by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
Sometimes raising five children feels like a giant, immovable mountain.
This morning my husband and I led the music for our beloved church after months of take-it-easy and watch-from-the-sidelines and attend-and-leave. This summer we have rested from ministry as we have never done in our almost ten years of married life, and I have felt refreshed and renewed and almost fully rested.
And yet we have missed it greatly. So we have eagerly anticipated this Sunday for a month now.
Our church has an amazing program for older children, part of the reason we go, but that program only meets during the first service. We knew this going in and had decided our first-grader was old enough to handle himself for the twenty minutes we’d play on stage during the second service.
So before the second service began, we told him that he would need to sit in the sanctuary’s art space, where we could see him, and draw until the music finished. I explained, probably too many times, that it was really important for him to stay exactly where he was and not go anywhere I couldn’t see him.
Apparently, in his 6-year-old mind, not going anywhere else did not apply to the stage.
He scaled those steps twice, once to ask his daddy something, and, when his daddy didn’t answer because he was singing into a microphone, he came to me.
Thinking he needed something important, like permission to go to the bathroom or a bandage for the scab he’d picked, I backed away from my mic and leaned down close to his face.
Me: What do you need, Jadon?
Jadon: What’s ten divided by ten?
Me: Jadon, we’re trying to lead worship here. Please stay off the stage. It’s one.
Sometimes even one child feels like a giant immovable mountain when it comes to these dreams.
God has very clearly and many times audibly called Ben and me to share music together. This is one of our two-becoming-one ways. We have spent years singing our heart-prayers and our soul-musings together, approaching the throne of God with voice linked to voice, sharing this God-intimacy purposed for us.
But there is a mountain, and this mountain is a great, lovely, matchless gift, but it is also a great big intimidating mound of dirt.
We did not begin our marriage knowing we would have five children. After two years, the first baby came along, that little one with olive skin and black-brown eyes, and then two years later number two was on his way, only I was so convinced he was a she that I bought a whole stack of little girl dresses and skirts and way-cute shirts. And then five months after welcoming that little blue-eyed boy, number three summoned forth a plus sign on that pee-stick, earlier than planned but welcome all the same.
Three boys filled the rooms in our house, and we thought one more. Just one more.
One more was a girl, but she slipped away, and then the longing for a baby become almost unbearable in the months after that devastating loss.
We tried again. And got twin boys.
These boys are rowdy and wild and awesome, and even on the worst days I would never, ever, ever trade my life for another, because this one is brim full of laughter and revelation and delight that far outweigh the work and frustration and impractical of it all (most days at least).
And yet, on days like today, I wonder how unveiling our dreams and then chasing our dreams and then living our dreams is even remotely possible. On days like today, all those numbers feel like one more layer stacking the top of that mountain.
Husband and I occasionally will use a date night to hear local musicians play, and I have found that when I’m listening to these who are playing their gigs several nights a week and traveling outside the local area, my first thought is, “They obviously don’t have children.”
This qualifier, or disqualifier, should not pass my lips.
All these times we’ve shared our dreams with others, our dreams for living artistically and sharing music and writing and art, the cynics race from their hiding, lending their how-in-the-world voices to our five-kids reality and speaking world-wisdom in place of God-wisdom, and sometimes it’s just too much to handle, because I was thinking the exact same thing.
Apparently people with five children aren’t allowed to live their dreams.
And days like today, I guess I agree, because it feels like a mountain I can’t climb just to get out the door on time with enough margin to set up and sound check and run through, and it feels like a mountain just to focus on bass notes and voice notes while eyeing my unsupervised children, and it feels like a mountain that I can even attempt praying from the stage while I’m distracted by the child care or lack of it.
It feels like a huge mountain to pack them back up in our car and drive them home hours past lunchtime and naptime and still try to maintain some sort of schedule for the rest of this tired-and-grouchy-kids day.
