by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
It’s the last week of school, and I am a weeping mess.
It’s not a sad weeping, really. It’s a bittersweet weeping, a proud weeping, because every step they take on this road that is education and growing up and moving on is another step they take out of my home.
Those heartstrings tied to them want to pull tighter, shelter them from the heartache I know is coming, because it always does. I want to protect them and hold them and keep them.
Mostly I want to keep them.
Keep them small. Keep them safe. Keep them here.
And yet this week has reminded me that keeping them is not something I can do.
Two days ago I watched my 8-year-old walk the stage for his second grade completion ceremony, where he got the “Artful Artist” award. Yesterday I watched my 6-year-old sing and sign and accept the “Best Reader” award during his kindergarten completion program.
Today I watched them both dance their way into summer.
Or I tried. It was hard to find a window between hands and arms and video cameras and smartphones where I could actually see them. I ducked and turned and moved, and everywhere I went there was another camera or phone recording the moment.
I had to squint and tilt my head just the right way to see my sons.
At first I felt angry. Annoyed. Because I was a parent, too, and I deserved to see my sons bust a move just like the next person did.
And then I remembered: It wasn’t so long ago that I did the same.
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Two years ago, when my first son was a kindergartener, I stood in the throng of parents and tried to take a video of him dancing.
Because his daddy wasn’t able to come and his daddy needed to see, but mostly because I wanted to keep the memory forever and ever and ever.
The whole time my Canon 7D kept slipping away from him because I was trying to just watch him, so the video isn’t even a very good one.
I watched him stand on his tiptoes waiting for the music to begin, and I watched him strike that last pose and I watched him walk away with a grin I could barely make out on the screen of the camera.
I could not see that grin shine. I missed the way he made a goofy face at his brothers in the crowd and made them all burst out laughing, because I was so intent on getting just the right shot. I missed the way his feet fairly flew off the blacktop because he was so excited that he’d nailed the dance. I missed looking into his eyes and letting him see the pride that shouted from mine.
I missed.
And to this day, I wish I had the vision in my memory store more than I had the video on my computer’s memory store.
When my boy got home from school, he didn’t even ask to see the video. He didn’t care that there was one.
He only talked about when he had done that jump move and did I see him throw some break-dancing into the free form section? And I had to admit, at least to myself, that no, I hadn’t seen it. Because I was too busy trying to capture video.
I missed.
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We miss something in these moments we work so hard to preserve.
We miss living.
It takes us a while to see it, because we are the first generation of parents growing up in a world of technology that puts access to video at our fingertips, without having to set up the perfect shot or figure out the best lighting or get as close as we possibly can. We have zoom lenses and auto-focus and cameras that can take five pictures per second.
And everything feels so necessary.
I know. I felt it this year.
I purposely decided, before each of the school events, that I would not pull out a video camera this year. But when the second graders walked across the stage for their completion certificates and awards and the principal announced that the center aisle of the cafeteria was reserved for parents taking video and pictures of their kids, I wanted to get up.
And when my son stood with his teacher and turned to the center aisle and no one was there, I felt like I had missed something. Like I had lost an opportunity.
But I just waved crazily from the back of the cafeteria and called his name and let that grin of his slide all the way down into the deepest places of my heart.
You see, our kids don’t have to know that we are recording their every step and capturing their every accomplishment and putting it all into a folder they won’t really care about when they’re 18. They just need to know we’re there. Watching. Enjoying. Marveling.
It’s hard to watch and enjoy and marvel with a phone between us and every special moment. Sure, we may get to savor it later, but what are we missing right now, in this moment here?
There are some things pictures can’t capture.
The excited glow of his eyes. The way that smile lights up the whole room. How he grins even wider, if possible, when he catches your eyes and not just the camera’s eyes.
I understand how we can get caught up with every significant moment and just want to keep it. Keep them. I know what it’s like to feel like you probably should order a class picture and those individual school shots, even though you take a billion better ones at home. I know how a yearbook in elementary school can feel necessary, because how will they remember if we don’t find a way to preserve those memories?
The thing is, they don’t really need our help remembering what’s important.
