by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
It doesn’t take us long, does it? We have only to look at those magazines to think, Not me. I could never look like that. Ever. We have only to look at each other—the thin, the round, the short, the tall, the fair, the dark—to remember that there are standards for this, that there are outer attributes that matter more than others: thin, big-breasted, long-legged, large-eyed, shiny-haired, smooth-skinned, thin, thin, thin.
We have only compare.
That’s where it all begins. At the comparison between her and me and you and me and you and them. We are women. We’re really good at comparing.
Comparison doesn’t stay in just the beauty places. We see it, too, in careers, in parenting, in marriage, in influence, in finances, in success.
We read about that author who did something we’ve wanted to do all our life, and we think, Well, guess I’ll never do it now. We hear of parents who never yell and parent in the most empathic way possible and, bonus, have perfectly polite and wonderful kids, and we think, She must be much better at this than I am. We listen to our friends talk about their new opportunities and we see the new cars of acquaintances and we can’t celebrate, not really, because it’s exactly what we wanted, or the idea of it is, at least, and now we’re never going to get it because someone else got it first.
When other people show up with the things we want—the perfect body we’ve been trying so hard to scupt, the accolades we dreamed about, the promotion we should have gotten, the book deal we set out to snag, the song we should have written, the children we long for, the popularity we deserve, the love we desire—we think that means those things aren’t for us, too. We think we should have gotten there first, if only we had done the work it required back when we actually had the time to do it. We think we should be different—flatter stomach, more muscular legs, bigger eyes, more defined chin, bigger breasts, everything that comes with beauty.
But sisters, there is something we’re missing here, and it’s this: There is room enough for all of us.
There is no better or worse, no more womanly and less womanly, do you see? There is only us.
I know it’s not easy to remember, exactly, but it’s true. Someone else having what it takes to be beautiful doesn’t mean that we don’t have it, too. Someone else finding love doesn’t mean we won’t. Someone else walking away from anxiety because they got lucky in that exploration of their past and found the root and pulled it up fast, doesn’t mean we won’t ever be able to do the same.
We think that there is only one space for people. Only one small space to be beautiful, and it’s already occupied. Only one small space to be successful, and it’s already occupied. Only one small space to be adored, and it’s already occupied. So, then, what is left for us?
There is enough to go around, sisters. We live in a world where scarcity is the truth of the day, but it is not the truth of us. Sure, the marketers will try to make us believe it is, because scarcity is what makes people buy, buy, buy, but while there might be a limited supply of products and a limited supply of resources and a limited supply of people making products and securing resources, there is not a limited supply of the things that really matter—love, beauty, family, success marks of a career, dreams come true. And so there is room for all of us in this world. There is room for all of us to be beautiful, for all of us to be successful, for all of us to be loved.
I know how it is. I know how we can get caught in the web of thinking-that-becomes-believing that someone else got something we should have gotten and now there’s nothing left for us. I know, because I have to shake off the stickiness of getting caught every single day when I read writing and blogs from women and men who are trying to do the same things I am—blast the world with truth—and the market feels saturated and water-logged and too concerned with shallow words instead the deeper ones, and maybe I just don’t belong. Maybe I should just stop trying.
But there is room enough for me, too, if I’m willing to carve and bare and build. And I will find my space, because I am unique, and I am my own person and I have something to offer the world from my own individual perspective, which no one in the whole world has exactly.
I only say all that because I want you to understand that there is space for you, too.
Just because the beauty magazines define beauty in those you-don’t-have-it ways doesn’t mean we can’t make our own definition. Just because the world tells us what it takes to be successful people in today’s reality doesn’t mean we don’t get to make our own definitions and shove it in society’s face. Just because that person who was dealing with infertility like we were and now has two babies of her own and we still have none doesn’t mean that there is not space for us here in this miraculous world of parent.
We’re beaten down and kicked around by the subtle message society tries to tell us—that only a select few matter. That we are not, in fact, in that select few. That we should move over and let others take our stage.