And yet I know this Savior who moves mountains, because He is the same Savior who protected number 3’s head during a church nursery accident and then healed that fracture so his little brain was unharmed, and He is the same Savior who spared my daughter a shell-life in this world and instead gave her paradise, and He is the same Savior who held my hand through the tension of a twin-pregnancy and all its risking and bleeding and thought-we-were-losing.
He is the same Savior who wrapped my heart in peace during a thirty-six-hour hospital stay, who wrapped my heart in love after my daughter’s death, who wrapped my heart in joy when those much-prayed-for twins entered our world six weeks early.
Mountains, all of them. Mountains moved.
[Tweet “Our dreams may seem impossible. They’re not. Because Someone Else holds them.”]
This Author of salvation is also the Author of our dreaming, the Author of our very living, and He has called us to this place and this time and these amazing little boys, and He does not call where He will not help, “For the God who calls you is faithful, and He can be trusted to make it so.”[1]
[Tweet “God can still move mountains. So we can dream in spite of our mountains.”]
And so tonight, when we are back in this church sanctuary worshiping with a crowd of teenagers, I steal a glance at my husband, and I lift my hands for the yield, and I close my eyes, because this is my favorite part of the song:
“I give my life to follow everything I believe in. Now I surrender.”
[1] 1 Thessalonians 5:24, The Voice.
This essay is an excerpt from Family on Purpose Episode 9: We Unveil Trust. Dreams. The Kingdom of God. The Family on Purpose series spans the first year Rachel and her examined their family values. She spent a year writing essays on her family’s journey–all the failures and all the small victories along the way.
by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
You came into the world on a hot summer day, and you were easy and tiny and so very beautiful, snuggled tight in my arms. And it did not take you long to find my face with those eyes that I knew would remain large and brown. You snuggled into my chest, skin pressed against skin, and I knew this one would be a special bond, just like the one I had with the ones who had come before.
We took you home, and your daddy had to leave immediately for a youth camp. You were only two days old, and I felt a little anxious at being left behind with a newborn and two others, but a good friend of ours came over and tended to your brothers while I slept a bit with you beside me, and then, when you slept longer than I needed to, I spent some quality time with your brothers, tried to show them that life wouldn’t change all that very much, even though it would. And in the nights, when you woke with hunger on your mind, I would feed you, lying in bed, wrapped around your warmth.
Year after year, I have watched you.
I watched you turn one. You still didn’t have any teeth, and I worried that it was because of a head injury you’d gotten in a church nursery (we still don’t really know what happened), when I spent a whole night by your bedside at a children’s hospital, until your daddy sent me home to see your brothers, because I missed them, and, as soon as I drove away, I missed you, too. But the pediatrician said, no, the lack of teeth was not because of your head injury, and your teeth would come in on their own time table, and they did, at 15 months, when you got eight of them at once and there were days of crying hysterically because it hurt so badly. I watched you grow that year—grow and grow and grow, and I watched you explore your world with a fearlessness that made me marvel and also, just a little, worry, because I knew that I would not be able to to keep you safe forever. You had your own ideas about how the world should taste and feel.
At two, when you still hadn’t spoken anything other than simple words—and you hardly ever even did that, because all you needed to do was point at something and make a little noise and your oldest brother would interpret what it was you wanted, so you never had any cause to speak, I worried that you would fall behind and never discover the beauty of words. So we got you enrolled in some speech lessons, and once those words were unlocked, you never stopped talking, vying for a place in the constant conversations that happened in our lives, and it pained me to see how deflated you’d get when it seemed like no one was listening (even though a mama always hears). Finally, we had to tell your brothers to let you have a few words in all the margins, and they did, of course, because they’re good brothers, and you turned brave in your speech, where you had been wary before.
Your third year, you were keeping up with your brothers on the playground and kicking a soccer ball with as much precision and skill as they had, because you’ve always been gifted in all the physical things. You’d slide down the stairs head-first, and you’d hang upside down on the monkey bars and you’d swing so high I thought for sure you would turn those chains over their steel bar and fall off, but you never did. You just giggled in glee at the feel of flying.