///
My kindergarten year is hazy in my mind, but I remember balloon letters hanging from a ceiling and a gather-together rug in the middle of the room and a claw-foot bathtub in the corner of the room where we took turns reading for pleasure.
I remember blue mats on the floor and lying down too close to a girl who picked my chicken pox scab while I was sleeping and made a scar in the middle of my forehead. I remember pronouncing island like is-land and how Mrs. Spinks gently corrected me, proud that I’d tried that tricky word at all. I remember a playground with metal seesaws and above-ground culverts painted yellow and tractor tires cut in half.
I remember losing a tooth in a Flintstone popsicle that was pastel orange and my brother choking on a chicken bone, back when the cafeteria chicken noodle soup was made from real chicken, and the first time I slid down the metal slide in shorts and burned the back of my legs.
My mom didn’t have to capture any of those moments for me to remember them.
There is something magical about remembering something the way our minds want to remember them. That kindergarten reading bathtub probably wasn’t as pretty as I remember. That metal slide probably wasn’t as tall (or safe) as I remember. The cafeteria and gym and schoolyard probably weren’t as large as I remember.
And part of me is glad a video doesn’t exist to prove my memory wrong.
///
Memories are so much more than seeing. They are hearing and feeling and smelling and tasting, too, and a video can only catch two of those. Our memories can catch them all.
I record so much of my kids’ lives. When they do something funny. When they wear or say something cute. When they sing one of their original songs or choreograph that amazing dance or write a play and perform it for us in our living room.
I record because I want to remember.
But could I remember without the help?
Could I remember the way he moved his hands in that funky way during “Uptown Funk” without a video camera preserving it forever? Will I remember the hilarious poses he struck during the free-form part of the dance? Will I remember the way my other son tipped his head and made his body so fluid and waved his hands at just the right times during “Surfin’ USA”?
I’d sure like to try.
Because I want to be present in the moment. Right here. Right now. Looking at them with both my eyes open. I want my boys to know what it means to be fully present in a moment, to soak it up and let our memories do their work.
“Are you disappointed that we didn’t get a video of your dance?” I ask my 8-year-old when he gets home from school today.
“No,” he says. He grins. “I saw you dancing along.”
See? He knows the truth of it.
A mama can’t dance when she’s holding a camera.
This is an excerpt from We Count it All Joy, a memoir that does not yet have a release date. To keep up with book releases and to get a free book from my starter library, visit my starter library page.
by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
He hugs the toilet, his head hanging, his legs folded beneath him in a way mine don’t do anymore, his arms trembling because he knows what’s coming.
I sit beside him, not even a foot away, on the lid of a stool his brothers once thought it would be fun to pee in, and I am here because he asked me, because he just wants his mama, because I am the one he loves hard and hurricane-like, and he wants my comfort beside him while he works through the nausea or whatever else may come.
Down the hall, in my bedroom, sit all those things I need to work on, because it’s bedtime and they’re supposed to be asleep, not feeling sick, but I cannot leave him, because he’s my son, because he asked, because he’s gripping the toilet like it’s that old lumpy dog he’s slept with since before he could talk.
I feel angry and frustrated, in a deep place I cannot speak, that we’re here again, bonding around a toilet instead of his bed, like we did a few days ago when he ate too much junk at a birthday party, when I rubbed his back curved over the white that caught his nausea, when I curved relief around his pain. It was okay then, and I waited as long as he needed, but tonight, the ending of this day where too many people derailed too many efforts, where the time leaked into a giant, invisible vacuum, where I’ve just spent the last hour pouring out my voice and my worship and my heart to a group of teenagers in a place where pranks cornered a stage and a guitar ran out of battery and voices had to make up the difference, all I really want to do is climb into bed and bury myself deep, deep, deep, in a book.
And I’m just thinking of this when he asks, between heaves, if I’ll get a story to read to him. So I bring the one that we’ve been reading during our night read-aloud time, and he listens.
It’s only my voice he hears in that tiny bathroom, and it murmurs in waves like the sickness twisting him tonight.
My voice, my presence, is the calm of his night.
