by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
This whole afternoon, since getting home from school, he’s been quiet and withdrawn, and I know him well enough to know that there is something weighing heavily on his 8-year-old heart.
So even though I should be working and he’s caught me in the middle of a story, I set my laptop on the coffee table and turn my full attention to him.
“What’s bothering you, baby?” I say.
Sometimes he talks and sometimes he doesn’t, so I’m not entirely prepared for when he says, “Some kids were mean to me at school today.”
And the first thing I want to know is who, because being mean to my boy is not tolerated in my mama heart.
It takes great effort to ask the question that won’t answer this one.
“Oh, yeah?” I say. “What happened?”
He was playing on the playground today, he says, and he asked his friends if they might want to play a Power Buddies game he’d made up.
Power Buddies are characters my boy has been developing for a year now, superheroes with elemental super powers. He has created a whole new world where they exist and loves to share that imaginary world with his friends. Often, they play along willingly.
“They said Power Buddies were stupid,” he says, and his voice breaks clear down the middle. “They said I would never write their stories and publish them in a book. And even if I did, no one would read them.”
He’s crying hard now because of this hurt. Blood starts roaring in my ears.
Because I have been here before, too.
But I don’t try to fix it. I don’t try to make him feel better. I just fold my boy in my arms and let him cry at this hurt from friends he thought loved him the way he loves them.
There will be time for what comes next.
///
My second year of college I signed up for an introductory creative writing class.
The first day of class I knew I wouldn’t like my professor. He was arrogant and opinionated and rigid in his beliefs about the way things should be done.
The first poem I turned in was a religious one about how dark and light can coexist. It wasn’t very good, but it wasn’t bad enough to merit the big red C he marked on it. He’d scrawled a piece of explanation across the back page. “Leave religion out of class,” it said.
So I did. And yet every poem I turned in after that he marked “melodramatic” or “flowery” or “fluff,” no matter how happy or dark or serious I got.
He used my short stories as material to rip apart in class, in front of the 25 others students.
He was a bully through and through, set on discounting me at every turn. But I didn’t drop the class, because I was not a quitter.
I stuck around and kept trying, kept getting better, but he never could bring himself to acknowledge that I was the hardest worker in the class.
When he handed back my last short story of the semester, it was with the words, “You will never be published. Look for something else to do. Your writing is not good enough.”
The words dropped down deep and sat there like permanent stones.
///
If we’re not careful, the words that others speak so carelessly can become more than just words. They can become lies that we believe.
I let those words of my first creative writing professor derail me for a while. I let them tell me what I could and could not do. I let them still my pen, because, of course, he was right.
What was the point?
For six years, every time I tried to pick up a pen, his voice came whispering from that dark wound in my heart.
No one cares about this story, he said.
These characters are boring, he said.
You will never, he said.
And then, one day, I decided to test that lie. I decided to open my notebook. I decided to write.
The thing about those critical voices is that when we test them and find them as untrue as they actually are, they then have the potential to launch us into greater determination and effort.
I let the words wreck me for a time. I gave up, but my giving up didn’t make me feel any better. I knew what I was made to do, and letting someone else determine whether or not I did it left me hollow and shaky on the inside.
So I chose to write—not to prove him wrong but to prove to myself that I could do it when someone said I couldn’t.
Sometimes those voices aren’t curses at all. Sometimes they are the greatest blessings of all.
Because in overcoming them, we learn just how resilient we are.
///
Two years ago I sat in the lobby of a hospital with my husband for a meeting with the pastor of a large church where my husband was spending a few months as the interim worship pastor.
The pastor had called a meeting to tell us that if we were to move forward, if my husband was to get the worship pastor job, I would have to stop leading worship with him.
My voice just wasn’t good enough for the size church he led, he said.
I was playing in the big leagues now, and I didn’t have what it takes, he said.
There would be no husband-and-wife music ministry at his church, he said.
I sat and listened to his words, and I would not let the crumbling inside make me cry. I didn’t say a single word about his thoughts, just thanked him for his time and walked back to the car with my husband when the torturous time had finished.
I spent a whole year reeling. My husband and I found somewhere else to serve, where people made it their mission to seek us out after the service ended and tell us how much they enjoyed our voices together. They couldn’t see it from where they sat, but every single time I got up to the microphone to sing—every single time—I heard that pastor’s voice.
Just not good enough, he said.
I believed him. I believed him even though my husband and I had been in a band for a decade and had three full-length albums under an independent record label.
What if all of it was bad, just because of me? I couldn’t bear the thought.
So I stopped writing music. I stopped singing. I stopped offering our worship leading services to the people with whom I came in contact, because they wouldn’t want us anyway.
And then, months later, I stood up, and there was a big, gaping hole where the music had been.
So I started crawling back to it, writing a song here and there. I started singing in the hallways of our home so my kids would smile at my silly lyrics that they hadn’t heard in too long.
I started to call that voice a lie.
