by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
“Are you going to go swimming tonight, Mama?” he says in that little-boy voice. It’s the 5-year-old, who likes to play with her hair. Who loves to snuggle. Who thinks she’s the most beautiful woman in the world.
All that doesn’t matter. She’ll still say no.
“Not tonight, baby,” she’ll say. Because she didn’t shave her legs or her bathing suit doesn’t fit yet (maybe it never will) or she’s just too tired today to deal with the emotional effort of trying to put on a swimsuit.
Because it takes great emotional effort to squeeze into that piece of spandex she keeps in her closet, where she can’t see it.
Those secret excuses—I’m just not ready to see what I look like, I’ll wait until I have a chance to lose more weight, no one wants to see this—go unsaid.
It’s okay, she tells herself. I’m still watching, so it’s not like they’re missing me. It’s still family time. I’m still present and fully engaged. I’m still there in the way it matters.
Every time she reads one of those articles urging women to just put on a swimsuit and get in the pool, this is what she tells herself.
Because, you see, it’s not as simple as just putting on a swimsuit and getting in a pool.
She’s had babies, and with every one of them, she added new marks, the ones that are almost invisible, almost unnoticeable, until they see daylight and start shining like they’re proud of their jagged lines, and people don’t need to see that. People don’t need to see the jiggly stomach she still carries five months, five years, fifteen years later. People don’t need to see those blue veins on the back of her knee.
God, she hates swimsuit season.
She does a pretty good job of hiding that disappointing body on a regular basis, with baggy shirts and hold-it-in undershirts and those workout pants that actually make her butt look a little bit good maybe.
Swimsuits are nothing of the sort. There is nowhere she can hide.
Children don’t understand these things, of course. They need other excuses—like she just doesn’t feel like it or she’s tired or she’d rather watch them having fun than join it. (Well, maybe not the last one. It’s too close to the truth.)
Her boys don’t care about the way she looks. They don’t care what other people think. They don’t care what she thinks, even.
Neither should she.
She knows this.
It’s just that it’s easier said than done, that putting on a swimsuit and getting in a pool. See, she is recovering from years of eating disorders, years of body dysmorphia, years of I-just-want-to-be-perfect-but-can’t.
It’s been years, a decade, more, but she is still recovering. She will always be recovering. This is her reality. No matter what they tell her, no matter what those body-empowerment proponents say, she still cares about having an attractive body, and she still cares about swimsuits telling the truth that she doesn’t (at least not from her perspective).
Every year after babies were born, she slipped back into that perfection mode—gotta lose it fast, gotta get “it” back in record time, gotta somehow fit back into that spandex suit well before summer rolls around, even if the baby came in May.
Every year she could feel those old ghosts creeping in, telling her not to eat, telling her to stick a finger down her throat, telling her to reach for the laxatives. Just do it. It’s easy. You’ll be thin in no time at all. Remember?
She fought hard, too. She pressed through, every day, every hour, every second. She made it, sort of. Her hair was a little tangled and her clothes a little torn and she still walks with a limp she’ll try to hide.
But it’s not a once-healed, always-healed kind of thing. This is her body. This is her eyes. This is her criticism of something that would be beautiful on someone else.
Trying to stay in a constant state of body-appreciation instead of body-despising is really hard work for women like her.
There is no easy way out of this body-conscious state irritated by summers at the pool. There is only through.
She will have to go through.
She’s managed to avoid it, until now. But now they’re asking, every day, and she knows. She knows how this will go.
Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who can look their best at all…
After children
in a swimsuit
walking in broad daylight?
What all those “outsiders,” the ones who have never fought through anorexia or bulimia or dysmorphia, don’t understand that it’s not so much what other people think as what she thinks of herself, how she feels about that body wrapped up in a too-tight suit.
What does she think?
Well, she tries not to think about that.
So she makes her excuses for as long as she can. She stays out of the pool. She watches.
Her boys just keep asking (and thank God they do, because she can’t use those excuses indefinitely. They’ll never let her.).
