by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
The lights flicker off, and the two oldest scramble to parent laps because it’s dark and they are afraid. We hold them, the 7-year-old, all 54 pounds of him, on my lap, and the 4-year-old on his daddy’s.
“When will the lights come back on?” the oldest asks, his voice tight with anxiety. Candles lick light on his lined brow.
No one knows the answer to this question, and so he prays, right there in the middle of dinner, that the lights will come back on right now. And he waits. And they don’t.
It’s apparent to me, but maybe not so apparent to him, that his prayer was answered long before he voiced it, because there, in the center of our table, is a line of candles shaking warm.
The darkness has not overcome the light.
These boys fear the dark, but without the dark this night, we would not eat by candlelight, and without the dark they would not huddle so close around our table, some on laps, some leaning near, and without the dark and those candles flashing flames, we would not laugh about the shadow animals our hands make.
The darkness, tonight, has pulled us closer to one another.
We finish dinner with our daily thankfuls, and the 4-year-old says, “I’m thankful for the lights, and I hope they come back on soon.”
“Sometimes we don’t realize how thankful we are for something until it’s gone, do we?” I say, and I hug him tight because he has traded places with his big brother and wiggles now on my lap.
I think of the little years, how they are gifts sometimes hard to see for all their work, and then they’re gone faster than we can blink. We can miss this gift of moments, of every moment, until all those moments are gone, until we mark another year’s turning, until we no longer look or feel young.
The light is a gift, and sometimes it is only when we sink into dark, until only that dim glow remains, until the light shimmers soft yet eternal, that we can fully see it for its beauty.
Tonight, we say our prayers around a hushed table, that the lights will come back on soon, that God will protect the workers repairing power lines, that He will guard all who live exposed to this windy winter storm, and we send boys to bed with lights blazing once more, and we end this day with greater wisdom moving in our deep.
No matter how unexpected that darkness, or how long it stays, the light will always endure.
This is an excerpt from Family on Purpose Episode 1: January: We embrace wisdom. Spiritual Maturity. Humility. This episode will release Dec. 2. To learn more about Family on Purpose, visit the project landing page.
by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
“I’m halfway to being an adult,” you said just this morning, and I nearly collapsed with the grief of it, because it feels like just yesterday, because you are my precious boy, because you were the first. And you saw, because your face changed completely, and you followed it up with, “It’s okay. I’ll take my time.”
But you won’t, my boy, because it’s what all children do: long to be adults, and I will watch the next nine years fly by just as fast as these last nine have, and then you will be grown and gone. There is an exhilaration and a sadness to this, as there is to every stage of child-raising. But especially with the child who first wrapped a tiny cry around our hearts.
Because you know what? It was not just you who were born nine years ago. It was me, too. You and I, we share a birthday—yours a coming into the world, mine a coming into a whole new world made more alive and colorful and lovely because of you.
I know it’s not easy being the first. You were, after all, our grand experiment. Your daddy and I had no idea what we were doing when you slid into the world, and sometimes we still don’t. You are heart and spirit and muscle and feet and sun and tornado, ripping away everything we thought we knew about how to do this raising-a-child thing and planting yourself right in the middle of a wilderness that would test us and beat us and tear us apart but, in the end, put us back together with all the right pieces, like a puzzle we’d forgotten we had until you let loose your wild wind and uncovered all the years. It’s you who has shown us just the right boundaries to set, and it’s you who has shown us what it means to love a child, and it’s you who has shown us more surely who we are.
That’s not to say that your brothers haven’t. It’s just that you were the first. The first one we laid in a crib and worried about all night until we couldn’t stand it anymore and went out to watch you breathing. The first one whose smile climbed down to the deepest places and said, “Adored,” so loud we could believe it. The first one who one minute made us feel so incredibly glad to be your parent and the next minute made us feel so angry we thought we’d burn right up in flames and smoke and haze.