///
Sometimes those words can hit us so hard we don’t think we’ll ever get back up. Sometimes it takes us a really long time to get back up. Six months. A year.
Six years.
It’s hard to say what makes people use their voices this way. Sometimes they’re jealous. Sometimes they’re just set on their own way and don’t care if getting that way is cruel. Sometimes they just don’t understand the responsibility that comes with their speech-freedom.
It doesn’t matter why, really. What matters more is what we do with their words.
Will we let them define a new, broken us? Or will we let them propel us into a new, better us?
Even though those voices shout loud and hit hard at all our weakest places, we don’t have to bend. We don’t have to break. We don’t have to let the stones inside.
We can let them drive us deeper into the journey of discovering who we are and what we can do, because we know, deep down, why we are here and who we are becoming and what we must do.
We know whether or not those voices and their words are true, and it doesn’t matter if they feel true in this moment right here, right now. It only matters that we call them FALSE.
Who would I be without writing? Who would I be without music? Fulfilled? Satisfied? Happy?
No.
Then I must keep on. No matter how many voices gather against me, no matter what those voices say, no matter how loud they get.
My boy has finished his grieving. I pull back only when several minutes pass without a sniff.
“Do you think your friends are right?” I say.
He shrugs. “I don’t know.”
“Do you think you would be happy if you didn’t write your Power Buddy stories?” I say.
“No,” he says. We look in each other’s eyes. “I want to tell their stories.”
“Then what are you going to do?” I say.
He’s quiet for a minute, and then he says, “I’m going to write their stories. Will you help me, Mama?”
Of course I will. Of course I will help my son prove to himself that he can do something others say he can’t.
Because I want him to know that “they” can’t tell us who we are or what we can or cannot do. “They” are not us. “They” have no idea why we have been put here.
But we do.
So every Wednesday night, during our snuggle time, we have been brainstorming my boy’s Power Buddy series.
We are telling those stories together, he and I.
Even though people said he couldn’t.
Even though people said it was stupid.
Even though people said no one would read them.
We do it anyway. Because we know.
We are doing what we were made to do, and this is wholehearted living.
by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
All day long I’ve been checking comments and shaking my head and feeling distracted by this war happening online, on my space, so I didn’t get much work done.
Many of the comments are kind, but too many of them are not.
So I sit down to my computer and get ready to fire back my responses. Something about how we should take care with our words and assumptions and especially strangers’ hearts.
My husband puts his hand on my arm. “It’s not worth it,” he says. “You can’t argue with people like that. You just have to ignore them.”
I scan the tirade one more time, and every single one of them pouring poison online holds up a “freedom of speech” card, claiming their right to share their opinion.
And yes, it’s true. We do have the right to our own opinion.
But just because we have the right to free speech and the freedom of expression, does that mean we should use it to air everything we think?
This is a harder question to answer.
///
When I was 11 years old, I stood outside the little Baptist church I attended on Wednesday nights and watched a friend play basketball with some of his older buddies.
Another girl watched, too. She had a crush on my friend, but he didn’t ever pay any attention to her, mostly because he had a crush on me. I didn’t see him as anything more than a friend, so I kept trying to bring them together.
But my efforts didn’t work. And there came a day when the youth leader called us all inside and the boys went one way and the girls went another, and my friend hugged me and said he was leaving early and wouldn’t see me again until school the next morning.
The girl was watching. The boys disappeared, and she turned to me and said, “You have a really pointy nose.” Then she walked away.
Maybe it wouldn’t have affected me as much if my dad hadn’t just left my family for another one. Maybe I wouldn’t have been as bothered if I hadn’t already been uncomfortable in my skin. Maybe I could have let it go if I hadn’t already been walking my way toward eating disorders and wishing I were different.
I can’t say for sure, because that wasn’t my reality then.
I tried to pretend her words hadn’t hurt me as much as they did. I tried to keep my fingers from tracing the shape of my nose. I tried to walk past the girls’ bathroom without ducking inside.
But I did go inside, and I stood looking at my nose in the mirror for five whole minutes, turning to examine it from every angle.
Yeah, I thought. Yeah, I see what she means. It is pointy.
If she thought it was pointy, how many other people did, too?
///
Even today, in my dark days, when I find myself unhappy with my appearance, her voice joins the others in their raucous chorus.
What does it matter? you might say. What does it matter what one little girl thought? What does it matter what other people think? You shouldn’t be so weak to care. You shouldn’t be so insecure about yourself that the words of another person can hurt you.
The problem is that we are all, at the heart of us, wired for connectivity. What exercising our freedom of speech and our right to our own opinions through personal attacks on other people does is it disconnects us from the human experience of community.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948. It was the first global expression of the basic human rights all people could claim.
Freedom of speech was added as Article 19 in 1949. Article 19 said that “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.”
This idea of free speech and expression had been developing since the advent of the printing press. Traditionally, governments had limited printing materials to only those that the government agreed with.