And then, one day, her husband whispers in her ear, I think you’re beautiful. Just wear it for me. Just get in the pool and play with your boys.
And she thinks maybe, maybe, maybe she can.
Maybe she can.
She doesn’t look, can’t look, in the mirror, so she doesn’t know exactly what she looks like. These steps have to start small. This is how it must be for now. She’ll leave without looking, but that doesn’t mean she’s lost. Because she GOES.
She goes. She leaps. She soaks up the joy of those precious boys, who are just so excited that their mama is finally, finally, finally in the pool with them. Finally.
And Isn’t she beautiful? their eyes say.
Isn’t she beautiful?
And another day, another more courageous day, when she has the strength to look in that mirror and still go, she will see it, too.
Yes. She sure is beautiful.
by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
It’s summertime. Bikini season. It can be a make-or-break season.
All the other girls in your class are armed with their bikinis in a myriad of colors, and they have their perfect bodies with their perfect breasts and their perfect legs and their perfect skins.
But you. Well. You don’t look nearly as good as they do in a bikini (at least from your vantage point), and because of this, you feel uncomfortable baring so much of yourself in public.
It’s just that there is a standard. An unspoken understanding. If you don’t want to be ridiculed for being a prude or old-fashioned or ugly, you will have to wear one of those, too.
I see you shrinking in your own skin. I see how you take that shirt off and slip off those shorts in record time and immediately slide into the water. I see you, when it’s time to get out, covering up just as quickly as you can, even if it means soaking the only clothes you brought with you.
I see you watch the ones who strut around in their strings so confidently and wish you could be them.
Oh, yes. I used to be you.
My body wasn’t perfect according to all those unspoken standards, and there was nothing like summer to make me remember all the ways I couldn’t measure up.
There was nothing like watching all those other bikini-clad teenagers to make me realize I would probably never have what it takes.
We live in a different world than we did when I was 17. We live in a world of body-empowerment. There is all kind of talk about those girls without perfect bodies walking bravely around in bikinis and celebrating the different sizes and shapes of their bodies, but there is still an ideal, isn’t there? There is still an “us” and a “them,” and you don’t want to be a “them.”
In fact, you don’t really want to reveal whether you’re an “us” or a “them.” What you really want to do is cover up. But it’s summer, and it’s a swimsuit and there’s an expectation, and who are you to argue?
This is what it takes to fit in, you say.
Maybe it’s hard to see from your 17-year-old eyes right now, but I’ll let you in on a little secret: There never was much great about fitting in.
Much easier said on the other side of 17, I know.
I know what it’s like to be the odd one out, to be the only one who’s uncomfortable in her own skin, to be the only one without a perfect body while all those others look like a page straight out of a magazine.
I know how scary it is to try to defy convention.
We don’t think it looks like courage to cover up. We think courage looks like baring our bodies, because it’s much more frightening to peel off the over-shirt and stand proud with those bikinis covering only the tiniest outer pieces of us, isn’t it?
No. It isn’t. All it takes is a misguided connection between our bodies and who we are (“I am beautiful because of my perfect body”) to feel so comfortable with baring our bodies for the world to see, like it wants us to. That’s not courage.
Courage is covering up in a society that doesn’t think you should.
It’s not easy, when you’re young, to see the bigger picture. But there is a bigger picture (there always is), and it is this: Your body does not define who you are.
Let me say that again: YOUR BODY DOES NOT DEFINE WHO YOU ARE.
I know, I know. The magazines. The television shows. The ads. Even the body empowerment movement. All of it claims you will be able to find the perfect bikini (try this particular style for your shape!) for your perfect-as-is body (Even if you have a bigger-than-you’d-like belly, feel proud to wear this revealing piece of cloth that will teach you to view beauty in a better way!) and still feel comfortable in it (It doesn’t matter what you look like! We can make you look and feel great!).
All these messages can leave you feeling angry and disappointed and most of all unbeautiful.