It doesn’t matter how we think or how we live or how we love or how we dream or what we do or what we look like or what we see or what we need, there is space for all of us. One’s beauty doesn’t detract from our own. One’s success doesn’t detract from our own. One’s love doesn’t detract from our own. One’s good-mom-ness, good-wife-ness, good-worker-ness, good-citizen-ness, good-decision-ness doesn’t detract from our own.
We are each as different as those stars hanging the sky, and there is nothing that will make us the same, and when we’re thrown together into the black, that’s when we really start to shine. That’s when we begin leaving space for each other.
That’s when we really waver into beautiful.
by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
I’m standing just a few feet away, and there’s this boy, bigger than mine in every way, hanging on the swing my son is using, so my son can’t even move.
He’s glaring at my boy, so I walk closer.
“Get off,” he’s saying. “This is my swing.”
And my boy is trying to swing, oblivious to the bullying going on, so I step in and say, “What’s going on here?”
The boy looks me right in the eye, and he says, “This is my swing. He pushed me out of it and took it from me.”
I look at the boy, hefty and stout, and my boy, all skin and bones, and just when I’m thinking there’s no way, my son’s friend, who’s standing just beside us, speaks up. “Jadon had it first,” he says. He points to the bigger boy. “He was trying to take it away.”
I feel the anger burning my face and my neck, because this is my son, and he’s just been bullied on a first-grade field trip, so I grab Jadon’s hand and say, “Let’s go line up, Jadon,” because it’s time to go anyway, and I have nothing more to say to a bully.
I forget, in that anger-moment, about the opportunity I have to teach another love and honor and respect.
The other boy moves away, into another group, and I fume all the way back to my son’s group, all kinds of assumptions moving through my brain.
His parents are probably bullies.
They probably let him watch lots of violent TV.
They probably don’t teach him a better way.
And, just like that, I’ve turned into one of those people who assume and judge and condemn before I know even one of the facts. I forget to teach and I forget not to assume, and these are the values I champion, so who am I to be teaching them when I can’t remember what to do, how to spread kindness and love and grace in a heated moment?
Sometimes we can be the biggest bullies to ourselves. Because the thoughts that swarm my head sound a whole lot like this:
You sure did a great job teaching that bully a better way. Stupid. No one should ever listen to you.
Look at you and all your assumptions. Hypocrite.
You walked away instead of engaging, you who know all about this emotional and social intelligence. Pathetic.
The chorus plays on, and we’re walking to a fishing pier when I flash back to my dad, storming out the door of a church, flinging the “hypocrite” word behind him at all those church people I, up until then, loved, and he spoke with such derision that I never, ever, ever wanted to be them. I see me in high school, when I walked with goody-two-shoes standards while my insides were crumbling because perfection was just too hard and heavy, and those girls were good at pointing out all the places I’d failed, all those gaps between the way I wanted to live and the way I did. I see me in college, when a best friend betrayed, and she threw those words into the yawning chasm between us: “I just want them all to know you’re not perfect, that you’re a hypocrite.”
Shame can burn a heart black.
[Tweet “We practice every day what we believe, but we only move toward perfection. We never reach it.”]
And the promise that stands at the end of a day is that we always get a do-over.
So maybe I got so caught up in my emotions that I forgot to teach a bully a better way. That doesn’t mean I can’t do it next time. So maybe that tangle of emotions carried me too far into assumptions. That doesn’t mean I can’t claim victory now and call them what they are: lies. So maybe I didn’t practice what I preach this time. It doesn’t mean I won’t ever win.
After all, our mistakes can be our biggest teachers.