Because of this limitation, political ideas could not be freely debated.
Free speech and the free expression of ideas was originally a political, intellectual right, not a personal one meant to justify airing our opinion about everything.
Governments still restrict freedom of speech and expression based on the harm principle, which says that one’s freedom cannot be used to harm another. Some of those restrictions include libel, slander, hate speech, fighting words and oppression. There are many others.
Article 19 also states that the freedom of speech and expression carries “special duties and responsibilities…for respect of the rights or reputation of others.”
This is the part we seem to have forgotten.
///
In college I worked as the editor-in-chief of the college newspaper.
There were a few rotating cartoonists who would publish editorial cartoons with us.
One night a cartoonist turned in his cartoon, and I immediately had a bad feeling about it.
In the cartoon, a professor stood at the front of the class. A bubble above him said, “Blah, blah, blah.” The students around him all had hostile expressions on their faces. Some were sleeping. A few were throwing things at him.
The caption below the cartoon said, “Mr. Smith puts his family to sleep, too.”
I called the cartoonist to see if he had anything else he could send me.
Why? he said.
Because this one just didn’t seem very respectful, I said.
It’s not a real teacher, he said. It’s just a joke. It’s just a humorous opinion.
He said he had nothing else to give me, and I was two hours from deadline with nothing else to fill the space.
So I let it run.
The next afternoon, when I got to my office, I had fourteen messages waiting on my phone and another seventeen in my e-mail inbox. People were outraged by the cartoon. It shouldn’t have run.
It seemed that everyone but me knew who the professor was, because even though the name had been changed, the picture, they said, was a dead giveaway.
I had to not only submit a formal apology for letting something so insensitive print in the paper for which I was responsible, but I also had to fire a really good cartoonist who’d probably just been annoyed at a teacher for some reason or another and decided to lash out in the best way he knew how.
Just because we have freedom doesn’t mean we should take it.
///
With this freedom comes great responsibility.
We are responsible for our words and whether they build up or tear down.
We are responsible for the hearts of one another.
In this day of computer communication, with our ever-increasing ability to comment anonymously all over the Internet, we have gotten really good at firing off responses, without really thinking about how, at the other end of our words, there is a person.
We can’t see their face. We don’t know much about their lives. We assume the parts that are missing.
It’s easy to forget our responsibility.
I don’t have a problem with a friendly exchange of ideas, with a person who can respectfully disagree with what I have to say, someone who makes a good effort to convince me of his or her viewpoint without feeling the need to make it personal.
But when someone starts attacking me or the members of my family, saying destructive, hurtful, dishonoring things they have no way of knowing for sure, that’s when they have lost their ability and their right to communicate with me.
What freedom of speech really means is expressing our opinions or viewpoints in a way that does not damage other people or people groups. It means carefully weighing our words and running them through a filter—is it kind? Is it true? Is it necessary?—and only speaking when our words pass the test. It means seeking harmony and peace even in disagreement.
We cannot claim our right if we do not exercise our responsibility.
Freedom of speech has the ability to broaden our minds in astounding ways, introducing us to new ideas and uncomfortable viewpoints and enriching humanity’s full experience of life.
We just have to know how to use it.
by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
I feel the annoyance creeping in, because it’s the third time this morning I’ve tried to finish this sentence—just this one sentence—and the boys are fighting again, so the baby starts crying and then someone says those dreaded words: “I’m telling Mama.”
It’s unusual that I’m working right now while they’re playing, but I sent some facts to be checked, and the source confirmed them late, and I have to finish this one little sentence, just seven words, to get it sent off before deadline.
But a little boy is shaking my arm, trying to tattle on a brother who took his toy, and I drop my head and let out the longest sigh in the history of air and say, “Can you just let me finish this one little thing? Just this little thing?”
He cries and blubbers and shakes my arm some more, so I shut the laptop harder than I intend to, and I can feel all the wrong words exploding from my mouth.
Sometimes being a writer and a mother feels dang near impossible.
“I don’t know how you get it all done and still have time to be a good mother,” my friends and family occasionally say.
I understand the question, because mothering is hard and mothering is intensive and mothering is never-ending. When in the world would I possibly have time to write?
How does a good mother become a good writer? How does a good writer walk away from the writing desk still a good mother?
How does a woman change diapers and spend time with her children and kiss the booboos that happen every other minute and build a star out of shape blocks and still put coherent thoughts down on a page?
We become mothers and believe that’s just the end of our story.
But I want you to know it’s not. Not if we don’t want it to be.
///
When I was 4 years old, I could already read, mostly because my 10-months-older brother came home from kindergarten and taught me everything he learned that day in class.
Reading opened up a whole new world for me, and I loved it so much I wanted to contribute to it. So I sketched out my first stories, with characters called Laura and Mary Ingalls, who would get into the same adventures my brother and sister and I would get into—meeting the ghost in the tree house out back, playing a risky game of dodge ball with the millions of pecans carpeting our backyard, building forts out of blackberry brambles before we knew they were mostly just ready-made snake nests.