You tested boundaries to see if they held strong. You shook the foundations of our philosophies. You let loose your whirlwind, and we were caught in chaos and fear, but mostly adoration and love. Because you were remaking us, piece by piece, limb by limb, in all the ways that mattered. So it is that we have learned how to navigate stormy waters of doubt and hope. So it is that we have learned to pry our hands loose from what happens in all the can’t-be-there places of your life. So it is that we have learned to parent in a way that feels and understands and loves in all the littlest ways.
We have made some mistakes. Of course we have. For those, we’re sorry.
But there is one, my sweet boy, that I cannot just slap a sorry on. Because I think it deserves more. So bear with me.
I spent my pregnancy with you laughing about your spirited kicks while sifting through parenting books so I might be at least just a little bit prepared maybe for what was to come. Still, we started out as authoritarians, because that’s how we were raised. It’s all we knew. When you know better, you do better, but we wouldn’t know better until four years later. So, for the meantime, we ignored emotions and hit while we told you not to hit and yelled while we told you not to yell. Do better than we do, that’s what we said in our actions. Be better than us. Choose the higher road, and you were just a boy.
How could a heart not be traumatized by inconsistencies like that?
And then I opened a Paul Eckert book on reading emotions in the eyes, and I saw your eyes on the page. They were darker than yours and smaller, with bushier eyebrows. But they were yours. Do you know what the caption said? Despair.
A little boy in a little body, crying out for help. Crying out for understanding. Crying out for someone to fight for his heart and help him back to a steady plane, because he was in danger of losing his step and his breath and who he was made to be.
I still remember that day. I don’t want to. But I need to. Because that was the day I fell to my knees and said, for the first time, “We need a better way.” That was the day that launched us into years of study, years of research, years of grasping for something that was right and true and good, and we found it. And even though we weren’t perfect at it, you no longer wore those despair eyes. Sometimes you wore angry eyes, when you had to put away a drawing pad and you weren’t quite ready to. Sometimes you wore sad eyes, when the book was supposed to be waiting on the hold shelf of the library and it wasn’t there. But mostly you wore happy ones.
We talked more. We accepted all the emotions, not just the convenient ones. We held your body when it flew out of control, whispering the only words you really need to hear: This is hard. I am here. You are safe.
And now here we are. Your ninth birthday. You are leaning closer to young man than little boy now, and I am so proud of and enthralled with and captivated by who you are. I am still just as wrecked by your eyes and your smile and your voice as I was the day you slipped into the world five days early, smelling of eucalyptus and mint, because that’s the lotion that softened my hands and touched every part of your silken face. You are my beloved one. My spirited one. My firstborn son.
You are deeply and wholly loved, just because you’re you.
Happy birthday.
by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
He sits on a rock, reading, and I know already how this will play out, because he’s the one who asked to come here to the library playground, but that book is pulling him deeper into its pages, so my warning, “Five more minutes to play, Jadon,” goes unheard.
So when it’s time to leave, I’m already expecting that response, and I’m ready.
Except I’m not.
Because he tosses the book aside and is gone before I even blink, racing into the thin woods that surround this library.
Anger flames my face, but I do not follow because his brothers, littler than he, are still there on the playground. I do the only thing I know to do, walk his brothers back to the car and strap them in their seats and tell them to stay there until I get back, and then I crack the windows, lock the car and speed-walk the path through the woods so thin and close I can still see my boys’ heads in the backseat of the van.
Five minutes of calling his name, walking that path, and panic starts clogging my throat.
Is he hurt, lying somewhere unconscious that I can’t see and will probably never find? Did someone take him in those few minutes I didn’t follow? Did he run off for good like he always says he’s going to?
How do I ask for help and admit this failure? How do I keep looking alone, when panic has already blinded my eyes blurry? How do I tell his daddy he’s gone?
And then I see him, blue shirt flapping against his chest in the wind, standing beside our van like he’s waiting to get in, like he didn’t just run off and ignore my calls, like he intended to come home with us all along.