I know this feeling, the body all out of control, those sea-foam swells rolling and pushing and pulling, this never knowing when they will pull too hard, when we will lose all control, and it’s wild and scary and unnerving, but the presence of one we love makes us brave.
That chapter winds toward close, and he sits up and watches the pages instead of bending and heaving. We finish, and he climbs into his recliner bed in a room that belongs to books, and I kiss his head and finally, finally, finally close myself in my room, turning down the covers of my bed with only a few minutes to read before I need to close my eyes.
Care, when we’re parents, can look a lot like the care of Jesus, a sacrificing that feels gutting and brutal and maybe even too hard, like a cup we can’t drink, at least not today, and those words whisper in the tangled gardens of our hearts: Take this cup from me. Because there are lunches still to pack and there is bread still to bake overnight and there is a full load of dishes still to be put away, and we have given all we can give and more already, and sitting in a bathroom for an hour, where a boy writhes and cries and hangs heavy over a toilet, was not on that list of to-do today.
Here we are shedding skins of self, one after another, for all the ways they are teaching us and growing us and re-making us.
“I lay myself down for my son who is learning to love because I first loved him,” says Lisa-Jo Baker.
I sit and lend my presence and fan into flame his brave, and he learns love.
We sit and lend our presence and fan into flame that light beam of motherhood, of daughterhood, of what it means to be God’s child, and the truth of it warms the faces of all those littles so they see the way we filled their cup of milk first, even though right there, on the counter next to that empty one is a computer waiting for a deadline-passed-already story; and they see its presence in the way we washed all those stuffed animals even though the laundry piles are taller than they are; and they see it in the way we sit and wait and breathe and read and wrap in these late-night hours when the work undone waits to be finished, like it does every night.
We know it for what it is, a stretching of arms on a cross, a dying to the old and a living into the new of a life named Mama or Daddy. They see it all, and they don’t call it sacrifice, not yet, not right now. They just call it love.
And this is the voice that whispers in their waves, calming their nights.
We die every day on the altar of Parenthood, and this sacrifice is never easy and the dying is never simple, but we are raised to live freer and stronger and so much more magnificent than we ever once were.
They fill all our spaces, and we don’t even know it, but they are burning all those bridges down between the old self that wore those white shirts because they were cute and that marked all those hours as uninterrupted reading time and that thought a career path toward advancement and name-recognition and Pulitzers was the way for her, and the new self that doesn’t even own a white shirt anymore and carves reading time into the bathroom breaks; and chose to pass up that job advancement because she wanted to spend more time at home.
The children who sleep down the hall, the ones I’ve snuggled and tucked and kissed, are walking me right into the aftershock of my dying and living again, and they are stretching all the lines I once drew and knew, and they are painting a sunrise, a new day, in brighter, more brilliant colors, because who I am becoming, with them, is greater than who I was, without them.
We lay down the old self, and we pick up the new, and we let them keep stripping all that skin until we are new and dazzling and beautiful.
This is the miracle of love.
This essay is an excerpt from Family on Purpose Episode 5: We Care for Each Other. The Earth. Widows, Orphans & Foreigners. To learn more about the Family on Purpose series, visit the project landing page.
by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
Here we are. You’re another year older. It doesn’t seem all that noticeable, if I’m being completely honest, because I’ve lived with you every day of this getting older, from the time you were 21 to the time of now. You are greater and truer and much wiser than you were all those years ago.
Remember that first birthday we were together, when I made you a Reese’s Pieces cake, back before we knew so much about food, and the humidity in that outdoor park split the cake in half, so it fell apart before we even cut into it? Remember how we laughed? Remember how we actually used to do something special for birthdays—like invite family to a park or throw a surprise gathering or even go out for dinner?
It seems like a lifetime ago—back before kids came along. It’s a life we hardly remember. We don’t often have the time or energy to do what we used to do for birthdays, or just to say I love you, or to cheer each other up after a terrible day. Kids are hard. We’re entrenched in the raising of our children, and that means we’re not so entrenched in the raising of us anymore. But you know what? Even after all this time, I can’t imagine doing the work of every day without you by my side.