When you turned four, you learned how to read, and every day I got to hold you on my lap and teach you those words that would soon become second nature to you. And even though you didn’t like it, exactly, you knew that it was only for about ten minutes and after that you’d be able to play. You were so mature, so responsible, that we’d let you play outside in the front yard, with your bothers and without us, because you knew about the rules, like staying in the front yard and watching out for cars and never going into another person’s yard or house. I could even leave you for your quiet time without any supervision, because you always stayed where you were told and did all the hard things with a gusto that was inspiring. You’d read books and draw amazing pieces of art, and I remember how excited you would be to show me that impressive fox you sketched in a notebook. You’ve always been good at everything.
This last year, I sent you off to kindergarten with a face full of tears, because even though you fall in the middle of a tribe of boys, you’re still my baby, the one I carried and held and snuggled, and I couldn’t believe you were in school, already. I couldn’t bear that you would leave our home for seven hours every day, and I couldn’t help but feel sad that I would not have you with me all the time anymore. I knew there would be a hole when you left home, just like there was a hole when your brothers left. I could only think about (I know it was silly) what it would feel like when the three of you left home for good. But, over the course of the year, I read all the stories you wrote in your “differentiated learning,” and I kept every one, because I knew they would be treasures for later years, to gather around and remember.
You have such personality and spunk and persistence. This year you even got an award for that persistence, and even though we didn’t tell you, because we don’t want you to rely on awards for who you become, your persistence really is remarkable. It is this that will carry you through all the rest of your days.
In your persisting in this first year of kindergarten, do you know what you have taught us? At the beginning of last year, I lost my job, and we were in a pretty scary situation, because we didn’t know what we would do for jobs, and a little child—you—led us. You showed us that we could do whatever it was that we could dream up to do, because that’s just the kind of person you are.
You have shown us our salvation, the strength of our hearts, the courage that we carry at all times but sometimes forget—because you do what needs to be done even if it terrifies you. You keep going, even when the odds are downright impossible. You do what needs doing. You don’t turn aside. You put your hand to something, and you finish it until it’s to your standard, something you can be proud of—and in all of this, you have taught us how we can overcome. You have taught us how to keep going, how to persevere, how to do all the hard things, because in your trying, you have done the hard things, too. In your trying, we saw your bravery, and we became brave, too.
In a way, you saved us. When we thought about giving up, there were all your bothers. There was you, the boy who kept trying no matter how difficult it was, no matter how far you were knocked down, no matter what came up against you. You are in inspiration to everyone whose life touches yours. You are a wonder. You are a marvel.
I am so glad I get to be your mama, Hosea Jude. So very glad. Happy sixth birthday. I love you
by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
“Are you going to go swimming tonight, Mama?” he says in that little-boy voice. It’s the 5-year-old, who likes to play with her hair. Who loves to snuggle. Who thinks she’s the most beautiful woman in the world.
All that doesn’t matter. She’ll still say no.
“Not tonight, baby,” she’ll say. Because she didn’t shave her legs or her bathing suit doesn’t fit yet (maybe it never will) or she’s just too tired today to deal with the emotional effort of trying to put on a swimsuit.
Because it takes great emotional effort to squeeze into that piece of spandex she keeps in her closet, where she can’t see it.
Those secret excuses—I’m just not ready to see what I look like, I’ll wait until I have a chance to lose more weight, no one wants to see this—go unsaid.
It’s okay, she tells herself. I’m still watching, so it’s not like they’re missing me. It’s still family time. I’m still present and fully engaged. I’m still there in the way it matters.
Every time she reads one of those articles urging women to just put on a swimsuit and get in the pool, this is what she tells herself.
Because, you see, it’s not as simple as just putting on a swimsuit and getting in a pool.
She’s had babies, and with every one of them, she added new marks, the ones that are almost invisible, almost unnoticeable, until they see daylight and start shining like they’re proud of their jagged lines, and people don’t need to see that. People don’t need to see the jiggly stomach she still carries five months, five years, fifteen years later. People don’t need to see those blue veins on the back of her knee.
God, she hates swimsuit season.