Hear me, little sister: Some things weren’t meant to be shared (Like the shape of your breasts outside a triangle of cloth. Like whether you have a thigh gap like all the supermodels. Like whether your stomach jiggles at all when you walk.).
Sure, we’re asked to share those secrets freely every summer. We’re asked to uncover. We’re asked to leave little to the imagination—and that little becomes littler every year.
The world likes to tell us that our worth as women lies in our bodies—and in summertime that means how we look in a bikini.
It’s a lie, a deep-seated one that reaches it hands into a teenage society that says if you don’t uncover like all the others there must be something wrong with your body. Of course there must be. The girls with perfect bodies don’t have any problem baring themselves. They strut instead of shrinking. They bare openly and proudly. They could care less what people think.
And maybe it’s true. Maybe some of them enjoy the stares they get because of the way they look in a string bikini, but it’s because their worth has gotten all tangled up in how they look, and they need the reminder, too: Our bodies do not define us as women.
Our bodies are beautiful—no matter what their shape or size, but they are not who we are. They are only where we live for a time. They cannot tell us what we will do in the future. They do not control what happens to us. They cannot guarantee our success in anything of value (or they shouldn’t).
They do not tell us the whole story of beauty.
You don’t have to bare your body to be beautiful. A society like ours that sexualizes women at every turn doesn’t have to have the last word. It doesn’t have to tell us how to be beautiful.
Our beauty is not a cheap beauty that can be bought with a couple scraps of cloth. It’s not a beauty that says we can only claim it if we are seen through the eyes of sex and pleasure. This is not how we are taken seriously as women.
You don’t have to bare your body to be deemed worthy. You are worthy just because you are you. Believe it in your deepest parts.
And then turn the tide.
Change begins with you, little sister.
I know it’s the road less traveled for a teenage girl to say she’s not going to bare her body for all the world to see, and the road less traveled never promised easy, but nothing worth doing was ever easy.
You’ll learn that in time, too. Everything worthwhile takes work—relationships, career, covering up in a world that ask us to bare more and more outer pieces of ourselves.
Dare to defy “convention.” Dare to be different. Dare to cover up.
Dare to be a force of change.
You won’t ever regret it.
by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
Five years ago you slid into our lives on a hot and humid summer day. You stared at us with those big eyes I knew would stay brown from the very beginning, and I fell immediately and deeply in love.
We spent those first few nights just the two of us, because your daddy was gone and your older brothers were sleeping. And at first I was terrified of that alone-time, but now, looking back, I’m so thankful we had those lonely hours and lazy mornings. I got a solid Mama’s boy out of them.
Now you are growing up. Five years old. In another six weeks you will head off to school, like your older brothers ahead of you, and I will feel the hole in our home like it lives in me, an ache all through my bones. Yet another one, off to kindergarten.
How I wish that time did not fly so fast, that I could keep you here with me for just a while longer. Just a moment. Just a day. Just a year or two or fifteen. This, though, is one more step along the road to freedom.
I am not yet ready to let you go.
Life doesn’t ever ask if we’re ready. It just marches on.
You have always been a sweet, charming, hilarious little boy, except when you get in trouble. Then you hide. Then you retreat into your own safe place. Then you don’t want to face the failure.
You know what, son? You’re not alone in that hiding place. Because I know. I know how scary it is to admit you’ve done something wrong. To admit you’ve failed, just this smallest bit. To see what waits on the other side of admission.
I used to hide, too. Back when I was your age, back when I was older, back when I was a full grown adult, about to get married. I used to pretend that I never made mistakes, that I always only did good. I tried so hard to be perfect.
This is a losing game, love. I want you to learn that sooner than I did.
Sometimes we feel the need to hide because we believe we won’t be loved if we’re not perfect. Sometimes we think our mistakes define who we are. Sometimes we’re afraid of the consequences of those mistakes.
Before you go to school, where rewards and punishments have a way of telling you who you should be, I want you to know this in all the deepest places:
Bad decisions don’t make you bad.
It’s easy to forget this, because of the people at the other end of our mistakes.