It’s strange how some people talk about the way love fades over the years, and even though ours has changed since that rainy day in October, 12 years ago, it hasn’t faded, not at all, because what has come to us in these difficult parenting years and these trying don’t-know-where-the-money’s-coming-from years and these I-feel-like-giving-up-but-know-I-can’t years is a deeper, wider, longer knowing of one another. We talk more, we listen more, we love more, I think. We know each other’s dreams and hopes and fears and disappointments. We know each other’s loves and hates and frustrations and joys. And even though sometimes I get annoyed that you’re videoing everything for your snapchat followers, because I don’t like our family being on display all the time, I still choose to love. And even though you get annoyed that I’m always talking about the same old things, because my mind works in circles sometimes, beating something to death, you still choose to love.
When you were brought into the world, my love, all of humanity gained a wonder. You are the most amazing man I have ever met in all my life. It’s true that I didn’t recognize it for a time, because I was shallow, and I was, to tell the truth, a little scared of the way you could see right through to the heart of me (you still can, and it’s still just as unnerving as it used to be), soon your curly black hair and your intense blue eyes and the way you saw good in everything to climb its way into my heart.
What is most significant of all is that you stuck around.
It didn’t take long for you to find my flaws, to locate all my insecurities, to feel the weight of my fears, but you stuck around.
I was a girl who didn’t think anyone could stick around, because the most important one didn’t, and I thought I had been made wrong. I had been made ugly. I had been made twisted and undesirable and insignificant.
But you stuck around, and you picked up all those pieces from the ground and you wrote on them the truth.
Wrongly made, I said.
Perfectly made, you said.
Ugly, I said.
Beautiful, you said. Gorgeous, lovely, stunning. Yes, stunning.
Twisted, I said.
Bent but smooth, you said.
Undesirable, I said.
Wanted, you said. So very wanted.
Insignificant, I said.
Noteworthy, you said. Important.
You whispered it in every way, at every turn, and how could I not begin to believe what you’d written on my shards?
Little by little, you gathered them all—all the pieces that someone else had left—and you showed me that a man could love enough to stay, and a man could be trusted to hold a heart in both his hands and not damage it, and a man could see my weak spots and call them enchanting. Those years began to unfold around us, and trust warmed their edges, and you proved in a thousand different ways that you would not be like him, that you would never leave, that you were in this forever and ever and then some. You told me in all the spaces between words that there was nothing I could do that would scare you away or make you turn your back or hasten your leaving. And I learned that I did not have to be alone, as I had always been alone, safe inside my own protective bubble that prevented me from getting too close to anyone who might hurt me. I learned that I could trust the deepest burdens of my heart with a lover, a friend, a fellow traveler along this journey into adulthood. I learned that I could be loved. That I was beloved.
And now I have the great pleasure of watching you with our boys.
I watch you let the 4-year-olds ride your back to bed. Every night they ask, and it doesn’t matter how tired you are, you do it. I watch you sit with the 9-year-old and patiently walk him through all those choices he’s made in a day, especially the ones that haven’t been the best choices, and you don’t hurry, you don’t rush, you don’t get that tone in your voice that says this walking-through-it is inconvenient, because you desire him to know that you’re always here and that you’re always around and that you’ll always be open to talking with him. I watch you with the 7-year-old and notice, again, how he looks like you and talks like you and looks at the world like you, how he reminds me so much of who you were all those years ago—looking at everything with innocence and optimism and a helping heart. I watch you with the 5-year-old, the way you affirm and encourage and love him even in his most challenging moments, and I think how very fortunate he is to have a dad like you. I watch you play with the 15-month-old, every chance you get, and I marvel at how secure he is, how secure they all are, in your love.
You are an amazing dad. You really are a wonder. I never knew that there could be such joy, such love, such hope in watching the one I love raise up his boys into men who will be just like him. Raising up a generation of daddies who stay. What greater gift to the world is there?
It’s true that kids are rough on a marriage, but what kids seem to have done for me is deepen my love and appreciation for you—because I know that you are a man who plays and takes part and loves. You are a man who stays.