Anger trades places with panic.
He can see it on my face, this boy who perceives everything, and his eyes drop to the ground, but I only say, “Get in the car, Jadon,” and for once in his 7 years, he doesn’t argue.
“We’re going to talk about this at home because I feel too angry right now,” I say, backing the van out of the lot, and it’s the first time I’ve said those words, ever, because I am finally, finally beginning to learn how to control the tongue in those critical anger-moments, and most days I fail but some days, every once in a while, I win.
We pull into our drive, and I help his brothers out of the car, and he brings in all those library books that usually get left in the car, without my even asking him, and then he sits quietly in a chair, waiting. His daddy comes into the room because he wants to know what’s happened, how to explain a panicked text from me.
Our boy tells of how he sat on a rock to read and suddenly Mama told him it was time to go, and he felt angry, so he went to get some exercise (because the path through the woods has exercise equipment along its way), and as soon as he was done, he ran back to the car.
And then I tell him my side, how I saw a boy, angry, running off into the woods without one word, how I called his name and he didn’t answer and I searched high and low and couldn’t find him and thought someone had taken him or he’d run off for good, how I felt so, so, so scared that I had lost my beloved.
I hear it in the way he says, “I’m sorry, Mama,” how he means it, and I can see it in his eyes, what he has learned from this, and we spell it out for him, the consequence for this running off without using words. And even though I’d rather not have lived those five minutes of panic when a little boy seemed lost, I cannot help but think how valuable this has been for all of us, this getting a glimpse into another’s point of view and alternative experiences, how maybe this is a lesson in humility.
Because humility teaches us we don’t really know all there is to know about anything.
A viewpoint is exactly that, a view from a point, and we need each other to see wide and deep and sure.
There I was, assuming when my boy ran into the woods that he’d done it to punish me, because he knew exactly how scared I would be when I could not find him, but that 7-year-old had no idea how a Mama-mind works. My fear surprised him. He knew where he was. He was safe. He was in control. He could see me and his brothers and the van, too, from where he exercised.
But now he knows how a mama panics when she can’t find her boy, how his actions have a ripple effect, a phone call to a daddy, a scared little brother who thinks big brother is gone, a mama stuck and panicked and alone in those thin-but-still-dark woods.
This is valuable.
I wonder how many moments like this one I have missed because I let anger rule the day and did not seek to understand a child mind and heart, did not take the time to share my own mind and heart?
May we always see the wisdom of engaged conversation, even with the children. Especially with the children.
This is an excerpt from Family on Purpose Episode 1: January: We embrace wisdom. Spiritual Maturity. Humility. This episode will release Dec. 2. To learn more about Family on Purpose, visit the project landing page.
by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
Today we spent three hours cleaning.
My husband tidies downstairs, puts every single little stray toy back where it goes, tosses all the left-them-where-we-took-them-off jackets and scarves back upstairs, and walks an endless path up and down the stairs to deliver books out of place.
I work on the upstairs, picking tiny pieces of crayon paper from the carpet because the 4-year-old likes to tear then off his crayons during quiet time, re-shelving the ten thousand books on the floor of our library (because boys have a hard time keeping that three-books-down-at-a-time rule), hanging up the stack of 2T clothes one twin decided looked like a nice jumping-in pile.
I don’t really mind all that time, though, because I’m listening to an audio book and I am alone.
I don’t really mind it, that is, until the boys have undone all that work and clothes litter the floor again and books have fallen from shelves and crayons lie there, dumped out yet again.
I quit. You guys figure out how to live in a pig pen.
That’s what I want to say. But then I remember: I have to live here, too.
Sometimes the gift of having more-than-the-national-norm number of children is the continual stripping of my control over things like clean and tidy.
I like my house tidy. I work best when it’s tidy. I function best when it’s tidy. I flourish and love better when it’s tidy.