This is an excerpt from We Believe in Jesus. In Ourselves. In All People, Episode 4 of the Family on Purpose series. The episode, along with Episodes 5 and 6, will release May 4. Get a free guide to family values by joining the Family on Purpose list.
by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
You were unexpected, to say the least. We walked in the door of my doctor’s room, and I felt hopeful, even though I tried not to, because we’d just lost a baby, your sister, and I really just wanted to know that you were still alive and still developing and still a promise on the calendar, marked in pencil this time in case…
And then the doctor said there were two, and I laughed hysterically and your daddy almost passed out with the fear of it, and we didn’t know what else to do but call our family and tell them the shocking news: a family of five would become a family of seven.
Two babies. What would we do with two babies? Those were the thoughts that chased us home.
And this one: Please don’t let me lose one.
After losing your sister, I was terrified that I would lose one of you, because when a mama loses a baby, it doesn’t take her long to believe that’s all she’s ever going to do.
You grew, and your growing was a roller coaster, every day a precious gift. I could feel you moving inside, and I thanked God that you were still there. And, just when I’d allowed myself a small glimmer of hope, the bleeding came rushing, and we raced to the hospital on an anniversary trip, because we thought for sure we’d lost another one—or both—and I couldn’t bear it, I couldn’t. I sat on that cold hospital bed while the technician checked everything out and your daddy looked at the screen, and I did not even dare to look at the screen, because I would not survive it if you were gone. But the screen showed two hearts beating, and your daddy held my hand and smiled, even though I could hardly see him, because of all the tears.
You were okay, you were just fine, you would continue your growing. I spent the rest of that nine months on modified bed rest. You bent my back toward the end of it, because both of you never stayed put, always fighting, even in the womb. We passed the safe barrier, and then we passed a few weeks after that and then we neared the end of it all, and I started settling into my new reality: I would be the mother of twins.
Then you were born in a flash of cramps and water and effort, and you were pink and tiny and perfect. Your lungs were perfect and your heart was perfect and all of you was perfect, but you had to stay in the intensive care unit so you could learn how to eat. You spent twenty-one days there, the only ones of my babies I’d ever left behind when doctors discharged me from the hospital. Every night we’d leave your older brothers with someone, and we’d drive up to the hospital to visit you when the unit had quieted, because we never knew which skin-on-skin touch would be the one that would make you eat enough so you could come home and our family would be complete. It was traumatic, that leaving you, putting you back in those incubators every time we needed to get back so we could wake and do it all over again the next day.
And then, of course, you came home, and I had no idea just how hard it would all be. But it would not take me long to learn.
That first night, your daddy and I didn’t get a single minute of sleep, because you were in a new place, without the heart-beeps of other babies, and neither of you wanted to sleep. We spent the whole night on pins and needles, trying to make sure you didn’t stop breathing in the middle of the night. Of course you didn’t, and we felt the foolishness of our fear the next morning, when three other boys came knocking into our room asking for breakfast and the two of you looked at us and screamed for your own breakfast. It was night after night after night of much the same, and we were so tired we didn’t know what to do with ourselves except keep moving, because as long as we kept moving, we probably wouldn’t fall over and die.
It was but an introduction to what life would be like with the two of you.
This year has been a hard one, hasn’t it? We haven’t gotten along so well at all for a full three hundred sixty-six days, because you are both curious and intelligent and relentless, and it’s made life a whole lot more complicated and crazy. But I want you to know, dear sons, that in spite of all the misbehavior and all the attitude and all the complication you bring to our lives, you are deeply loved.
It’s not easy to come at the end of a family, especially when there are two of you. Your daddy and I don’t often get to snuggle with you individually, because there’s not enough time for anything but sharing. We aren’t often able to listen to what you have to say, because your brothers are always talking about something or the other. And I hope you understand that this doesn’t mean that what you have to say is not as important as what your brothers have to say; it only means that we are stretched a little too thin, at this point in time.
