; a day when there were no candles to wish upon, because I was too old or maybe she was too poor; a day when I still made my wish on the first star in the sky: I wish I could be pretty so he would come home.
Or maybe it was the twenty-fifth one, when I had just quit a dream-come-true newspaper job to follow my husband on a church-planting adventure, a day when I decided I would just spend my time writing, a day when I peed on a stick and it said yes, a day when I still made my wish on the candles my husband lined up on a cake he’d made himself: I wish I could publish a book.
Maybe it was all of them, because a tenth birthday came around, and he did not come home; and a thirteenth birthday came around, and my beauty, or lack of it, did not bring him home; and a twenty-sixth birthday came around, and I had not published a book.
Birthdays did not feel like friends at all, even to a 9-year-old girl. They felt like fingers pointing to all the ways I had disappointed time.
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I wish I could say it’s different this time around, but it’s not.
The day after my birthday rolls around, my job will end. It’s the first time I have never worked for someone else.
And all that space feels more like an expectation, not a possibility, because there is a birthday climbing on my back and whispering in my ear, Another year older, and what have you done? The answer is not much, and so this birthday takes my words and cackles and throws all those other years, when wishes didn’t come true, right back in my face.
So when my husband asks if I want to celebrate with friends and family, I say no.
Who wants to mark another year gone when there is nothing to show for it? No published book, still. No job. Not even a family that is “put together” and “doing it” and functioning past the overwhelm that raises tempers and flings words at each other we don’t really mean.
Only an aching back, because kids have pulled all the joints out of whack. Only anxiety that still claws at a neck, even though I’m practicing meditation and exercising and learning to change my thoughts and popping that pill every day.
Only a collection of dreams and wishes that never came true.
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When I was 8 years old I saw the movie The Goonies (still one of the best movies of all time), and I remember how, for days, I dreamed about all those skeletons.
I would sit in the bathtub, and my mom would come check on me, and I would see a skeleton walking through the door. My little sister would be fast asleep in her bed when I came in, and I would see a skeleton lying between the pink sheet and the purple-striped blanket. I would imagine my dad, wherever he was in the world, slumped in a corner, in skeleton form, looking like One-Eyed-Willie, except there was no treasure waiting on a lost ship.
What I’d seen in a childhood movie had thrown reality at me, proven that one day we would all die, and one day we would all turn to skeletons like the ones Mikey and Bran and Mouth ran into. Death terrified me, because it looked like those brittle bones, and sometimes it looked even scarier, like the wax figures lying in a casket, and neither one was what I wanted to be.
When I imagined getting older, I imagined death. And just like that, a little girl broke off what should be a happy relationship with her birthday.
She didn’t want to grow up. She didn’t want to get any older. She didn’t want to die.
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So, you see, getting older has never been exactly easy for me. I was never the girl who couldn’t wait until she turned 10 or 16 or 21, because every one of those years felt like a step closer to death.
And even this week, when another birthday has come and gone, it passed with more dread than excitement.
It’s silly, when we get down to the heart of it, that we fear getting older. We, especially women, can feel time ticking so loudly—this many years until I can no longer have a baby, this many years until my hair turns all gray, this many years until they will no longer think of me as “young.”
What does it really matter?
Because there is a great gift in getting older, too, a wisdom that begins to settle into our bones when we realize that life is not really about these little things—having a job or not, publishing a book or not, making a name for ourselves or not.
Life is really about who we become in all these years. Who we become in our families and in our communities and in our selves.
Will we become people who believe accomplishment and accolades and just-right circumstances tell the whole story of who we are? Or will we become people who believe that our true worth is really tied to who we were created to be, who we already are when we peel away all the layers a world can wrap us in?
We are all born with a diamond down deep inside us, and the diamond is brilliant and visible for a time, and then the world covers it in a great heap of armor, and then we spend the rest of our years trying to uncover it again so we can see and know and believe the treasure we already are, without the qualifications and accomplishments tagging behind our name.
And if getting older means uncovering more of that brilliance, one shovelful at a time, then I want to embrace this getting older—because it’s another way I love myself.