I knew early on that I wanted to be a writer. I knew I wanted to write kid lit. I knew exactly what I had to do to get there.
I told everyone I knew of my plans. They agreed and nodded and patted me on the head with smiles that spoke of great amusement that here was a little 5-year-old telling them what she wanted to be when she grew up, already, and watch how she would change those plans when she got older and real life happened.
Except the plans never changed.
They didn’t change when I went off to college and was encouraged by a guidance counselor to major in a field that would actually pay, so I picked journalism. I wrote out my stories longhand in the extra hours between classes.
They didn’t change when I married my husband and I got my first job at a large newspaper in Texas. I wrote my stories in the hours between dinner and sleep.
They didn’t change when we had our first baby and started talking about the possibility of quitting our jobs and pursuing music together. This time, though, there was no time to turn plans into pursuit.
So I put them on hold.
///
I didn’t know they would be on hold for so long.
I didn’t know that my husband would quit his job and I would stay at mine, because it was flexible enough to allow travel and there was another baby on the way and someone had to get a steady paycheck to make sure we stayed caught up on our budget.
So I worked as a managing editor and took care of the baby and spent evenings practicing or playing gigs or trying to get some sleep even though there was so much, always, to do.
You couldn’t really see it from the outside, but I was withering into only a piece of who I am.
A piece doesn’t live like a whole does. A piece has only a matter of time before it dies, cut off from the whole.
I was slowly dying, and no one could even tell.
///
Six years later I still felt stuck, working a job I hated, trying to make ends meet, trying to love kids well, trying to just keep up, trying to feel fulfilled.
But all those stories were burning holes clean through me, and they kept getting deeper and wider and blacker.
I snapped at children and picked fights with my husband and became a person I didn’t really like, because I felt so dried up inside.
It didn’t matter that I had all these beautiful boys or that my husband has only ever been supportive or that I got to work my job mostly from home so I got the best of both worlds—designing pages and editing articles while my kids romped around in the same room.
It mattered that I wasn’t writing. It mattered that I could not create all those stories that had lived in my imagination for more than a decade.
So I started taking moments where I could. When my boys were eating breakfast and we’d finished the morning devotional, I jotted down story ideas. When they napped, I crafted essays and chapters. When they went to bed at night, I wrote random thoughts in a nightly journal.
When I read to them, I picked books that would make me a better writer. When we engaged in our after-dinner family time, we incorporated a writing time and independent drawing time for the littlest ones. When school let out for the summer, we brainstormed a family story-telling project.
Slowly, slowly, slowly, I started coming back to life.
///
It’s never easy, being a mother who writes.
I feel the pressure of do-it-all and try-to-look-perfect and volunteer-for-everything-at-my-kids’-school.
I know many mothers who feel it, too.
We want to be the best mothers we can be. We want to have perfectly clean and put-together houses. We want to spend the most time we can in our kids’ classrooms so the memories they have at school are always associated with us, too.
We want to keep on top of laundry and cook the best and healthiest meals and organize an afternoon of pure fun for our children.
Because we just love them so much.
But we can’t do it all. We just can’t.
So we need to stop trying.
There’s an easy answer to the question, “How do you do it all?”
The truth is, I don’t.
If you were to come to my house on any given day, you would see a thick layer of dust on the bookshelves, because I was busy building a flower garden out of shapes with my 3-year-olds this morning and every other morning for the last three months. You would see the mess the 4-year-old made with his crayons and art paper during his Quiet Time today, because he no longer naps and I needed to make the deadline on an article. You would see that tonight we’re having raw carrots and raw cucumbers tossed in a bowl, along with the chicken that’s been simmering in the crockpot all day, because I had a lot on my mind that I needed to get down on paper.
You would see that the laundry has yet to be put away, even though I finished it three days ago. You would see that the 6-year-old frequently bursts into my room when I’m in the middle of an essay and asks if I’ve seen the other Spider-Man sock that went missing. You would see that sometimes, when I’m sitting in my wing chair crafting a chapter on a novel, my 8-year-old will sneak quietly in and sit in his daddy’s wing chair without saying a word for a whole hour, just because he wants to be near me.
This is what it looks like to be a writer and a mother.
It doesn’t look perfect. It doesn’t look neat all the time. It doesn’t even look completely consistent, because sometimes someone throws up on the carpet and needs Mama to lie down beside him so his tummy feels better. Sometimes the twins won’t stop fighting over who gets which train and Mama has to step in to defuse emotions. Sometimes the biggest boy threatens he’s going to run away and I have to talk him out of it.
Some days all I can be is Mama.
That’s okay, too. Because do you know what living does? What engaging with our children does? What being a mama does?
It makes our writing richer.