I’m afraid that we haven’t spend as much time with you, as individuals, as we possibly could have, and for that I’m sorry. It wasn’t easy to feel like the bond between us was as strong as it should have been when I spent twenty-one days without you, and then you came home and life turned so crazy I barely knew what I was doing or who I was anymore. And then life just kept snowballing, because you learned to walk and then you could get into everything, and then you learned to take your diapers off and it was every other day that we’d open your room to a brown masterpiece painting the walls and then you learned how to escape from your room, and we could never rest, ever.
And there were always two of you.
There were always two of you, and that made it never easy. There will always be two of you, and that means it will probably never be easy. It’s a miracle and it’s a hardship. I still cannot separate one from the other.
I made myself feel guilty about that for a time. I wanted you. I got you. And now I was complaining that I had you?
I felt guilty that I didn’t have the time, that I didn’t have the energy, that I didn’t have the patience to mother two at a time. I felt guilty that while it was wonderful, at the same time, I hated it, because it was too, too, too hard. But here’s what I’ve learned in my life: Nothing worth doing is ever easy. The most transformative experiences in our lives also happen to be the most difficult.
It’s not easy to raise twins to be who they were made to be, individually. That also means it’s worth doing. More than worth doing. And you have transformed me in your challenge. You have deconstructed me. You have remade me.
So here we are. Year four. I know who you are. I know one of you likes to play with the light sockets when you think no one is looking, because you’re curious about what happens in there. I know that one of you likes to try to sneak out that puzzle when my attention has been turned to washing the dishes, because you want to dump out all the pieces and try to figure them out on your own. I know both of you will grab those treats and shove them into your mouth if they’re left anywhere near the counter you can reach.
I love you anyway. I love you because.
I know that in this next year of life, you will do greater things than you have already done. I know you will become more of who you are. I know that our love will continue blooming so that it becomes a fragrant offering between the walls of our home.
Welcome to four, my loves. You are exceptional. You are wonderful. You are beloved.
by Rachel Toalson | Uncategorized, Wing Chair Musings
We were just kids when you would follow me around wherever I went, and maybe I thought it was annoying at the time, because I didn’t really want a kid sister talking to all my friends and embarrassing me with all her questions and messing up my “popularity.” A kid sister could detract from popularity in the blink of an eye. (I had much to learn, you see.)
And I remember being on the playground in that tiny elementary school. I remember, first, the house across the street from the playground, and I remember running on the worn-out path around merry-go-round and Mom telling us to make sure you held on tight, because it was dangerous, and I remember the times you fell and the times we told our stories so we didn’t get in trouble. I remember swinging on the porch swing not even six feet from the place where Mom had chopped up the snakes that fell from a tree one Sunday morning, and I remember sitting beside you in a brand new church right down the street that held stained glass windows that gave it a sense of meaning and depth and beauty, even to kids.
I remember the white stone house and the room we shared and the way you’d always fall asleep before I did, because you were always a better sleeper, and you probably didn’t imagine the claws of Freddy Krueger tapping on your window and the giant wolves waiting for you right outside the room and the monsters that lived in the corner shadows and, especially, the closet. I remember coming back into my room and finding my Cabbage Patch dolls with lipstick smeared on their faces, because you’d gotten into Mom’s makeup and thought they needed a little help with the way their creepy faces looked. I remember returning to my room after school and finding my Barbies laid out on my bed, because you’d dunked them all in the toilet, thinking they needed their hair washed.
I remember singing to the kids Bible songs on a CD and trying to teach you harmony when you were too young to sing it, and how I felt when you unraveled all the tape and hid the destroyed result under your pillow so I wouldn’t find out. I remember singing Teenagers in love and getting mad when you messed up the oooh, oooh, wha-oooh, oooh. I remember both of us always singing around the house while our brother played Mario on the Nintendo. I remember recording your crying on a tape recorder, because it sounded just like an ambulance, and the way we laughed about it for so long.