Sometimes they make us feel stupid for thinking that could ever have been a good idea. Sometimes they’ve had a rough day and our bad decision and its ripple effect is just one more notch on the line of the day’s disappointments. Sometimes what they say, the way they make us feel, how they react instead of respond, can make us start to believe we’re bad. Like we should be better, know better, do better.
That we are a disappointment, through and through.
I want you to know you’re not. I want you to know that there is absolutely nothing on this earth you could do, as horrible as it may be, that would make me or your daddy love you any less. I love you because you are here, because you are you, because you are mine, at least for this short time.
You are a good boy who sometimes forgets who he is. When you forget who you are, you lash out at that annoying little brother. When you forget who you are, you bang your feet against the blinds because I won’t let you go downstairs to play during Quiet Time. When you forget who you are, you bury your face in a couch so you don’t have to see your brother crying because you said you didn’t want to be his friend anymore.
But every time you do something you know is wrong, or you act impulsively instead of cautiously, or you lash out in anger, I know the truth: You’re better than those mistakes. You have forgotten who you are, and it’s my job to help you remember.
So, as you prepare for a career in public school, I want you to know that the days you bring home your red folder, and the behavior chart has a green smiley face that says you behaved well, we are going to celebrate.
But the days you bring home a behavior chart with a yellow face or a red note scrawled across today’s square, we are still going to celebrate—because those are the times we get to remind you who you are. Those are the times we get to speak life into your broken places. Those are the times we get to teach and steer and love in a way that is more than words.
Those are the times we get to say:
Bad decisions don’t make you bad.
Bad behavior doesn’t make you bad.
Bad thoughts don’t make you bad.
Who we are changes what we do, but what we do doesn’t change who we are.
We get really good at punishing ourselves when we’ve done something wrong. We get good at analyzing our motivations and concluding that we’re just bad people. We get good at wishing we could just be better.
It’s not an easy habit to break.
So it’s important to remember this:
Who are we without all the armor covering our weak places? Who are we when we fail? Who are we when we forget our identity?
We are still worthy people.
That will never change.
Hear me, son. THAT WILL NEVER CHANGE.
As we come up on your fifth birthday, I want you to know, yet again, that your daddy and I love you as much as we possibly could. We are in your corner, always. We are waiting with great anticipation to see who you become in these years to come, because who you are is already amazing.
Happy birthday, love, May your next year be filled with opportunities to remember that what you do doesn’t change who you are.
by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
We’ve just gotten back from the doctor, because, for days, my throat has held barbed wire or shards of broken glass, and my fever is out of control and I’ve lost two work days to sleep.
We’re turning onto the street that leads to our house, shaking our heads at the strep throat diagnosis, when the air conditioner on the van—the only vehicle we have—stops working, and a noise starts following us home.
A noise that means something is wrong with our van.
My husband spends hours trying to figure out how to take out an old, messed-up compressor and put in a new one—a new one he bought with a credit card, because God knows we don’t have it in our checking account.
All this after breaking a foot and having sick kids and logging two months without any steady income, just side jobs here and there, and I tell a friend, “Sometimes I feel like the universe is just throwing one thing after another in our path, asking us how resilient we are. And all I want to do is hold up my middle finger.”
Five months ago we had our sixth baby. Two days after he slid into our lives, I was laid off my job. We blew through the severance (since the job never paid that much anyway). There used to be savings, because I always obsessively saved, making sure we lived on the lowest dollar possible so we could hide money away for a moment like this one. But here we are, with that buffer nearly gone, and fixing the car will take more than we’ve pulled in this month. Again.
My anxiety is so high I have a panic attack every time I think about the electric bill and the mortgage and what it takes to feed six boys in the summer. Usually those attacks come late at night, when I’m trying to fall asleep and those ugly words wrap around my neck: How are we going to do this?
I feel sad and terrified. Mostly I feel angry. Angry that we’re here, angry that the plans we believed were God’s plans don’t seem to be working, angry that God’s promises don’t apply to us.