At least, that’s what I like to yell when it’s completely out of hand. The reality is, tidy means control. We try to control the mess, but children, if they come with anything at all, come with mess. Which means we’ll go clinically crazy if we don’t let this go.
They take their clothes off and leave them where they stripped, and even if I remind them today to put those shirts and pants where they go—laundry or closet—they will forget tomorrow and do it all again. They leave their books just inches from the shelves, and they take out all their socks to try to find just the right pair, and they forget to put their backpacks on those hooks we attached to the wall for this very unclutter-the-school-clutter purpose.
And, yeah, it’s important for them to know these things, how to put clothes where they go and how to re-shelve books and how to hang backpacks on the proper hooks, but when the only words I’m saying to my children are, “Don’t forget those clothes you just took off.” “Hey, hang your backpack where it goes.” “Only three books at a time down,” maybe there’s a little bit of control that needs a little mess-fire to burn it clean away.
Because it’s more important that they unknot this knot that gets my heartbeat quickening and my face flaming and my words twisting, and it’s more important that I see them as more than inconvenient frustrations to my clean-house expectation.
Messes, they become memories.
You see? There are the clothes he stripped off as soon as he got downstairs so he could put on that Wolverine costume and save the world, and do you remember how he flew from couch to couch and did that amazing flip to the floor?
And there are the books we read for the day’s first story time, the ones he kept with him because he wanted to remember the way that story about knights and dragons and living a thousand years ago made him feel strong and mighty, and do you remember the words he said, how you were his princess and he was your knight?
And there are the socks he wore on his hands today for the slippy-slide across the kitchen floor, and remember the way he laughed at the fun of it?
Every single one of those messes tells a story.
And so, when the oldest steals into our room, after he’s supposed to be in bed and even though it’s against the rules, when he leaves that book he brought to show me on the floor, I bite my tongue.
Tomorrow, when I climb from my bed and trip over it, I will remember.
I will remember the way his hair, still a little wet from his bath, smelled like citrus mixed with cedar, and I will remember the way his hand felt, warm and soft in mine, and I will most of all remember that voice,” I want to show you this, Mama,” and the way I listened and really heard.
These things are worth remembering.
This is an excerpt from Family on Purpose Episode 1: January: We embrace wisdom. Spiritual Maturity. Humility. This episode will release Dec. 2. To learn more about Family on Purpose, visit the project landing page.
by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
I know how it is. I know how it goes. You just want to know what’s coming. You want to know if there’s something bad around the corner, or something good, because you don’t want to lose your heart to the bad, and you don’t want to lose your hope to the good, because there might be something bad coming after that.
The knowing means a calm and controlled and perfectly ordered life. If you don’t know, you can’t control.
It’s easy to understand. Because there is that past, when you were just a kid, or maybe more than a kid, when something happened, something completely dangerous and out of control, something unexpected and unwelcome, and you just want to make sure nothing like that will ever blindside you again.
And there could be something now, too. A too-empty bank account. A call you don’t want to get. A test. A job’s insecurity. A child. A big step into the black.
There is something frightening about the unknown. We try to leave it be, because we can’t change it anyway, when it all comes down to it, but then we care too much, we think too much, we fret and worry and agonize over all the details, because surely there’s a formula that will tell us what’s waiting in the future so we can plan and plan some more.
It’s not easy living in this world of tension, where we aren’t really sure what’s next, whether we’re going to have to venture through sickening dark or blinding bright, and so we try not to. We try to figure it all out. We try to run it over in our minds, every possible situation sitting behind that what if, so at least we’ll be prepared. So at least if our plans don’t pan out we’ll have a backup plan. So we won’t hope unnecessarily and feel those hopes clanging to the ground when the universe throws its curveball.
But we know life doesn’t work that way. Because we just can’t plan for everything.