I remember moving to Ohio, walking to school in the snow that stayed for longer than we ever thought it would and the fun of throwing snowballs, and the time I threw a snowball that must have had a rock in it, because it made a giant knot on the middle of your forehead, and our brother and I convinced you to tell Mom you’d accidentally fallen on the way to school. I remember watching you that first day of school, walking into your downstairs first-grade classroom while I went upstairs to fourth grade. I remember sharing another room with you, this one with bunk beds because it was too small for anything else. I remember putting my hand on my Sally doll’s cool face, and I remember keeping it there until the voices in the next room faded and her face grew warm.
I remember moving back to Houston with you, for the year we lived with our grandmother, when we would get you in trouble by blaming you for the antics we pulled, even though everybody knew we were the brains behind the operation. I remember taking all the cushions off Memaw’s couch and flipping over the sides, with someone posted at the lookout (usually you) so we’d know when she got home and we could clean up real quick. I remember walking into Mom’s classroom at the end of a school day, and you’d already be there, because the second graders were walked to their respective places, but the fifth graders took their time. I remember eating Poncho’s with you for our all-As report cards, back when schools gave incentives for that kind of thing.
I remember moving back to the place we first left, and this time we shared a room and a day bed, you on the trundle that pushed in beneath it. And by this time we were nearly the same size, so I remember you’d borrow clothes and we would borrow friends and you joined the marching band, and we fought like sisters do, and I couldn’t wait to leave our house.
And then I remember leaving, and, a week later, thinking that you were the one I missed most, and so I convinced you to come to my college, even though the same year you came was the year I met my husband, and I always felt a little bad about that—it was almost like it was a waste, because we couldn’t spend a whole lot of time together, because all my extra time was spent with him, and it was just the beginning of a man taking the place of a sister. But what I would learn later is that a man can never replace a sister, because a sister is forever and a sister is blood and a sister will always be around, forever and ever. I remember hurting you and apologizing, and I remember trying to fix you up with the next best thing to my husband, because he really was a good man, but you found your own good man in time.
There were so many things you did for me in those later years. It was you who planned the bridal shower, and it was you who planned my bachelorette party, when we all had to sleep on the floor, because my husband and I didn’t want to sleep on the brand new bed until we were sleeping on it together—silly now that I think about it (we all had sore backs the next morning), but you didn’t even blink an eye. You came the first day I had my first son and cleaned my house and cooked some meals and held the baby for a bit, and when you left, you hugged me and reminded me that I knew what I was doing, that I would make it, that everything would be okay.
Now you’re raising your own babies. And I just wanted to tell you, today, what I see:
I see a woman who has become a woman secure in her own skin. I see a mother who loves her children with a love that is fierce and true and wild and hopeful and forever. I see a devoted wife. I see someone who has overcome darkness and chosen to radiate light in her overcoming. I see someone who has taken in the fatherless and spoken a new name over their hearts. I see someone who is lovely and worthy and remarkable. I see someone I feel so proud not just to know but to also call Sister.
I am so thankful for who you are and what you have done in my life, because you have done a lot in my life, whether you know it for not. You have shown me what it means to love in unconditional ways, and you have shown me what it means to forgive a person who hurts you (I was quite a beast pre-wedding. I still feel like I should apologize for that.), and you have shown me what it means to sacrifice in order to make a special day an even more special day.
I don’t think in all my years or in all my searching, if I were, in fact, searching, I could ever find a sister quite as wonderful as you. Happy birthday, Sister. May you have many, many more.
by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
So you didn’t have a father. You didn’t have a shining example of what it means to be a man, and by the time the other one came to show you how to do this growing-up thing, you’d already lived too many years, and it was too late. You were too closed up. And sometimes you regret this. Sometimes you think that if you had just opened a little, pried those hands loose, you might have learned a little something. You might have been a little different. You might have understood more.
But, brother, I want to tell you what I see today. I want to show you how much you are loved.