We didn’t use our money selfishly. We gave generously to the church. Even now, even when we’re pulling in zero income ($300 on a good month), we’re supporting some missionary friends and six World Vision kids so they can have a better future—because no matter how quickly it makes the backup money run out, I can’t stop doing it. I can’t.
We’ve given everything to follow the call God put on our lives, and yet here we are, talking about the very real possibility of selling our house to keep ahead of the bank. I’ve never felt so angry in my life.
///
A month ago, I walked up to the front of my church, where those prophetic prayer people waited, and I swallowed the pride that gets in the way of asking for help, and I asked for help. Prayer this time. I could handle asking for prayer, if only barely. More than prayer? No way.
“I get this picture that you are not sitting at God’s feet waiting for an answer,” said one of the women, a good friend of mine. “I see you grabbing onto his collar and screaming your desperation into his face.”
I just nodded, not daring to speak, because, yes, that’s exactly what I did that morning. Exactly what I’ve done every morning for the last four months. Shouted at him. Screamed at him. Cried, raged, begged.
And every morning there is NOTHING.
My friend also said there was such great pain in this foggy season not because the money wasn’t steady (or there, really), but because something in my childhood had felt exactly like this, too. And at first I tried to ignore that piece of it, because what’s important now is trying to figure out a way to feed my family, not trying to heal some old childhood wound.
We got home, and it was time to balance the checkbook, and I opened the email with the electric bill. The bill was $143.18.
An old friend of ours used to believe the numbers 143 were God’s way of communicating with us across time and space. I love you, they said. 143. But there was a bill and a checkbook that didn’t have enough money to pay it, and what did that mean for me?
I started crying, shaking my head, saying the only thing I could think to say. “But do you really, God? Because this doesn’t feel like love. It feels a whole lot like abandonment.”
Sometimes numbers are just numbers.
///
When I was just a girl, three years old, or four, maybe, my mom and dad took my brother and sister and me to a water park. Or maybe it was just a neighborhood pool. My memory gets fuzzy with some of the details. Others are crystal clear.
My sister was a baby, so she stayed off to the side with my mom, while my dad told my brother and me that we could go down the massive slide on the other side of the pool. It was a tunnel slide, with all kinds of twists and turns. I watched my brother slide down so my dad could catch him. I was content to watch, too afraid to try. But my dad wanted me to try.
He walked me to the top, sat me on his lap, and wrapped his arms around me. He said, “I won’t let you go.” Then we were tearing down the slide, and the bottom was getting too close, and I was screaming terror.
A tower of water slammed into us. And my dad let go.
He let go.
///
He would let go in other ways over the years. There would be the day he decided he wanted a new family and all those days after, passing without a single word from him. There would be birthdays and graduations and an aisle I would walk down on the arm of my stepfather, who was as proud as any father could be.
When a parent leaves and doesn’t look back, what he’s saying is, Figure it out on your own.
Figure it out on my own. How I wish I could.
It’s not surprising that I would have this picture of God, too. That there were more important people for him to be concerned with. That I did not matter in the lineup of human beings who needed him. That he could not be bothered with remembering my birthday or paying my mortgage or making sure my kids were cared for.
And then came this last son, born the day before my birthday so God could remind me that, look, he gave me the greatest gift a mama could ever get: another son. I was not forgotten.
Except all those months came after his birth, and, with them, hit after hit after hit, and I could barely lift my head from the floor, because this didn’t feel like love.
THIS DOESN’T FEEL LIKE LOVE.
I feel abandoned. I feel forgotten. I feel wrong, like maybe we were selfish to have so many children or pursue our dreams or try to build our own businesses or use our gifts or make a way where there was no way.
I certainly don’t feel brave, the kind of brave needed for something like this. I feel like a little eleven-year-old girl who’s wondering if her daddy is going to come through for her.
And he never did.
///
We did not plan for everything.