So this year, on my day, I didn’t check for more gray hairs and moan about the wrinkles that have begun to gather around the corners of my eyes from smiling too much at my boys, and I looked, instead, toward the gift that time holds out to me every single birthday: one more chunk of a diamond revealed.
And then I whispered my wish.
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by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
In December of last year, Husband and I released a single called, “The Needle Breaks the Skin.” It was a song that took us two years to write, record and perfect, after a friend of ours asked us to write her a song about scars and healing and telling our stories.
In another life, Husband and I had been traveling musicians. We produced three full-length albums before we had our third child. But as the children started taking over our lives, we realized that we’d have to cut back on the traveling and even the making music, since none of it really paid the bills and there were these children to feed. So we took a step back and then another, and still another.
For two weeks in December, we set up virtual concerts, dusted off some of our old songs and played music. It was hectic, a little nerve-wracking, and wonderful, all at the same time.
We’ve missed the music. It’s been hard to fit it in our lives, but what this experience taught me is that pursuing a passion, unrelated to our work, is important for our well being.
I love what I do. I get to write for hours every day. Some people would think that’s the worst possible job ever, but I continuously search for more hours to write.
I also love music. There aren’t many hours left for it anymore, but it’s important that I stick with it. In fact, I’ve committed to writing at least 20 new songs this year. Maybe it will take us 10 years to record them, or maybe they’ll never get recorded at all, but the point is that even though the music is not front and center anymore, it is still living. It remains.
The thing about a passion, outside of what we do for our day job (and I hope you really love what you do, too), is that when we pursue something that doesn’t have any expectation attached to it—expectations like success or income or whatever it is—we have the opportunity to engage in simple, innocent play. Play is good for us. It helps us maintain our connection with creativity. If we are all work and no play, we are, indeed, dull people. Science has proven it.
[Tweet “Pursuing a passion unrelated to our work offers us an opportunity to play. Play invigorates us.”]
Music gives me a place to play, without the expectation that it will ever turn into anything more.
That’s why I’ve pursued music so doggedly in my life. I can’t not pursue it, because in an industry where I am constantly pouring myself out through essays and stories, I need a space where I can fill again. Music provides me with that space. I am simply creating art and maybe, along the way, changing a few lives for those who happen to hear it.
What is your space? What fills you when you have emptied? Find it, pursue it, and you will see a greater depth of meaning open in your life.
[Tweet “Find your passion space, pursue it and open your life to the wonder of play.”]
I hope you’ve enjoyed this inside look at my life and my perspective on loving yourself. Every Friday, I publish a short personal essay that includes a valuable takeaway. For more of my essays and memoir writings, visit Wing Chair Musings.
by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
Dear President Obama,
It is with a truly heavy heart that I say farewell to you and your family today. There are many things I will miss about your leadership of the American people, and because I know that our tendency as human beings, as fickle Americans, is to dwell on all the things that went wrong in a stretch of presidency instead of all the good that came out of it, I want to take the time, today, to say, Thank you. And I mean my thanks with all of my heart.
If one were to ask me what I will miss the most, I would have to say it is this: Your classy interaction with your public and your honorable representation of the American people to the other nations of the world.
You have shown the American people an example of what it means to live in love, in honor and in respect at all times. You have shown us what it means to not take yourself too seriously and have a laugh or two at your mistakes—because we all make them. You have shown us what it means to return ill-spirited, judgment-laden words with kindness and fortitude.
I don’t know much about you, personally speaking. I don’t know much about you, politically speaking, either. I do know that you made it possible, through the Affordable Care Act, for my husband and me to launch our own businesses and still provide good healthcare for our six children. How transformational. I also know that the few times we forgot to send packed lunches with our three school-age children, they had healthy lunch choices in their school cafeteria because of your wife’s desire to save our children’s lives through their diets. How noble.
And I know that your example of family has been a beacon of hope for what family could be. Surely no president of the United States can make it through eight years of leading a nation without significant family tension and stress and conflict. I was not present in the private rooms of the White House, but in your public appearances, you and your family have always exuded adoration, support and deep, abiding love. How beautiful.