We grew up together, like two twins born ten months apart. My earliest memories are of you, coming home from kindergarten, the way I felt when I saw you coming up the walk. I’d missed you while you were gone, but you couldn’t wait to teach me all you’d learned. You would read those early readers out loud and open up whole worlds to me, and you would try to help me see the letters and sound out words, a teacher even then. I remember writing a story in first grade about how if I had a million dollars, I would buy a car, but I wouldn’t share it with you because you were mean (but only sometimes). I remember how scared I was the first time you drove down that gravel road for kicks, going way too fast, and fishtailed your way into an accident.
I remember tearing across a pasture to get to our secret club house where we hung the cow skull because we were cool kids with big imaginations. I remember weeding the garden with you and running to find Mom because there was a snake on our front porch. I remember spending the night in a box in our living room because there was a thunderstorm and Mom knew we wouldn’t be able to sleep in our own rooms. I remember wanting you to like my boyfriends, even though you always thought they were punks, and I remember trying to beat you at the ACT, and of course you were more brilliant than I was (even though I beat you at the SAT—my only win in all those years). I remember listening to you play the trumpet and thinking there was nothing more beautiful in the world than that melody and no one better to play it than you.
My life is full of our memories, but mostly what I remember is loving you.
We’re adults now, with lives of our own. You’ve gone your way, I’ve gone mine, and I’ve watched, in anger, what life has flung your way.
There are tragedies in all our lives, sure, but you’ve had more than your fair share of them. So many of your children have been lost. What does a guy do with tragedy? How does he wade through it? How does he overcome?
What I want you most to know is it was not your fault. It is not because of who you are or who you aren’t, and it’s not about whether or not you were worthy, whether or not you were favored, whether or not you were good enough. It’s about our own separate journeys. And I know how unfair that sounds, but we are all made and shaped by the road our lives take, and whether we pull through or stay knocked down is entirely up to us.
I know what it’s like to wonder what might have come your way if maybe you’d done something differently, or been someone different or believed something else. Would things have turned out better? Would your life have lightened a little of its load? Would you be a business owner or a wealthy man or a loving father or a sought-out friend or a patient husband or a lifeline to someone else?
The truth is that these things come and they go and they roll over us and they bowl us over and they scrape our faces and they bruise our arms, and sometimes we can’t even find our breath after they’ve stolen that, too. That’s what pain and heartache and sorrow can do to us. It can strip us and tear us and burn us and stab us and shatter us. Sometimes it feel like we’ll surely die.
And when we’re in that place, the one that is dark and closed-off and frozen, it feels, too, like we are alone in the suffering and the wondering and the dying. But we’re not.
What I see in you is a man who desires nothing more than to be known, but he is afraid to be known because he is afraid that all those people he wants to show himself to will not love him after he bares his broken heart.
Dear, brother, you are loved. You are loved just for being you. You are loved for being wild and fierce and intelligent and conspiring and self-conscious and skeptical and sometimes weird and irreverent and all the time wonderful and loving and worthy. Yes, most of all worthy.
It’s not easy to believe it in a world like this one, because it’s hard and it’s unfair and it’s demanding with its rules and expectations and impossible measuring bars, but you are loved simply for being you.
When there are so many walls around you, raised between all the other people, it can feel like you’re a million miles away, but I’m telling you today, you’re not. It doesn’t matter how many walls you build around yourself, we can still see you. We can still see who you are and what you desire and what you dream of and where you’d like to be and how you’d like the world to change. We can still see your greatness and your spirit and your shining example of what it means to be a man—because in all your years of searching for that “definition of a man,” you have become one.
Be careful what you say, dear brother. Your daughter watches and listens and waits to be told who she is by a man like you. I know, because I was once a daughter, and the words I heard were not words that built me up but words that tore me down, and it took me years to find freedom from that. Be careful what you think, dear brother, because the minds that we have, the minds we use to go about our days, the minds we use to imagine and dream and believe are minds that can be easily swayed into cynicism if we’re not careful, and there is always, always, always room for hope, no matter how far down we find ourselves.
Be careful what you do, dear brother, because there are things that can hurt us that we didn’t even see coming, and we’ll regret them the rest of our lives. No one wants to live a life of regret.