She does a pretty good job of hiding that disappointing body on a regular basis, with baggy shirts and hold-it-in undershirts and those workout pants that actually make her butt look a little bit good maybe.
Swimsuits are nothing of the sort. There is nowhere she can hide.
Children don’t understand these things, of course. They need other excuses—like she just doesn’t feel like it or she’s tired or she’d rather watch them having fun than join it. (Well, maybe not the last one. It’s too close to the truth.)
Her boys don’t care about the way she looks. They don’t care what other people think. They don’t care what she thinks, even.
Neither should she.
She knows this.
It’s just that it’s easier said than done, that putting on a swimsuit and getting in a pool. See, she is recovering from years of eating disorders, years of body dysmorphia, years of I-just-want-to-be-perfect-but-can’t.
It’s been years, a decade, more, but she is still recovering. She will always be recovering. This is her reality. No matter what they tell her, no matter what those body-empowerment proponents say, she still cares about having an attractive body, and she still cares about swimsuits showing the world that she doesn’t (at least not from her perspective).
Every year after babies were born, she slipped back into that perfection mode—gotta lose it fast, gotta get “it” back in record time, gotta somehow fit back into that spandex suit well before summer rolls around, even if the baby came in May.
Every year she could feel those old ghosts creeping in, telling her not to eat, telling her to stick a finger down her throat, telling her to reach for the laxatives. Just do it. It’s easy. You’ll be thin in no time at all. Remember?
She fought hard, too. She pressed through, every day, every hour, every second. She made it, sort of. Her hair was a little tangled and her clothes a little torn and she still walks with a limp she’ll try to hide.
But it’s not a once-healed, always-healed kind of thing. This is her body. This is her eyes. This is her criticism of something that would be beautiful on someone else.
Trying to stay in a constant state of body-appreciation instead of body-despising is really hard work for women like her. And there is no easy way out of this body-conscious state irritated by summers at the pool. There is only through.
She will have to go through.
She’s managed to avoid it, until now. But now they’re asking, every day, and she knows. She knows how this will go.
Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who can look their best at all…
After children
in a swimsuit
walking in broad daylight?
What all those “outsiders,” the ones who have never fought through anorexia or bulimia or dysmorphia, don’t understand that it’s not so much what other people think as what she thinks of herself, how she feels about that body wrapped up in a too-tight suit.
What does she think?
Well, she tries not to think about that.
So she makes her excuses for as long as she can. She stays out of the pool. She watches.
Her boys just keep asking (and thank God they do, because she can’t use those excuses indefinitely. They’ll never let her.).
And then, one day, her husband whispers in her ear, I think you’re beautiful. Just wear it for me. Just get in the pool and play with your boys.
And she thinks maybe, maybe, maybe she can.
Maybe she can.
She doesn’t look, can’t look, in the mirror, so she doesn’t know exactly what she looks like. These steps have to start small. This is how it must be for now. She’ll leave without looking, but that doesn’t mean she’s lost this war. Because she GOES.
She goes. She leaps. She soaks up the joy of those precious boys, who are just so excited that their mama is finally, finally, finally in the pool with them. Finally.
And Isn’t she beautiful? their eyes say.
Isn’t she beautiful?
And another day, another more courageous day, when she has the strength to look in that mirror and still go, she will see it, too.
Yes. She sure is beautiful.
by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
We all gathered on the same two acres where my sister and brother and I grew up, though the house we lived in for seven years no longer sits on the land. Another marks its place instead, wider, longer, newer.
Fajita meat smoked on the island in the middle of the kitchen. A bowl of my mom’s potato salad hugged the edge of the counter, a metal spoon rising out of it. A cake, frosted in white, covered in candy mustaches, bleeding red along the sides, waited to be cut.
It said, “Happy Father’s Day.”
I’m not a cake person, but my eyes would catch on those words every time I passed by the island. Happy Father’s Day, it said. Happy Father’s Day.
All day long I felt something pinching at the corners of my existence. All day long I shoved it back down where it belonged, hidden and safe in a heart that had come to terms with this, truly. All day long I tried to forget about my rocky relationship with the word “father.”