Some would say we made our bed and now must figure out how to fit in it. And maybe it’s true. We chose to have six children, even though we could not have seen what might happen two days after our sixth was born. We chose to turn down that job offer my husband got a year ago because we thought we needed to stay at our church and heal a little. We chose to believe that God would take care of our needs instead of planning how to afford six kids on paper.
Now I can’t help it. I feel cornered and trapped—and that makes me fighting-angry.
On my best days I shape thousands and thousands of words into essays and songs and poems and stories. On my worst days I sit around thinking maybe we shouldn’t have had so many children.
Which one would I have given back? That answer’s easy at least. Not one of them.
All my life I’ve heard these stories of other people falling on hard times and then—miracle of all miracles—that giant check comes just in time at the end of the month, and there you go.
There you go. All neat and pretty. They’re blessed people. And if they’re blessed people, then that makes us…not blessed people—because on the last day of last month, we transferred half the remainder of our savings into our checking account to pay for our most basic needs, make sure our kids had food to eat, keep a roof over our heads for another month.
“It’s so hard to understand,” I told my mom the next day. “After so many years of giving ourselves to God’s mission and ministry.”
Makes a person not ever want to do mission and ministry again. That’s the part I didn’t say out loud.
///
“God will provide,” they say. “God will make a way where there is no way,” they say. “Don’t worry about tomorrow,” they say. “God will meet your needs.”
What about when he didn’t? When he still doesn’t?
Does that make him any less sovereign? Any less great? Any less merciful or loving or kind?
My head wants to say yes. Yes, it makes him less sovereign, great, merciful, loving, kind. Yes, it makes him cruel and uncaring and just like the earthly father who let go.
But my heart knows the answer.
No. God is the same today as he was yesterday. He does not change because of my circumstances or my feelings or even my knowledge or lack of it.
So what does all this mean?
Well, I wish I had a neat and pretty answer for you. But I don’t, because our story isn’t over. We are still navigating through this mess, and we don’t know how it’s going to end. Not yet.
All I know for sure today is that love sometimes does what’s better instead of what’s easier. My kids remind me of that every day.
I guess I know something else, too. One day the anger will fade. One day I will know how this ends. One day I will be on the other side.
Just not today. Today is for walking, one step in front of the other, trying not to trip.
Pressed but not crushed. Persecuted, not abandoned. Struck down, but not destroyed.
Never that.
This is an excerpt from We Count it All Joy, a book of essays. For more of Rachel’s writings, visit her Reader Library page, where you can get a couple of books for free.
by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
“Do you work?”
We’re sitting at the pool. The boys are swimming with their daddy, but I’m sitting out with my four-month-old and this still-broken-but-almost-healed foot. A woman has just counted them all up and laughed about “all boys.”
The youngest smiles, because he’s joyful like that.
“Yes,” I say. “I’m a writer.”
“Oh,” she says, and it’s not a condescending sound, more of a surprised-mixed-with-wonder sound.
So I break the ice. “I need my work so I stay sane,” I say, and we spend the next ten minutes laughing about how we can only handle so much and how work feels like a vacation sometimes and how we are both better mothers for our out-of-the-home pursuit.
The truth is, my out-of-the-home pursuit is not just for me. It’s also for my family. For our finances.
My family needs my contribution to stay above water, so even if I did want to stay home, I couldn’t.
I wasn’t always okay with this reality.
///
Just before my first son was born, I took a job producing a newspaper for one of the Methodist conferences in Texas. It didn’t pay a whole lot, but it was steady and it took care of the electric bill and the water bill and the Internet bill and the grocery needs and the gas expenses.
And then my son crashed into our lives and the whole world turned upside down, and I just wanted to spend all my time with him. I didn’t care about promotions, didn’t care about accolades, didn’t care about anything except being present with my amazing little boy so I wouldn’t miss a single thing.
Except my husband didn’t make enough money to pay our bills on his own, and we needed two incomes. So I had to work. I had to keep my job.
I arranged a compromise with my boss: I would work part of the day in the office and part of the day at home so I could still hang out with my boy.