You have changed my life in a thousand tiny ways and a whole lot of earth-shattering ways, too—speaking my beauty when I can’t see it myself, believing in me when I don’t have a believing bone left in my body, sacrificing yourself so that I can get a little rest every now and then. I love you for that.
And I know that I can be whoever I choose to be, and you will stay. There is freedom in that knowing. I love you for that, too.
Today, on your birthday, I want to affirm, again, that I appreciate everything you do. I appreciate who you are. I appreciate what you’ve done in my life, in the lives of our boys, and in the lives of so many others who love you. I appreciate your love and your care and your kindness and your optimism and your heart and your dreams and your stubbornness and your help.
Mostly I appreciate your love.
Happy birthday, my love.
by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
I see you.
I see you in the early morning, when it’s still dark, before the kids are up, trying to type out a business plan that’s been taking you a month to finish, because you only get to work on it in the tiny little margin hours, and I see you racing through that devotional and jotting down your own words, and then I see you come quietly down the stairs to start breakfast and hot tea and lay out all the vitamins before it’s time to wake up the kids, because this is how you love.
I see you rushing through the morning, kids asking for shoes and where their socks are and can you help him find his pajamas, because today is pajama day at school, and no one wants to miss pajama day, no way, and where is his lunch and can you help him zip his backpack, tie his shoes, pour more smoothie, find his other library book, decide which picture he should take, sign his reading log, wipe this yogurt spot off the table so he can do the homework he forgot to do yesterday, read this one little part of the book because it’s due today and he didn’t know it. I see you bending, just a little more, with each request that flies your way, because it all feels heavy this morning.
I see you walking them to school, down the sidewalk where too many cars go too fast, and I see you watching them with every bit of attention you have, making sure they don’t even miss a step, because if they do, you fear they’ll go stumbling toward a street that’s much too dangerous in a residential area like this one. I see you walking half of them back, up the same road but with a little less anxiety, because three have been safely delivered, and I see you return to the house you so hurriedly left and straighten up, without ever having a bite of breakfast to eat yourself.
I see you opening your laptop to try to fire off a few emails, or just get a few random thoughts down before kids start coming in and asking for things and the baby needs to eat again, or gets tired and wants to fall asleep in your arms, which you don’t mind, because he’s your last. I see you using the other “free” time to tidy what needs tidying and cut carrots and slap peanut butter on a sandwich and pull grapes from their vines and arrange it all on a plate you slide before them after they’ve cleaned up the crayons and put the Hot Wheels back where they belong.
I see you wrestling them down for naps so you’ll at least have a little bit of time to work, and I see you sitting right outside their bedroom, because you can’t really trust them to be left alone for a single minute, and I see you smiling at their little twinanigans, when before you only felt annoyed, because you’re learning, minute by minute, day by day, to be grateful instead of perpetually annoyed. I see you steal back to your room as soon as the last one falls asleep, to steal a few minutes with your computer.
I see you look around your room and wonder how anyone could work—or even sleep— in a disaster area like this. And even though you’d like nothing more than to work or even sleep, you should really be prepping for the afternoon, getting snacks ready, doing dishes, finishing up the laundry, tidying up the house or this disaster of a room.
I see you bending over the pile of laundry, this pile that seems to pile again as soon as you’ve finished the week’s loads. I see you sorting it all—the white clothes and the light clothes and the dark clothes and the towels and the random things like hats and stuffed animals and blankets and costumes that get put in the laundry because kids are too lazy to put them back where they’re supposed to go and think it would just be easier to put them here.
Easier on everyone but you, of course.
I see you standing at the sink, handing off those plates to one of your boys, while he bends and loads them into a dishwasher you’ll probably rearrange later, because he hasn’t quite mastered the art of saving space yet. I see you wrinkling your nose at those old plates they all forgot to wash off this morning, with the dried yogurt spills, and I see you smile, because you remember what they said when you put those plates in front of them, but they ate it all in spite of the complaints.