We did not plan on a layoff two days after we welcomed our sixth son into the world. We did not plan on being launched into our passion pursuits because there was nothing left to do but go. We did not plan on loving so many boys around a dinner table so they could strip us of our control.
We did not even know how to put one foot in front of another.
And I cried and raged and shook a fist to the sky, because I just couldn’t see the end in it, I just couldn’t see whether it would work or not, I just couldn’t see all those possible outcomes, and it made my head ache with its impossibility, because I was just a small-town girl who grew up in a poor family, and all I knew was I didn’t want that for my boys, and I planned for everything, every single little thing, except I hadn’t planned on this, and here was a place where I could not possibly know everything.
Our circumstances, you see, asked us to walk a plank we couldn’t see and pray it wasn’t the end. That we wouldn’t fall. That we wouldn’t go under in shark-infested water.
And then we did.
We fell, and we went under, and the sharks circled, and we tried to catch our breath and fight back to the surface so we could see the sun again. And we did.
See, the thing is, when the unexpected comes sweeping in, uprooting all those old oaks and tearing the roof off our house and lifting all the random toys my kids left in the backyard so they shift and turn in the vortex, what we get to learn is that those old oaks can be made new, and that roof can be repaired and we didn’t really need the toys anyway.
Before life began to peel the control from my cramping fingers, I thought I needed to know everything. I thought I needed to examine every scenario, every last possibility, so I could just go on and expect the worst and rise again when it came, as it always would. I thought that was best.
But a lost job offered something startling in its hands: freedom.
I sank and I nearly drowned, and my hands were water-logged by the time I climbed back out of those waters, but I rose again completely out of control and unprepared and surprised, and I felt free.
Control keeps us from freedom.
Control says we have to wrap our arms around it or else (fill in the blank). Control says we have to grip this circumstance in won’t-let-go hands until we have wrestled to the death, even though we’re the ones who will do the dying. Control says we have to live on a plan that always knows what’s next.
Control is not telling us the truth.
You, dear one, don’t have to know everything. It’s safe to let go. Go on. Let go. Just open your hand. Pry your fingers loose, if you have to. Let the sparrow fly, and feel the weight of the world and all its possibilities leave your shoulders once and for all.
The truth is, we can’t know everything. Sometimes life will throw us a curveball, and the only thing we’ll be able to do is duck and cover, jump into those shark-infested waters for a time, because the pitches just keep coming, and the only way out is in. And sometimes we walk not a plank but a bridge, from one beautiful side to another, and we cannot know which it will be before we take the first step.
We can know that we will rise again. And we will rise stronger. Always, we will rise stronger.
But first we must fall.
by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
It wasn’t so very long ago, just a little more than a year, that I got the first awful text: She’s in labor. She’s going in.
She was only 20 weeks.
And I spent that whole day praying for a woman and a man and two baby boys I already loved, because there was still hope, wasn’t there? Labor could still stop. Babies could still be saved. Miracles could still come winging in on the back of prayer and hope and faith. Nothing is impossible for you. That’s what I heard growing up, all the time, and I believed it. We just had to have faith and pray.
But this was impossible for you, because there was no miracle, and those two people I love watched their two babies slide into the world much too soon and claw for breath and then suffocate, because they had no lungs. The cruelest way to die for tiny beings. The cruelest way for parents to die in the secret places.
It all happened the same week I found out our sixth baby was growing in my womb, and guilt gripped my heart and wouldn’t let go for all those months later, all those months we asked and begged and cried and raged for their miracle and yet still rejoiced, because we had ours.
And then, finally. Finally came the day when another text pinged across the miles, and there it was: beautiful hope. A picture of a sonogram. The words rimmed by exclamation points: Coming in March 2016!!! So excited!!!
We danced and sang and cried and offered up thanks and hoped. Most of all we hoped.
Because we knew everything that could go wrong. We knew how a beginning doesn’t always assure the ending we want. We knew that sometimes the sky opens up and drops acid rain when we aren’t even looking.