But it’s not something a fatherless child can so easily forget.
///
My memories of my father, especially the first ones, are vague and hazy and uneven. I remember looking up to him and remembering how tall he was, like a giant. I remember watching everything he did with awe and adoration, like he was the very definition of a hero. I remember the way he smiled, his eyes crinkling up in a way that made you want to do whatever you could do to elicit another, because they were so few and far between.
I remember hands that would hold me when crossing a road, so I would be safe, and hands that would smack me for crying harder when he threatened to give me something to cry about. I remember tall glasses of milk with butter biscuits and the mess of a kitchen my mom would have to clean up after my father decided to cook. I remember a bright yellow truck and swimming in a murky lake and words that could sting worse than his hands.
I remember standing beneath a cover of trees, the wind pulling at my dress, whipping it against my knees and calves, while he climbed on the back of his motorcycle. I asked him when he would be back. He said nothing, only smiled and drove away. I watched him until I could not see that motorcycle anymore, until I could not see him anymore.
And then I remember gone.
///
It took him a long time to come back, but he did. He came back and then he went away again, and then he came back and went away again. After a year of his being gone, my mom told us we were moving.
To Ohio, she said.
To be together, she said.
Like a real family, she said.
We cried and protested, because we didn’t want to leave our friends, and we’d never been out of the state of Texas, but we went in the end. We had no other choice. Being a real family was too alluring.
My mom settled us into the largest house we’d had, or at least that’s how my memory tells it, even though I can’t remember the rooms all that clearly, because a veil dropped over my memory that year, as if my life had been a candlelit movie set until a move to Ohio turned it into a darkened theater, with only flashes of clarity.
But what didn’t happen in the Promised Land was we weren’t together. We weren’t a family. Nothing changed.
My father’s absence in that year carved a jagged hole in my heart. I tried to be the best I could be, so he would come home. I tried to make the best grades, tried to have all the right friends, tried to be perfect, tried to be less of an inconvenience, tried to prove I was worthy of love. But nothing I did could bring him home.
We left Ohio with failure whipping across our backs, and I would work harder in the years that came after, always trying to prove I was somebody. Somebody great, somebody noteworthy, somebody who deserved a loving father who stuck around.
The harder I worked, the larger the hole grew and the harder I worked and the larger the hole grew and the harder I worked. It was a cycle that could not be tamed.
I fell fast and furious into it.
///
I was a seventh grader when my step-dad showed up at the front door with two large pizzas and met us for the first time. He was a young blue-eyed buzz-cut-haired man who treated my mom like she was something special, and as much as we loved that about him, we could not forgive him, at the time, for taking my father’s place. And we made it hard on him.
We shouted our disrespect, and we fought with our hands and our hearts and our words, and we told him we didn’t want him to live with us, never ever ever. We did everything we could think to do to make sure that our father’s space was untouched. Saved, if you will. Because our father might one day return.
It’s hard for a kid to let go of that dream. It’s hard for a kid to let another man step into the place of one who should have loved them unconditionally, recklessly, forever and always just because they shared his blood and genes and the long legs and thin lips and straight hair.
But my stepdad stuck around. He fought for our hearts. He picked up all the pieces my father left and said we could be his. We could be loved. We could be good enough.
My stepdad walked me down the aisle, and he sat in the waiting room the day all my sons were born, and he calls my sons his grandsons, even though they share none of his blood. He has shown me what it means to be a father.
It means putting a heart back together with Duct tape and calling it spectacular anyway.
///
My husband is one of the most hands-on fathers I know. He cares for our children for half a day every day. He plays with them, he raises them, he speaks life into them. I watch him sometimes with a mixture of love and awe, because I never knew that a father could be like that. So hands-on. So forgiving. So involved and heroic and wonderful.
I never knew a father’s love could be so spectacularly life-changing—not just for the ones who are the recipients of it, but for the ones who are watching it unfold around them.