Maybe we will always feel this tension between creating and mothering. Maybe we will always hear the voice that whispers we are being selfish in our pursuit and we should just be content with being a mother. Maybe we will always feel guilty that we want and need something more.
But what I have learned in my years being a writer and a mother is that I am a better wife and mother and person because of my creating.
This is whole-hearted living.
And it’s way better than doing it all.
by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
We are talking of the future and business plans and all these topics that beckon anxiety from its hiding place, because we’re in such a precarious position with so many unknowns.
He is asking for hope and trust and certainty, and I just can’t give it in light of all those years when plans didn’t work out like we thought they would and disappointment came loping in like a stray dog that thinks it’s home.
What if this new plan ends the same way all the others did?
His eyes, wild and furious, tell me I’ve said exactly the wrong words at exactly the wrong time in exactly the wrong way.
But there are children in the car, so he bites his lip and stares out the front window, and he will not be able to say what he wants to say until we get home and feed kids and put them down for their naps, because there is not a moment alone until we do.
We let the silence speak for us.
My head starts turning it over and over, how maybe I shouldn’t have said what I did, but, God, I’m so tired of arguing about the same old things and having the same old conversations about the same old dilemma, and all those years adding up to tired brought words to my mouth without so much as a second thought.
You can’t take back words.
So they just sit and fester in both our hearts, waiting for boys to sleep so we can fight these wrinkles back into smooth.
///
It took him a while to convince me to spend the rest of my life with him.
There were two other possibilities, a boy destined for politics and another who had a good shot at professional baseball, when he came along. My future husband came crashing through both their plans with his black curls and blue eyes and a voice that could soothe me to sleep when he talked, but especially when he sang.
The problem wasn’t that he was just the tiniest bit dorky or that he wasn’t very good with money or that he wasn’t really sure what he wanted to be when he grew up.
The problem was mostly that when he looked at me, he really looked at me. He really saw. He really knew in the deepest ways a person could know.
It unsettled me. I was so good at hiding feelings and pretending that life’s hard punches hadn’t even winded me and constructing this identity of a laid-back girl who had her whole life figured out.
I worked so hard to lock away those secret places.
And here was a boy-man dismantling all the walls and staring into the bare places and shouting that what he saw—all the ugliness curled inside a little girl’s heart—was actually beautiful.
But I wasn’t ready, and I wasn’t sure he was The One, and I couldn’t really tell if this was love or just hope.
But mostly I was afraid of the greatness he saw in me.
I held him at arms’ length for as long as I could, and then I gave in.
He slipped a ring on my finger, and we stepped into forever.
///
He still knows in the deepest ways a person can know.
When I say there’s nothing wrong in that specific tone of voice, he knows it means there really is, but I’m just not ready to talk about it yet.
When I say I had a hard time writing today, he knows it’s because it’s the last day of the month and tomorrow I’ll have to sit in front of a computer and try to reconcile our budget.
When I say I need to go to Wednesday night church, he knows it’s because I just need time to myself, without anyone bothering me or trying to get my attention or asking me for something.
He just knows.
He knows how I’ll respond or react before I do. He knows what I’m feeling before I can even articulate the words. He knows my motivations and my fears and my shaky hope and my annoying realism and the way I tie my shoes with two bunny ears and how I’ll feel about my son’s playground experience today and the words I’ll say about the one who won’t leave us alone at bedtime and what I think about the book I’ll pull open tonight.
Living together, scraping against each other’s edges, sharpening the iron strength of another for as long as we have means that you really, really know someone in the deepest places. You know how they’re feeling and how they see the world today and what they need at just the right times.
It can feel scary to be known this way. When we are known, we have no place to hide. When we are known, we are vulnerable.
When we know, we see all their vulnerable.
This knowing can turn cruel, and sometimes it does, taking its anger-shot at the exact place it will hurt the most.
When you know someone, you know how to aim your punch.
This is part of the marriage story, too.
///
I had never met anyone quite like him before.
When I was sick, he stayed by my side, holding my hair as I bent over the toilet or lying beside me while I burned up with fever or carrying me down fifteen stairs after I broke my foot.
When I spoke, he listened and heard. When I dreamed, he believed those dreams were possible. When I cried, he did not run away.
When I raged, he met the fire.
For the early years of our marriage, I lived with a ball of black in my heart. It spoke of abandonment and fear and a bottomless well of insecurity. Sometimes that ball flew out of my mouth and wrapped around words. Sometimes it took off the screen door of my heart and nailed up a cedar one instead. Sometimes it aimed its arrow and sent hurt into the most tender parts my husband’s heart.
Every single time he forgave. He never held grudges or threatened leaving or wondered if he might do better for himself somewhere else.
Instead, he stood solid against all those years until I began to soften. And then he loved me more gently, more profoundly, more wholly.
I have still never met anyone quite like him.
///
A fight like this one is not the first in the nearly twelve years we’ve been married. Of course it isn’t. Because we’re human. We’re imperfect. We’re selfish.