I see you sit on the side of your bed after the last one has been wrestled into his, and I see you put your head in your hands, because no matter what, no matter how much work you do, it never feels like you’ve done enough. There’s always something else that needs doing Always some cleaning to be done. Always some relationship that needs repair. Always some request that needs to be filled. Always someone needing something from you. Always some other, more important thing that you should take the time to do, instead of taking the time for you.
There is so much to do in this mother world. And you are only one person.
How does anyone do it? How do they make it look so easy? You must be a failure, all around.
But you’re not. Do you know why?
Look at all this. Look at what you’ve done in a day (as if that’s the measure of success or failure, but we’ll get to that). Look at all the love and the attention and the care and the detail that threads through your morning. Look at the afternoons when you’ll open a window into your soul and let it come sliding out onto paper. Look at the evening, when you’ll sit down to dinner or take them places or read them long stories or let them splash in the bath or put them back to bed a thousand times because you know sleep is important, and you’re kind of a little bit of a freak about this.
What you’re doing is enough.
You, dear mama, don’t have to do everything. You don’t. You don’t even have to come close to doing everything. You don’t have to make beds and do laundry and fold it the same day and scrub the table clean and try to write and make that perfect business plan and send those invoices before they’re too late and read to your kids and bathe them every night and keep your house perfectly neat and tidy and fix dinners that are immaculate and wonderful and should grace the papers of a magazine, or Pinterest, at least, and send those homemade goodies to school so he doesn’t have to eat processed food and volunteer at his class party and cheer him on at field day and somehow find the time to call his teacher about that one thing and pick up all the socks they left on the floor yesterday and write on that one story and make those important calls and balance the checkbook to the last penny and do a puzzle with one and play chess with another and wipe down all the counters until they shine and reserve, if you can, a little bit of energy for your husband tonight and smile through it all, like you’re the happiest June Cleaver on earth.
You don’t have to do it all. You don’t. You are not a failure if you don’t do it all. You’re not a bad mother. You’re not selfish.
Because what you do is already enough.
WHAT YOU DO IS ENOUGH.
Rest in that, for today.
by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
We sit around the table, and we’ve just finished talking about what we appreciate about one another, and now we get to that hardest of hard questions, because this is our Weekly Reset: Did you hurt anyone this week?
I file through my days, tripping over all the ways I raised my voice, all the times I spoke my annoyance in the hearing of a little boy who had trouble staying in bed, the fight I picked with my husband just to get to the bottom line that said he’s not doing enough.
Yes. I have hurt people.
Will the answer ever be anything but yes? We are all in relationship, and relationship feels challenging when we’re such different people and we’re together all the time and we believe we know who everyone should be.
Sometimes, there are places I’d rather be than beneath the roof of imperfect love.
We fail to love well and we hurt unintentionally and we hold those expectations like they offer the reason to love, but it doesn’t matter how many failures we log in a week. What matters is what we do next.
Do we care enough to repair?
Their daddy goes first, apologizing for something the 7-year-old reminds him about, some words he didn’t think through before he loosed them in frustration.
I look out the window, into the backyard at that tree we planted nearly three years ago when their baby sister died. We tore into rocky earth to dig out a hole large enough so those roots could form strong and reach deep, and we packed the choicest dirt around it so that tree would stand secure. This repairing time does the same kind of work in the lives of our children.
This being available for our children, passing over jobs so we can all sit down to dinner together and talk through our Weekly Reset, protecting those dreams flapping our hearts so our children learn the precious magnificence of struggle and pursuit–these are the holes we dig.
Our forgiveness and acceptance and repair form the dirt we pack around their roots.
We can dig a foundation that’s shallow and already full of who we expect them to be, and we can forget to connect them to the ground of unconditional love with our repair, or we can dig them a foundation that is deep and wide and free, and we can pack that repair dirt so they stand tall when the winds blow and the storms rage and the enemies come prowling.
We are caring for one another, rebuilding that home of belonging, showing our children we love that they are not bound by our imperfect parenting but wide-open free to be imperfect, too. It’s not easy to do this work of repair, because it feels different, or we’re not so great at admitting our mistakes, or we fall back into our old thought patterns—that they are children and we are the adults, so why should we apologize for the words we say when they’ve gotten out of bed for the 300th time, or why should we apologize for the tone of voice we used when they interrupted their brother for the eighth time so he had to start all over again on all those places we’ve already heard, or why should we apologize for the toy-takeaway that surprised them into tears when they flat-out ignored our cleanup song.