But even though we could not see the end, I could not stop thinking the same thing over and over again: It’s about time. It’s about time they’re able to welcome a baby into their lives, as if they already had. It’s about time their prayers were answered, as if they already had been. It’s about time they were given the longing of their heart, as if the gift was here and sure and alive.
Every day we prayed for them, the six of my boys and Husband and me, storming your throne so that baby would be born safe and healthy and not too soon. My boys prayed it and I prayed it again: Please don’t let her be born too early. Please don’t let her be born too early. Please keep her safe and don’t let her be born too early. And every night, just before sleep, we breathed relief that the day had ended without the bad news that something had happened, that something had gone wrong, that another baby had been lost.
It was all going perfectly. Uterus health, check. Cervical health, check. Baby health, check.
Check, check, check, check, check. All the boxes were checked.
And then.
There we were, picking up my boys from a weekend at my mother’s, and I was caught in a project when she knocked on the door and startled me. I opened the door for her.
“Have you heard?” she said, and I felt your whole world crumble down. This world you made for us, this world of hope and dreams fulfilled and waiting in expectation. The next words reached me from a tunnel. “Her water broke.”
She’s only 17 weeks.
I sat there, sad, worried, but mostly angry. Mostly I felt the red-hot anger-fire climbing through the places one can’t see, down my face, past my neck, where it sat, flaming, on my heart. I felt it clench my fists and grit my teeth and shake my head against the news I could not bear to hear. Because they can’t do it again. They just can’t, God. They can’t go through another goodbye, and here it was, knocking on the door, again, in water breaking 23 weeks too early.
So many years they have waited, wishing, hoping, trying, and so many years they have held onto hope as it unraveled in their hands, and even now, with a 1 percent chance of survival, they hold on, and, God, it’s just so unfair. I am so angry. I am livid. I am on a war path, because they deserve better. They deserve a family. They deserve a baby, because they want a baby, and there are so many who get babies who don’t really want them, and why can’t they just have a baby?
WHY CAN’T THEY JUST HAVE A BABY?
My boys came piling into the car, but I could not move, could not even try for those moments of grief, because it’s just not fair, it’s just not fair, it’s just not fair. She’s had to say goodbye to two of them, and what if she has to say goodbye to this little girl? Would a mama survive? Would a daddy survive? Would their faith survive?
I just don’t know. I just don’t. We can only take so much, God.
Their hearts are bruised and crumpled from all the dried-up wishes in their chests, and they wait in expectation and fear and hope still flapping in their hearts, because hope is that thing with feathers that sings songs without words and never, ever stops. But this is a road no one ever wanted to travel, and yet they have traveled it already once before, meeting two babies before their time, and those pictures hang on a living room wall proudly, because their sons are never forgotten.
And now there is this baby.
Let them meet her. Let them know the delight and joy that she will bring, ALIVE. Let them watch your miracle keep a womb warm and full and protected so she is born ALIVE. Seal up the rupture so she stays ALIVE.
Let them hold her and listen to her breathe while she sleeps in a crib that first night home from the hospital, and let them feel the weight of her, the living weight of her, in their arms so that they will know surely and beautifully that you are God. That you hear the desperate cries of our hearts. That you give. And give. And give.
Let her be a mother. Let him be a father.
We know all things work together for the good, and we know that with God all things are possible, and we know that we only see things through a glass dimly right now. We know all the right answers, because we’ve been repeating them to ourselves all our lives, for all the years they’ve been trying, but show us. Show us you are God. Show us you can do what you say you can do. Show us that you still bring miracles in babies who live in spite of overwhelming evidence otherwise.
We need to see you. We need to see your miracles. We need to see her.
So I’m coming to you today, like I’ll come every day that baby stays put safe and sound in a mama’s warm, to shake my fist at the sky and say: JUST GIVE US A BABY.
Just give us a baby.
Just give us.
A baby.
Just.
If you’re there, just.