We speak without thinking.
And when you’ve been married this long, you know what all the words say, but you also learn what the silences between the words say.
In every marriage there come seasons of waking up on a different page in a different book, feeling more like strangers who fight than friends who talk.
We have had days, weeks, months of tension and push-and-pull and butting heads and asking forgiveness, and every single time—every single time—we have walked out of that shaky season stronger than we walked in.
Every single time.
We fought and we disliked and we raged and we cried and we opened our umbrellas and we hid in ditches during those storms that sometimes only dumped rain but sometimes felt like a won’t-survive-it tornado, and through it all we fought for love.
We all say words we don’t mean to the ones we love. And then we all have the privilege of stepping outside ourselves and meeting the other person’s hurt with humility and remorse.
The secret to saving a marriage is not avoiding all the conflicts. The secret is letting go of our pride. Saying we’re sorry. Choosing love over winning.
Forgiving.
It takes time and practice to learn how to fight fair. How to crawl toward forgiveness and redemption and a love wider and deeper and stronger than it was before those storms came rumbling in. How to let conflict rearrange us into better people.
Sometimes, when we are entrenched in those days and weeks and months of conflict, when it feels like we can get nothing right and we can’t say one single word without arguing, we can start to believe that conflict tells the whole story of our marriage.
But if we look closely enough, we’ll see.
Forgiveness after forgiveness, redemption after redemption, this is the whole story of a marriage.
And so, today, while boys eat their lunch, I follow my husband up the stairs and I wrap my arms around him and speak my apology into his ear.
Tears mix on both our cheeks, but that salty water is really sweet. So sweet.
Because it tells the real story of a marriage. The real story of partnership. The real story of love.
(Happy belated birthday, my love. I hope you know all the ways I love you. I hope you know how thankful I am that we can fight and let it rearrange us into better people. I hope you know how glad I am that you unlocked my heart (even if I fought you every step of the way). You are still the most wonderful man I have ever met in my life. I love you truly madly deeply.)
by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
So much of what I do, as a mother, goes unseen.
I plan our healthy meals and read the labels of everything I put in my shopping cart, to make sure our home stays toxin-free, and I mix our own cleaners and make note of when we’ll need to reorder those essential oils we use for healing.
I carve out a schedule that protects our family playing time, and I craft a budget that means we have food and shelter for another month, and I make sure all the art supplies stay stocked.
I manage Amazon subscriptions for ingredient-approved vitamins and count them out every single day and line them up next to my boys’ breakfast plates, and instead of “thank you” I hear about how they didn’t want these scrambled eggs this morning because all their friends get to eat cereal for breakfast, and why can’t they?
I clear out their closets when their old clothes are too small, and I buy them new underwear when the old ones cut off circulation and I buy new socks when the old ones have too many holes, and the only thing I hear for it is how they wanted red socks instead of the white ones I bought.
I turn off lights and flush toilets and remind them to brush their teeth and mend their blankets and find their lost library books and read stories until my throat hurts and send them back to bed a thousand times every single night, and I don’t even think they notice.
There are so many days I can feel downright invisible.
Welcome to being a mother.
///
When I was eleven years old, my mom slapped a magnet dry-erase calendar on the front of our white refrigerator.
“Dish schedule,” she said.
Our names were written on it in black, Jarrod, Rachel, Ashley and Mom switching places on all the squares.
Every month she sat down with a school calendar and the dry-erase one and wrote our names on the schedule in a way that wouldn’t interfere with our lives.
The schedule got more complicated when we got to high school, because there were volleyball games and every-night-of-the-week practices and football games with the marching band and National Honor Society and Wednesday night church and homework after all that.
I didn’t appreciate all the hard work that went into a schedule as complicated as that. All I did was resent that I had to wash dishes two nights a week.
I resented that I worked so hard at school all day and then slaved away at volleyball practice and rode a bus to the pick-up point and finally got home after dark to finish what homework I couldn’t do on the bus, because I cared about handwriting and the bus was too bouncy, and then I still had to do the dishes.
So unfair.
My tunnel vision didn’t let me see that she worked all day, much harder than I ever did at school, and then she cooked dinner and tried to keep it warm for me and drove to meet the bus and stayed near while I finished my homework so I’d have help if I needed it and, on top of all that, she planned meals for the month and did all the shopping and budgeted our very limited resources and wrote out a schedule for doing dishes so one person was not overburdened with the responsibility.
She was a mother.
She was invisible, too.
///
Now that I have children of my own, I know just how selfish children can be. I know just how thankless motherhood is. I know how no matter what we do behind the scenes, there is still more they want us to do.
It’s just the nature of children. I know this. They don’t see their own selfishness or the way those ill-timed complaints can make a mama not ever want to cook a hot breakfast for them ever again or how just the thought of tackling eight loads of laundry that come back every week is enough to keep her in bed when the alarm chimes.