Thank you for your tireless efforts, for your constant concern, for your honorable example. Though we, the American people as a whole, do not see it now, and though some of us never will, we are grateful for your efforts on behalf of our well being.
In the eight years you have led us, you gave the American people dignity, because you embodied it. You gave us a higher standard of what it means to be human, because you exemplified it. You gave us love, because you lived it.
I wish you peace, joy, wonder and triumph in all the days hereafter.
Thank you for your faithful service.
In love,
One of the little people.
by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
In the last six months, Husband and I have shifted our lifestyle to include six days of the week where we eat only complex carbs, and very few of them at that, and absolutely no sugar. One day a week, we allow ourselves to splurge, which usually ends in one or both of us feeling pretty sick, because chocolate is so hard to parcel out in small doses.
At the beginning of the year, however, we, like many of our friends and family and acquaintances, made it our goal to tighten up the healthy eating even more. Husband said he wasn’t going to allow sugar until he’d reached his ideal weight, which, honestly, will probably take the whole year. I decided to underachieve and just do a 30-day jump start.
However. That 30-day jump start only lasted seven days.
Let me tell you why.
This is actually a very unusual thing for me. I’m a pretty self-motivated person. I think the scientific term is “gritty.” When I say I’m going to do something, I do it. I persevere, almost to a fault (as in, I will die trying to meet a commitment if I’ve agreed to it). But I could not do this. Why?
Because of my children.
When I was in college, about to marry Husband, I spent a whole year avoiding sugar. It was easy at the time. I just told myself I wasn’t going to eat sugar, and I didn’t. The only variable that has changed in those years, besides getting older, is children.
I recently finished a book about the power of habits, and in it was an example about how people who choose to make a habit of working out also choose to eat healthier. This has been studied by science, with MRIs of people’s brains to prove that habits are strong and mighty. The problem, as I see it, is that the adults whose brains were imaged were not specifically parents.
Parents have an almost impossible task before them if they want to suddenly change their diets in drastic ways. Let’s go over some of the challenges.
1. Kids have ravenous appetites.
Which means, if we’re trying to keep carbs off the table, the only thing that will fill our children’s belly in a way they deem satisfactory is carbs. Otherwise they’ll eat twelve turkey burgers and be hugging the toilet tonight. We’ve tried stuffing their faces with stalks of celery, two pounds of salad, fifteen carrots, but they are always still hungry.
2. Healthy meals are (usually) unattractive.
We drizzled some olive oil and artichoke hearts over some chicken the other night, tossed a bit of arugula on the side, and our kids complained like the sky was falling on top of them. We’ve eaten this meal before. For several years now. But my kids have an almost unconscious aversion to anything that looks weird. Most of the meals I cook look weird. I’m sorry. I’m not a Top Chef contestant, and, frankly, I wouldn’t want to be.
3. Parents don’t get to eat normal meals.
When we place dinner on the table, that’s only the beginning. There are a thousand other things that have to happen before we can actually sit down and eat, and by the time we do sit down, our meal is already cold, and the kids are asking for seconds. So we end up cramming asparagus into our mouth before someone gets down from the table without being excused and destroys the whole place in a matter of seconds.
4. There’s so little to look forward to in a day.
Why not look forward to chocolate? You’ve just conquered a day with children (or maybe just survived. Nothing wrong with that). Might as well reward yourself for it, right?
All humor aside, I did have to reevaluate why I was putting stricter parameters around my eating. I’ve always struggled with body image and confidence, and what it boiled down to, for me, was that I wanted to look good. That’s not a good enough reason. Life’s too short to deny yourself simple pleasures just because you want to reach an practically impossible ideal (I have had six kids, after all).
So I’m back to six days on, one day off. Which reminds me—today is my splurge day. Please excuse me while I go pop a few peanut butter cups and revel in the bliss that is chocolate.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this inside look at my life and how kids sabotage parents’ efforts to eat healthy. 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
You’ve been telling me how to be a woman all my life. You, with your glittering perfection and your attractive bar of expectation and your promises for love and acceptance and significance—if I’ll just do this.