We can care enough to repair or we can turn our backs and let that connection-tear grow every time we fail again, because we will.
Apology is like a bandage on the cut of disconnection, but back-turning is like a cut that festers without heal. We can see it in our own lives, in the ways others have hurt us, in the places we never spoke repair.
Maybe we’ll find it tough the first time or the second time or the fiftieth time we do our Weekly Reset, because it’s not easy for us to admit, in front of our children, that we shouldn’t have made their daddy feel so small when he didn’t unload the dishwasher and we had to do the unloading and the loading, and this is not the deal we made way back when; that we shouldn’t have told our son to shut his mouth when he interrupted our instruction so he could tell us why he didn’t want to do it that way before we’d even finished explaining our way; that we shouldn’t have scared the 3-year-old back into bed by turning off all the lights that one night.
The words, “I’m sorry,” are like a healing balm to a child soul.
And maybe it doesn’t matter as much right now, when the hurts are smaller and they can barely remember what they did yesterday and they bounce back from injury like that fall didn’t even hurt them, but one day it will matter, and something this hard and serious and sacred takes practice. So we practice while they’re young, and we believe this caring will make a difference.
There is a gift in the imperfection. Because it’s the new creation that counts. And if we are already there, or we act like we are, our children never get to see the beauty of progress, the beauty of a made-new creation, the beauty that is becoming.
“Parenting is about making a journey with our children toward wholeheartedness, and it’s about learning and growing alongside them…” says Brené Brown (Gifts of Imperfect Parenting). “…the most profound moments in our parenting that shape who they are and who we are is our vulnerability.”
May we always show our children vulnerability and choose the care of repair.
This is an excerpt from Family on Purpose Episode 4: We Believe in Jesus. In Ourselves. In All People. Episodes 4, 5 and 6 of the Family on Purpose series will release May 4.
by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
It’s not easy being the easy one, is it? You come second in a long line of boys, and you’ve always been the one we worry least about, because you’ve got a good head on your shoulders, and you know who you are, mostly, and you don’t ask for much. You mainly give. It’s all you’ve ever really done. Observed the world and given whatever it lacks.
But the danger in being the easy kid is that oftentimes you’re passed over, unless you do something really spectacular, because there are other kids who need their behavior curbed and redirected, constantly. Sometimes the frustration of that—the being passed over—comes out in your behavior, and I can tell you’re feeling forgotten. If you only knew. You could never, ever be forgotten, my son. You are a gift to us and to this world. But I know it’s not easy to understand that when you don’t get nearly as much attention as your 4-year-old twin brothers, who are always into mischief, or your 9-year-old brother, who is always badgering us about something, or your 15-month-old brother, who needs more care than the rest of you.
So, today, on your seventh birthday, I want you to know that I see you.
I see you. I do.
I hear you outside, speaking your gentle heart and your kind words to the girl the rest of the neighborhood boys called fat. I hear the way you defend your brothers, especially the flies-off-the-handle one, to all those kids who don’t always choose to be nice. I hear the way you join in and connect and befriend everyone who comes in our cul-de-sac for a game of soccer, and I feel so very proud that you are my son. I feel proud that you are not afraid to show your emotions and name them, that you are only seven and have the amazing ability to curb your actions even when overwhelmed by emotion, that you believe, so deeply, so truly, so contagiously, in everyone who has been put on this earth. What a magnificent boy you are.
It surprises me every time, those days I’m washing dishes and I hear your encouraging voice sneak up behind me, telling me I’m doing such a good job at washing dishes—something as simple and mundane as this. Something so…ordinary. It doesn’t seem to matter in the grand scheme of things, but you find ways to make it matter, because this is who you are. You find the small, overlooked things we do, and you make them shine like a full moon, like they are the most important things we do, because this is who you are. You watch your next-in-line brothers try to tie his shoes, and you can’t help but speak to him, urging him on, trying to teach him what you know, encouraging him to never give up, because this is who you are. You reach for your baby brother and fold him in your arms and let him stay there a while, and he lights up when you walk in the room (did you know that he lights up when you walk in the room? I have seen it), and it’s all a brilliant picture of your love and your help and your interconnectivity. This is who you are. What an exceptional boy you are.