They only wonder why they’re having oatmeal again when today was supposed to be pancake-day. They don’t see that Mama ran out of time to flip pancakes because she had to turn every male shirt right-side out before sorting it into laundry piles she’ll spend all day washing.
It’s completely, developmentally normal for them to not make those connections yet.
Someday they will.
But that means nothing for this day, this day you stripped all his sheets and blankets and spent half the day he was at school vacuuming and washing and putting a bed back together because he woke up with ant bites all over his legs and you’re afraid there might be ants in his bed because they were eating popcorn up here yesterday even though it’s against the rules. This day he comes out of his room complaining that his blanket is still a little wet.
This day when you loaded the washer with that first pile holding his Spider-Man shirt, because you were sure he’d want to wear it on his birthday, and there’s just enough time to wash and dry it before he has to leave for school. This day he comes down the stairs crying about how he can’t find his workout clothes to wear on his birthday, and you know they’re lying at the bottom of another pile you planned to wash later today.
This day you woke up to find three lights left on all night and you can’t help but mentally calculate how much that’s going to cost you.
The promise of someday does not make this day any easier.
///
After I married and had an apartment of my own, my mom came visiting with a box.
“What’s that?” I said, because I had just finished unpacking, and I hadn’t missed anything important.
“All your old stories,” she said.
“What stories?” I said.
“The ones you wrote when you were little,” she said, and she pulled out one that imagined what I would do if I had a million dollars. I’d written it when I was 7.
“I’d buy a car, and I wouldn’t share with my brother,” I’d written.
We laughed about it.
There were Little House on the Prairie imitations and the story about a girl miraculously walking again to save her friends from danger and another scrawled out on 93 sheets of notebook paper the summer I went to visit my dad.
“I didn’t know you kept all these,” I said.
My mom smiled. “Of course I did.”
Of course she did. They were pieces of me she loved. They were pieces that proved her love.
And she is a mother.
///
There is a drawer in my closet where I keep my kids’ drawings and old writing notebooks they’ve filled with words and loose papers with quirky doodles filling corners.
My boys don’t know the drawer is there.
My 8-year-old doesn’t know that when he slipped his note under our bedroom door, the one that says he feels angry when we tell him it’s bedtime before he’s ready to go to bed, the one that bears a picture of a boy with a red face and smoke coming out of his ears, the note went into that drawer.
My 6-year-old doesn’t know that when he wrote a kindergarten essay in school about how he knows his mom loves him when she reads to him, his essay went into that drawer.
My 4-year-old doesn’t know that when the amazing fox picture he drew disappeared from his drawing binder it went into that drawer.
They don’t know all the ways I love them, because they are just children who believe love looks mostly like hugs and kisses and sweet snuggles.
They don’t know yet that it mostly looks like time and service and invisibility.
What I am still learning in my mother journey is that sometimes the greatest acts of love are the ones that whisper instead of shout.
A storage container with writing treasures shoved under our mom’s bed.
A dish schedule that honored our time over her own.
A ride to early-morning volleyball practices, even though she worked late.
I want to be that kind of great.
It comes welling up in me, every now and then, when I’m tired and frustrated and annoyed that I can’t seem to find just a minute to myself. I want to be noticed. Acknowledged. Appreciated.
I forget that invisibility is better than alone.
I get to be a mama. I get to love my children through olive oil brushed over broccoli and a sprinkling of sea salt. I get to love them by sitting down and coloring a picture of Lightning McQueen with them, even though a thousand other responsibilities are calling my name. I get to love them with a secret drawer that holds treasures more valuable than what sits in our bank account.
I get to be loved by his bursting into the room while I’m working just so he can give me a missed-you kiss. I get to be loved by the flower he brings me, because its beauty reminded him of me, and I get to watch it curl up while I’m writing. I get to be loved in his request to be carried downstairs, just like old times, even though he’s so much heavier now and fully capable of walking himself.
We get to be loved in a million silent ways, and we get to love in a million silent ways.
Welcome to being a mother.
(Happy Mother’s Day.)
by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
Photo by Helen Montoya Henrichs.
Today he turns 6, this second boy who stole my heart.
It’s hard to believe he is that old. Every time I look at him now I see a boy, not even little anymore. Just a boy with skinny little legs and big feet and a smile that can light the whole house on fire.
Time has flown so fast I want to grab it all back. I want to savor it right now, this moment. I want to hold him while he will still let me, but the problem is, I don’t ever want to let him go.
This weekend we cut a cookie cake and played Spider-Man games and watched him open presents like LEGOs instead of baby blocks, and I kept thinking about how these last six years have gone and how the next six will go, and I feel sad and glad and scared and excited all at the same time.
He is one of the most remarkable children I have ever known.
Just the other day, when I was in the middle of beating myself up about a to-do list largely left undone, with the potential to derail a whole week’s plans, in walked my boy, just home from school, with a yellow flower he’d made and another he’d picked. He was grinning.