A father, in my world, had only ever picked up and left, moving on to another family—one that was better, easier, more worth the work of sticking around. But healing crept into my heart, watching my husband. Not just because he was a phenomenal father but also because he messed up.
He messed up. My father messed up. We all mess up.
A father has a tough job, this being a hero to the ones who look to him for truth and love and identity. Some fathers aren’t up for the task. Some are. Some try. Some don’t so much. Some step into the role and play it for all it’s worth. Some are too afraid to even toe it.
And some? They just don’t even know where to start.
///
So Father’s Day. It’s not an easy day for me. I always feel a bit guilty that I only really call my father once a year, on Father’s Day. Sometimes I don’t even do that. Sometimes it’s just a text. Sometimes the whole day goes by and I’m so busy with my husband and boys that I forget to even text.
Part of the problem, see, is that my father is not the first person I think of on father’s day. I think of the man who stuck around when the going got hard and I turned into a raging teenager. I think of the man who stood there, stoic, when I called him an idiot because he wouldn’t let me go see my boyfriend. I think of the man who spun me around the dance floor during the father/daughter dance the day I married.
Father’s Day isn’t always a simple day in the lives of the fatherless ones. Some of us have blood fathers who gave up and called it quits, and that damaged something deep inside, told us we weren’t worthy of the effort it takes to be a dad. Some of us have fathers who left in other ways, like death or suicide or an accident that left him inaccessible to us. Some of us never even knew our dads.
We were hurt by our dads. We still carry the scars. Maybe we haven’t quite forgiven them.
And so when it comes time to celebrate dads, we say, oh, well, it’s just another day in my life, because I never really had a dad anyway.
But there is something I have learned in the years between that vulnerable 11-year-old and this woman I am today, and it is this: Dads come in many different shapes and sizes, and the ones we think of on Father’s Day aren’t always the ones who scientifically contributed one half of who we are.
The fathers of our heart look like teachers and coaches and friend dads and stepdads and fathers-in-law and mentors. They look like the ones who step into our lives when others step out. They shape us the same as any dad should, even though they didn’t have to. They fill us. They rebuild us. They are dads.
And so, for Father’s Day, I choose to thank all those men who step into the lives of the fatherless ones and teach men how to be men and women how to be loved. Thank you for your presence. Thank you for your generosity. Thank you for your love.
Happy Father’s Day to all the fathers of our heart.
by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
Children do not see in gray, only in black and white.
Here I go complaining and criticizing and judging, and I have told them this is not the way, and, oh, it is so hard to live the way I desire my children to live, without this bend toward complaint and this critical spirit and this judging others from the sidelines, but how else will they see and know and really understand if not for the example I set?
“We don’t whine in this family,” after listening to a request for water that is impossible to fulfill where we are, and ten minutes later, I’m whine-complaining about the heat and how ridiculously hard it is to carry a double stroller packed with twin babies and lunch remains and a heavy camera up forty-five steps in 104-degree summer heat because Daddy didn’t want to trace our steps back to the air conditioned elevator, and how in the world will they understand that we don’t whine in this family if my words sound a whole lot like whining, too?
“You only have to ask me once,” after listening to fourteen demands for help opening their child-proofed pajama drawer (to encourage only adult-supervised dress-up) and then, five minutes later, demanding for the hundredth time that they put their shoes in the designated place instead of the middle of the floor, and how in the world will they understand that we don’t pester and nag in this family if this is what I do?
“We tell the truth” after one tries to sneak an extra stuffed animal friend through the church doors, even though I permitted them only one, and an hour later I’m pacifying the can’t-get-his-shoes-back-on littlest with “I’ll help you in a minute” when I really mean I’ll help when I’m finished packing up the twins and gathering their diaper bag, and how do you even answer when your 6-year-old announces it’s been a minutes and it’s time to help his brother and you’re not even close to being ready to help, and how in the world will they understand that our yes should be yes and our no should be no and that truth is the only acceptable communication in our family if I cannot do the same?
The old way of it, that do as I say and not as I do, it must become more than this, because these little ones are watching, always watching what we do, barely hearing what we say, and they will be just like us in the doing, regardless of the saying.