You defuse fights between your brothers, and you take the time to smile at the discouraged one, and you help the twins put on their shoes when it’s time to go and they should be ready, and you never complain about any of it. Sometimes, of course, you get disappointed and sad, and that shows itself in the way you talk or the way you act or the way your eyes leak, but even then, you are sweet and kind and gentle. What a wonderful boy you are.
Because I see you, I have also seen your heart. I know that you feel a little shaky about your abilities. I see it in the way you ask if this is the right answer and the way you want to know if you’re doing it right before you’ve even begun and the way you feel frustrated with math and science and certain building toys before you’ve even begun. And so there is something more I must tell you.
It’s not easy being the second-in-line behind a brilliant brother. I know. I was the second-in-line behind a brilliant brother. You see how easily it comes to them, and you feel like somehow you’re missing something, because maybe it doesn’t come as easily to you. Maybe you actually have to really concentrate in order to figure out the right answer. Maybe you have to re-read the question a time or two and can’t just add it all up in your head. I used to feel that lack, too.
But the thing is, we are all gifted in different ways. So your brother is gifted in every subject. So maybe you’re only gifted in a few. But I have never seen a boy who could make a friend everywhere he went quite like you can. I have never met a 7-year-old who could find a way to encourage every single person he meets. I have never known a child to walk so surely into who he was made to be. And this is a gift, too.
So I just want you to know, today, that I see you for who you are. I love you for who you are. There is never anything you could do differently that would make me love you any more or any less. I love you as much as my heart could possibly love you. I feel as proud for you as I’ll ever feel for you, because of who you were born to be. I feel as privileged to be your mother as I’m ever going to feel, whether you become a superhero like you want, or you just remain an ordinary man who saves the world in quieter, gentler ways.
Sometimes it feels like you’re forgotten in the great mess of our lives, but I want you to know that you are never forgotten. I look forward to our times alone together with so much expectation and delight. I love sitting with you, talking with you, hearing your heart. I love listening to your fears and your dreams and what you did on the playground today and who said they’re mad at whom and how you really wish we could get a dog. I love watching you greet the world with love and hope and wonder, as if the smallest things—that lady bug crawling across the porch, that kite flying in the sky, those bubbles the wind pulls from the wand, still hold as much fascination as they did when you were 15 months old. Because you have taught us wonder, too.
Sometimes you doubt yourself. It’s no less than I have done, but, oh, it pains me when it is you. No mama wants her boy to doubt himself, but sometimes we all need the encouragement of another to feel like we have what it takes to do something hard and amazing and breathtaking. So let me be that voice now. You have a brilliant mind. You have a beautiful heart. You have as much intelligence and kindness and hope and love as you will ever need, flapping around inside you.
You are able. You are able to do whatever your mind decides to do. I know. I see you. I’ve watched you color a lovely picture, color reaching all the way to every side, and it was grander than any piece of art I’ve seen hanging in a gallery. I’ve watched you create grand towers out of those contraption planks, and there is not another like it anywhere in the world. I’ve watched you roller blade down the hill with perfect precision and balance, even though you were only six, and it is a feat to be applauded. There is no one quite like you.
So the next time you doubt whether you can do your math homework or you doubt that you know the right thing to do when two of your friends are having an argument or you doubt whether you’re quite as brilliant as your older brother or quite as dogged as your next-in-line brother, I want you to know that you are who you are, and who you are is glorious. Marvelous. Breathtaking.
Rest in your own abilities. Run your own race. Be who you are.
You are light in the darkness. You are everything good and beautiful. You are a magnificent wonder. I appreciate the person you are, and I can’t wait to see how you take this world by storm and infuse it with joy. Because I know you will.
I love you as much as I possibly could. Happy birthday.