“I know you’re working,” he said. “But this is for you.”
He kissed me and wrapped his arms around me in a tight hug, and then he was gone.
For six years I have watched this boy grow into his name. Asa. Healer.
For six years he has been healing holes in our home.
///
We didn’t even know if it was the right time to try for another baby.
Four months before, I had lost my grandmother, and I was still reeling from her death, weeping every time someone mentioned the name grandma, even though she was called Memaw.
And, at the heart of it, I was afraid I could not love another child as deeply as I loved the first.
Most mothers of one child worry about this, because, until it happens, we cannot imagine how a heart can expand its body borders so it’s wide enough to hold multiple children.
But then I took that pregnancy test, and it said no, and I cried, afraid we wouldn’t be able to have another baby because so many friends couldn’t.
That when I knew just how desperately I wanted another.
Two weeks later I took another pregnancy test, convinced the first one was wrong because I could hardly climb out of bed in the morning and I fell asleep while my 18-month-old was eating his lunch even though the choking fear was right up there with the drowning fear and the getting-hit-by-a-car fear.
This time the test said yes and I smiled a little, knowing already who he would be.
He would be called Asa. Healer. Zane. Everything that is good and beautiful.
Already, just a few weeks in, this baby was healing my heart, glowing new life in the space my Memaw had taken with her.
I knew she would want me to be happy, even in grief. And so I let myself be, waiting to meet another little piece of perfection that might carry her generosity or her love-looks or that infectious laugh.
///
He doesn’t even know all the way she has healed.
In our home, this second boy is the one who comes home from school and tells each one of his stays-at-home brothers how much he missed them while he was away. He is the one who will catch me unaware when I am lost in thought, washing the dishes that never seem to ever be done, and tell me, “You’re doing such a great job doing those dishes, Mama,” and make me actually want to do them.
He is the one who will open doors for his brothers and turn on light switches for the ones too short to reach them and comfort his baby brother when he’s crying.
He has more friends than I can keep up with, and he’s the example his teacher uses for a helpful spirit and a kind heart, and he’s more often than not an objective mediator between his fist-fighting brothers.
When I asked him today what he’s been put on this earth to do, his answer was simple and lovely, an honest picture of who he is at heart.
“To help people,” he said.
Yes. Of course. He has been living into that purpose since he was born.
///
He slid into the world after six hours of labor and three good pushes. He was the easiest labor of all.
When they put him in my arms, though, I thought they’d made a mistake. This isn’t my baby, I thought. He doesn’t look anything like the other one.
That mama bond with the first was instantaneous and deep, and I realized later it was because looking at him was like looking into a time-machine mirror of me as a baby.
But this second one, he had blue eyes that would stay blue and the full lips of his daddy and no hair and red splotches all over his body from a labor quick and jarring.
I worried that I would not be able to love him after all.
But I shouldn’t have worried. My love bloomed and uncurled over those days and weeks and months that followed his birthing day.
It was easy to love him. He smiled before any other the others, and he let me hold him as much as I wanted, and there was something in those eyes that could give such courage to an overwhelmed-mama heart.
When his older brother threw a fit because he was tired of sharing Mama’s attention, my baby waited calmly to be fed, like it was really no big deal.
When my belly started growing with baby number 3 five months after he was born, he just watched in awe and excitement that there would be another baby.
When his mama could not play blocks with him because she had to feed the new baby, even though he was still a baby, he did not fuss or throw blocks in anger like his older brother would have done in his place. He just came to sit by me, kissing his brother’s forehead and waiting for the time when Mama would be free to play.
He is the easiest boy I’ve ever had.
///
There is a danger in this easy.
Sometimes we forget that he has needs, too, because he is kind and calm and flexible and unworried and sweet, a personality that often gets lost in all our crazy.
Sometimes we forget that he has his own plans, because he is so good at following everyone else’s.
Sometimes we forget that he should not always be expected to act like who he is.
We’ve tried to remind him of this every now and then, because the danger in going with the flow and doing what you’re told all the time and always behaving in the way that’s expected is that you never get to try out rebellion.
Rebellion can be good for us, when used well. It can teach us that we are loved not just for our abilities and our behaviors but for just being us. It can teach us that we are accepted for who we are and not who others expect us to be. It can teach us that we have room to make mistakes, too.
Encouraging rebellion in this precious boy has taken intention and hard work, because he’s the kid who’s happy to stand in front of his whole school and accept that Star award for exemplary behavior and obedience.
But this year I have watched him grow from a boy who had to make sure he was doing everything perfectly right before he tried anything new to a boy who just leaps into the unknown. I have watched him decide for himself that his art is good. I have watched him test limits and slide into a new understanding of what it means to grow up and make his own decisions.
How beautiful it’s been.
And through it all he has remained a healer. Everything that is good and beautiful.
Happy birthday, sweet Asa.
I am so glad you are mine.