Just this being perfect. Just this juggling everything—home, love, family, career—and making it all look easy. Just this flaunting your definition of a perfect body.
I see your expectations in the eyes of my sisters. I see them in magazines, where models have hourglass figures and smooth skin and sculpted limbs. I see them in the heroines you splash in the plot lines of television shows and movies—those strong women who are always great business women and yet loving mothers and caretakers at home with their perfectly groomed and well behaved children.
I see your expectations everywhere, because, somewhere along the way, we all bought into your idea that perfect is synonymous with woman.
Perfect body, perfect life, perfect job, perfect careers, perfect husband, perfect home. Perfect, perfect, perfect.
The story you tell is an alluring one. That I could be loved and celebrated for being perfect is an attractive thought. That I could do it all and do it all well enough to call it easy is a daunting yet coveted dream. That I could be made to feel desirable for wearing a perfect body even after six babies have stretched and torn and marked this one is a lovely idea.
But what you don’t always say, what we have to often discover for ourselves in ways that feel disappointing and terrifying, and, sometimes, shameful, is that your story is no more than a pretty little lie.
Being loved and celebrated for a perfection that doesn’t exist is nothing more than being loved and celebrated for wearing a fake skin and fake smile and fake attitude that everything is just fine the way it is, even if it’s not. We reinvent ourselves, sharing only the parts we think the world will find worthwhile and beautiful, and our real selves, with their thoughts and mistakes and disgraceful struggles, are buried beneath the weight of a life that wears perfection like a shell but cannot hold up to the shaking storms. Hiding our imperfections means we lose, all around.
Doing everything and doing it all well is an impossible feat, so of course it will never look easy, of course it will never look simple, of course it will never look as wonderful as we’re promised it will look. Because there are always snotty noses to wipe and dishes to wash and toilets to clean and emails to send and a partner to please and time to give and papers to sign and work to do and hearts to mend and sleep. This kind of life, trying to find balance and make it look easy, will mostly make us want to sleep.
The perfect body, what might this look like? Glowing face, dolled-up eyes, unlined neck, stick-thin arms, perfectly symmetrical breasts, tiny waist, wide-but-not-too-wide hips, muscular-but-not-too-muscular legs, pedicured feet? Maybe more? Who gets to decide the dimensions of this perfect body? Men? Women? Covert masochists?
Your expectations are just like your story. Pretty little lies, all of them.
So I have come here today to tell you this, societal expectations: Thank you for your standard, but no thanks.
I QUIT.
I don’t need your dazzling ideal of what a real woman should be, because I know that who I am is a real woman. I am a real woman with my imperfection and my imbalance and my body that doesn’t look like all the magazines say it should. My sisters, with all their different pasts and all their different realities and all their different sizes, are real women, too.
We are much more than false realities and easy achievements and bodies that fit into our jeans today but may not tomorrow.
So what if our story holds some pits along its path? So what if we’re falling into those pits right this minute, because danger and disappointment and mistakes are often hard to see until you’re right down in the hole of them? So what if our lives don’t look like all those fairy tales because we have to work really hard at choosing love every single day?
So what?
So what if our career isn’t quite where it would have been had we not gotten married when we did or had kids when we did or just chosen to quit when we did? So what if our home has dust on every surface and dishes piled in a dirty sink and enough lint on the floor to clog four vacuum cleaners? So what if we just yelled at our kids because they were being really annoying and we just couldn’t take it anymore and then we had to apologize and agree that, no, it wasn’t the proper way to talk to each other?
So what?
So what if we carry a little weight around the hips because we really like chocolate and we just passed the holidays and birthdays are coming up and Valentine’s Day will be here before we know it, and there’s really no point in trying to lose it now because it’s just a losing try? So what if we don’t every day painstakingly apply that makeup because we don’t really care about standing out in a crowd or being seen for the beauty we can paint on our skin? So what if we didn’t get around to working out today because the baby was a little fussy or a friend called and wanted to talk or we just wanted to sit out in the cool air of winter and soak it up while we could?