You are a magnificent human being. The day you were born, the world gained a true man in every sense of the word. I know that sometimes you feel like you’re forging your own way, that you’re walking down uncharted territory, because there was never a person to truly show you how to do all of this, and I know that sometimes you think you’ve got it all wrong, but let me tell you something, brother: who you are today is a man, and who you are today is exceptional, and who you are today is wildly wonderful.
Sometimes we don’t need another to show us who we are or who we could be so much as we need another to believe in us, and I believe in you. Do you hear me? I believe in you. I believe in your brilliance, and I believe in your mind, and I believe in your love, and I believe in your decisions, and I believe in who you are.
You might not know it, but this is what we all see when we look at you—a worthy, significant, brilliant man. And so on the days you can’t see it for yourself, on the days you don’t believe in your own greatness, I hope you’ll let us remind you. We are your song when you have forgotten how to sing. And our song sounds a little something like this:
Who you were yesterday, who you are today, who you will be tomorrow, is remarkable.
Who you were yesterday, who you are today, who you will be tomorrow is loved.
Who you were yesterday, who you are today, who you will be tomorrow is worthy.
No matter what you do, no matter what you say, no matter what you think. No matter what.
You are loved.
Happy birthday, dear brother. May it be the best year yet.
by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
All day long, since he got home from school, he’s been raising his voice, letting it hang up there in the whine-range, and it’s grating and annoying and maddening, and his daddy and I say it over and over so it plays like a broken record, “Please speak in an honoring tone,” but he’s having a hard time still, even with all these constant reminders.
And some days we just have to let it be.
Because we know the truth of it, how all those pressures can keep mounting and those disappointments can keep piling and those expectations can keep crumbling, and before we know it, we’re stuck there at the bottom of a negativity pit, all of us, and we can’t even see to climb our way back out.
Sometimes believing in who our children are created to be means accepting who they choose to be, right here, this moment, knowing that one moment or a few moments or a whole bad day or fifty of them does not define who they are.
This boy, he is not a negative boy, defined by the dark clouds that follow him today. He is a boy who sees light in everything, who feels wonder at the world’s mysteries, who explores the possibility living in all things. He is curious and marvelous and magnificent.
“Remember that children are not miniature adults,” says Susan Stiffelman, a family therapist, parent coach and author. “They are reasonably new inhabitants of the planet, programmed to discover all they can about the world around them…rather than seeing your boys as misbehaving, recognize how healthy it is that they are so engaged with life!”
She is talking about how boys are constantly on the move and how it can annoy and frustrate those of us who just want them to sit still, but I hear it for everything, because we parents can too often hold up that bar of unrealistic expectation for our children, the bar that demands perfect behavior and perfect sitting still and perfect peace and quiet.
[Tweet “Everyone dies under the bar of perfection. So let’s tear it down.”]
Maybe we turn, instead, toward accepting, believing that our children are more than just what they do today—because they are.
It’s not an easy turn, when they are running wild and flipping over couches and talking in a roar, when it’s all I can do to keep from demanding that silent sit-still so I can hear myself think, just for a minute, please. But this is nature. It’s how they’re made. It’s unique and wonderful and wild and heart-stopping and life-giving and exhausting and beautiful and true.
Turning our hearts begins with the turning of our mind, so we see the way they stand on their heads during story time not as disobedience but as necessary to their listening; so we see that standing on a chair during dinner, after all those times we’ve told him to sit down and he forgets, not as blatant defiance but as necessary for his always-fidgety legs; so we see their hand taps and then their foot taps and their bottom wiggles during phonics lessons not as rebellion but as necessary to their learning.
Our children are more than what they do. May we be the first ones to believe it.
This is an excerpt from the Family on Purpose April: We Believe in Jesus. In Ourselves. In Each Other. To find out more about the Family on Purpose series, visit the project landing page.