I had the best of both worlds, watching my son in the morning while working on the pieces of my job that didn’t require complete and uninterrupted concentration and letting my husband hang out with him while I went to the office in the afternoons.
We made our trade-off work. We divided chores. We supported each other in every way we could.
And yet something still felt wrong. Something still felt suffocating. I thought it was because I was still working. I was still a mom who had to work, and I was not made to work. I was made to raise my child.
A bitter ball settled in my throat.
///
We are mothers.
We can convince ourselves that the best thing in the whole world would be to stay at home with our babies and raise them to love reading and teach them how to write in journals and shape them into people we actually want to hang out with when they’re older.
This is what mothers are supposed to do, after all. It’s our duty. Our calling. Our inheritance.
Sometimes it’s possible to find a way to stay at home, if we look hard enough. Sometimes it’s just not, because health insurance premiums went up too high and the cost of food has increased outrageously and the car needs some unexpected repairs we didn’t anticipate in the budget we made last month.
And when the finances fall short and we realize we can’t stay at home because more than one income is necessary to care for our family, we can sometimes get wildly bitter about it.
If only our circumstances were different. If only our husbands had chosen a different career. If only he made more money.
If only…
It’s not easy to pull ourselves back out of this if-only pit.
///
Six months ago I was laid off from the job I’d had for nearly nine years. We found out about the layoff a few months in advance, so I spent the last months there feeling sad and out of sorts and terribly unmotivated. I wanted to finish well, but how do you finish well when someone doesn’t want you?
In the meantime, I was searching for a new job, because my income was still necessary for our family. The old bitterness was rising up to meet me.
There was a day, close to Christmas, when I came home from work especially drained and sad and maybe a little angry, because the bad news about the layoff had been repeated in different terms. I could practically see the walls shaking as I walked up to my door.
I put the key in the lock, and I could already hear the world falling apart into hysterical laughter.
Then I opened the door, and there was my husband, in the middle of all my boys, except the one I still carried, doing “The Robot.”
“Dance party!” he said.
I just stood in the doorway watching my boys giggle and rearrange their daddy, watching them all dance, watching those faces that glowed with such happiness I could hardly handle it. An overwhelming wave of gratitude knocked all the bitter from its stronghold.
They might have missed this, I thought.
They might have missed sharing such a sacred time with their daddy if I weren’t a working mother.
They might have missed.
It was the first time I really felt glad that I had worked all these years. Glad that my income was necessary to raise my growing boys. Glad that my husband had THIS time with them.
Just glad.
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We don’t have to feel guilty or bitter or angry about working outside the home, because our working gives a gift to our husbands.
It gives them the opportunity to be present with their children, to play with their children, to share in the raising responsibility of their children that will change lives forever.
I think I need to say that again, mostly for myself: WE DON’T HAVE TO FEEL GUILTY. WE DON’T HAVE TO FEEL SHAMED. WE DON’T HAVE TO FEEL BITTER.
We are letting our husbands be intentional dads, letting them take their important place beside us in this journey of training up a child in the way he should go.
That’s the picture I got, all those months ago, when I walked into my house with bitterness in my hands and saw why the walls were shaking.
It’s not unusual, today, to see dads who stay home with their children. And while many shake their heads and say it’s just another way women are taking over the workforce, I can’t help but think that a generation of involved dads is so much better than a generation of disinterested ones.
It means we get a whole generation of children who grow up with present dads, not absent ones. It means we get boys and girls who know who they are because their moms AND their dads have spoken it into their lives with not only words but also time. It means we get little ones who recognize how valuable they are to their moms AND their dads and, by extension, the world.
This is a worthy shift.
So today I am thankful for my split-down-the-middle day. I am grateful that I get to work.
Most of all, I am glad that my husband gets the privilege of speaking into the lives of his children in ways that mean life and freedom and love.
I’ll go to work any day for that.
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 autofocus 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.
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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 laying 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 corrected me. 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 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.
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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 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 freeform 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.”
He knows the truth of it.
A mama can’t dance when she’s holding a camera.