So what?
We’re tired of living up to your standards, society. So we’ll make our own.
The real story of our lives is way better than the fake one.
Today’s work is enough for today, even if we did absolutely nothing.
Forget the beholder, beauty is in the eye of us.
We will bare our imperfections with fear that steps around fear and shares those scary pieces anyway. We will do what we can, right now, today, without agonizing about what someone else is doing and how they’re doing so much more than we are. We will wear our yoga pants and our unbrushed-hair ponytails and our naked faces with pride, because we believe we are beautiful, and that’s all that matters.
We are Woman. Hear us roar.
by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
I can’t believe that the first two weeks of the year is already over. It’s been a blur. It seems like the longer I’m alive, the faster time passes. It could be because I have so many children, and they make time fly because we’re always having fun. Or something like that.
At the beginning of every year I’m always reminded of the importance of setting goals—not just because I do this pretty obsessively with my business goals but because I do it with every part of my life. In the last two weeks of every year, Husband and I sit together and discuss the things we’d like to do in our business, the things we’d like to do as a family, the things we’d like to accomplish as a couple and the things we’d like to do in our own individual lives.
Some of those things, this year, include taking at least one family trip together outside of Texas, spending at least two kid-less weekends together as a couple, and, for me personally, looking at myself in a mirror without immediately looking away.
That last one is a little weird, right? That’s probably because not all of us struggle with looking at ourselves in the mirror and then immediately looking away. I have a hard time looking in a mirror and believing that what I see is beautiful, so I just choose to look away from the image reflected back at me.
But even if you don’t struggle with that particular thing, there are millions of other individual struggles. Some of us can’t bear to go out in public looking like our world chaotically exploded this morning. Some of us can’t stomach admitting that we’re sort of falling apart right now. Some of us give so much of ourselves away to other people in our lives that we have nothing left for ourselves, and we’re feeling it a little (we’ll feel it more if we keep it up). Some of us hate our hangups—the anxiety, the depression, the manic vacillation between highs and lows. Some of us don’t want to get help, because we think it means we’re a failure.
This year, by making one of my personal goals to look in a mirror without immediately glancing away, I have taken a drastic step to say that loving myself is important. I have never loved my reflection. I have never been comfortable in my own body. I have spent a lifetime trying to attain some idea of perfection in the face and flesh I carry out into the world. I have spent far too much time avoiding my reflection and believing this was perfectly okay.
Loving ourselves is important. It extends to every part of our life. If we learn to love ourselves, we begin to love the people in our lives better. If we learn to love ourselves, we begin to love even the people we’ve never met. Loving ourselves is a force of good in the world. I want to embrace that force and carry it like an enormous blanket of acceptance wherever I move in the world.
But it has to start with me. It has to start with you.
[Tweet “Love starts with me. It starts with you. It starts with loving ourselves.”]
None of us is perfect. We all have pieces of ourselves we’d like to change. But this year, I want to make it my goal to love those unlovable pieces of myself. I want you to make it your goal to love your own unlovable pieces, whatever that looks like for you.
Maybe it means dropping off your kids at school with crazy eyes and ratty hair, because you just walked through the tornado of a morning with children. There is no shame in your mess. Maybe it means taking a good, long, well deserved bath and reading a book without interruption for once. There is no shame in this luxury. Maybe it means calling that therapist your friend recommended. There is no shame in that call.
[Tweet “We’re all worthy of love. We accept that worth by loving ourselves.”]
We are all worthy of love. I know that life doesn’t always make this clear to us or easy to believe, but we are. I am. You are. And sometimes the best thing we can do in this journey to self-acceptance is to make it our goal to love ourselves for 365 days until we can finally look into the eyes of the person staring back at us from the mirror and say, “Yes. She is beautiful, isn’t she?”
I hope you’ve enjoyed this inside look at my life and my perspective on loving yourself. 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.