How will they learn the magnitude of speaking lovingly and truthfully and respectfully if they do not first see it from me?
Do as I do, that is our parent maxim, and anything less means our words become meaningless mist in a world full of dew.
[Tweet “Do as I do is the only parenting truth our kids understand. So we must do as we want them to do.”]
And when we fall short, because we all have and do and will, these little ones learn still from our awareness and our confession and their forgiving that follows.
Because we must see the wrong way to know the right.
This is an excerpt from We Speak Truthfully. Respectfully. Lovingly., the seventh episode in the Family on Purpose series, which will release July 5.
by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
Dear society,
Let’s settle something once and for all: Boys are allowed to have feelings, too.
I know you feel uncomfortable with a boy who cries. I know you cringe to see a boy walking sad. I know you can’t stand to see a man barely able to crawl from his bed for the darkness hanging his head, weighing him down.
I watched my brother shake beneath your hand, society, but I didn’t fully understand it until I had six boys of my own.
These boys in my home are brim full of emotions, and those emotions leak out his eyes when he’s told he can’t bring a book to the lunch table, because he’d rather bury himself in a book than talk with friends about video games he doesn’t play; and they climb out his mouth when his playing time passes way too fast and he’s not ready, not at all, for the clean-up time; and they hide behind frustration when he just can’t execute that flip as perfectly as he wants.
I know what you would tell them, society.
Forget about it.
It’s not that bad.
We’ll give you something to cry about.
Man up.
Man up, because real men don’t cry.
And there they go, walking around with their emotions trapped by your dam, so they’re ticking time bombs, and you shake your heads in disgust when you read about that young man sneaking into an elementary school with a loaded gun and that baby’s daddy beating her, a toddler of only two years, to death and all those men walking out on their families because disengagement is easier than feeling the sorrow of alienation or the frustration of a crying child or the disappointment of a rocky family that points to a rocky marriage that points to a messed up life.
There they go, turning from their inner lives toward stoic silence and solitude and cynicism. There they go straightjacketed by the rules of manhood, so they don’t even know who they are anymore.
You are stealing life from these boys, society.
You whisper it behind your hands: Wow. He’s really sensitive. Dramatic. Easily upset about so little.
And you shout it in their faces: Be someone different.
And you tell them a thousand other ways that men don’t feel because they’re men, dammit.
But here’s the thing, society:
Real men do cry. Real men do feel. Real men talk and grieve and walk with vulnerable hearts instead of clenched-tight ones.
You are not a man if all you ever do is hide behind a straw house of strength. You are not strong if you never show us weak.
[Tweet “Real men do cry. Real men do feel. Real men talk and grieve and walk with vulnerable hearts.”]
When do our boys just get to be who they are, without being called names or labeled into a box or dismissed as something they’re not?
What if all that negativity poisoning a life leaks from a clenched-tight heart in those tears that make you so uncomfortable? What if letting a boy walk sad for a minute means we save him from not just a physical heart disease but an emotional one, too, because he feels understood and supported and highly esteemed? What if naming the darkness following that man who can barely climb from his bed means, for him, a release from the shame and fear and anxiety heaping his shoulders at the possibility of being found out, of being seen as weak, of forfeiting his identity as a real mean?
What if they all walk lighter for it?
Maybe we see a brave new world, a world where boys stand with an emotional vocabulary they aren’t terrified to use, where boys honor and value their emotional lives as rich windows to their souls, where boys unclench those precious, magnificent hearts.
Where men can be real men.
And that, society, is worth letting my boy weep for the losing of a toy, because it meant a whole lot to him. It’s worth permitting him a good, healthy cry for the leaving of a house when it’s time to go, because he genuinely, wholeheartedly enjoyed this visit with people he loves. It’s worth holding him while he shakes out his sorrow for the trouble he had at school because he really, really regrets it.
After all, “teardrops are healers as they begin to arrive” (Rumi).
[Tweet “Teardrops are healers as they begin to arrive. –Rumi.”]
