by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
It happens unexpectedly, like everything else this boy does.
The oldest, the one who first stole my heart, sits on the side of my bed during our snuggle time. He is drawing some cartoons for the book we’re brainstorming, one we plan to write together.
He says it almost like an afterthought, like it isn’t a big deal, because he has no way of knowing just how big it is.
“I want to marry a woman like you when I grow up,” he says.
I laugh and touch his cheek, and he smiles wide into my eyes. “Really,” he says. “I’m not joking.”
I know he’s not, so I tell him so. And then, when the timer clangs and the baby starts fussing to be fed and he walks out, back to his room, I breathe deep and long, trying to keep the tears from dropping.
They do anyway.
Maybe it’s because the last few days he’s been walking around the house reminding us he only has eight more years before he’s driving and 10 more years before he graduates.
I’m just not ready for any of it.
I’m not ready for them to be grown. I’m not ready for them to be married. I’m not ready for them to be gone.
Sure, he’s only 8, but the day is speeding upon us, if the last eight years have anything at all to teach us.
One day he will be gone. One day they will all be gone. They will all be someone else’s.
This is all right and true and noble and sweet and beautiful. But there is a bittersweet piece to it.
They are all boys.
So I will lose them all.
///
When I was a senior in college, I came down with a severe case of the flu.
I had never before had the flu, in all my 21 years. My throat felt scaly and fire-filled, my cheeks turned red and I could not sleep my body hurt so badly.
My husband, who was just a fiancé at the time, stuck by my side, even at the risk of getting sick himself. He put a cold washcloth on my head to keep the fever down. He made me hot soup and fed me the two bites I could swallow. He took me to the emergency room when my fever got so high I almost passed out.
And then, when it just got too awful to bear, I finally croaked out, “Call my mom.”
Because there is just something about your mom knowing you’re sick that makes you feel just the littlest bit better. She doesn’t even have to drive the 123 miles to your college apartment or sit on the side of your bed or wait outside the room while you sleep.
She just has to know.
A few weeks later, my husband (fiancé) came down with a stomach virus and puked for days.
The only person he called was me.
His mother didn’t even know.
///
I ask my friends with grown boys all the time.
Does he call?
Does he visit?
Does he invite you to visit?
Do you know when he’s sick?
Do you know when he’s hurt?
Do you see him at all?
Most of their answers are the same.
Not often, they say.
I don’t know if it will be the same with my boys.
But I do know that the bond between a mother and a daughter in those growing up years grows right up with them. The daughters have children, and we begin to understand what our mothers sacrificed and how deeply she loved and just how hard it all was.
My boys will never know what it’s like to be a mother, only what it’s like to be a father.
They will never feel what I felt, that incredible awe at having grown this perfect little human being and how lovely it was to watch them nurse in the lamplight of my room and the way they whittled me into a better version of myself.
I used to think I was missing something, that this piece of mother had been withheld because I was not a good enough woman to raise a girl.
Now I know better.
Every child is a great gift, and whether or not we receive him as such doesn’t change the truth of that gift. They were all given so they could scrape us into the best versions of ourselves, and maybe they are boys and maybe they are girls, but they all scrape our hearts the same.
If my boys want to marry a woman like me someday, then I have to let them shape who I become.
///
When that first pregnancy test showed positive, and my husband and I could finally move again, my mother was the first person we called.
He was the first grandchild, so of course she was excited. She went to the second appointment with me and listened to his heartbeat. We recorded the first sonogram and gave her a copy. She called me every week, and I called her in between just to let her know how I was doing.
She was the one I wanted to stay with me after the baby came home so we could find our feet with this new little person. She was the one who comforted me when my milk never came in. She was the only one I trusted to keep him for the first overnight road trip his daddy and I took.
Having a baby just made our bond even stronger, and I ached to have a baby girl so I could one day share that with her, too. So I could tell her about the incredibly strong women whose line she shared.
Only it didn’t happen.
We welcomed boy after boy after boy, and the one girl who came slipped right through our hearts before we could meet her. And then came more boys.
Mother of a daughter is a title I would not carry.
///
This is our last baby.
I knew it was coming, and even though I felt disappointed at first that the baby I carried was a boy, I am so very glad that he is another boy.
But.
There is still a deep longing for the daughter I lost, for the bond I missed, for a lifelong friendship like the one I share with my mother.
People ask all the time, when they see or hear that we are the parents of six boys: “Did you want a girl?”
The answer is of course.
Of course I wanted a daughter. Of course I wanted to raise a girl to know where she stands in a world that was made for men. Of course I wanted to raise a girl to know she didn’t have to do anything at all to be proved worthy. Of course I wanted to raise a girl so she would know she was beautiful even in all the imperfect places.
It’s not the reason we had six children, but I did want to be the mother of a daughter.
A daughter shares something so very special with her mother, and I wanted this.
She shares the experience of watching her mother put food on the table, day after day, week after week, year after year, and knowing a little something about this overwhelming need to provide them with everything they need.
She shares the experience of seeing her mother sitting in the stands at all her basketball games, even the one where she sat the bench for too many aggressive fouls.
She shares the experience of accepting a “secret” engagement and understanding, later, that her mother knew all along, because a mother always knows.
I will never have a daughter to experience a first heartbreak with, and I will never have a daughter whose engagement I know about first, and I will never have a daughter bounce career ideas off me.
I will not be the one they call when they are sick. I will not be the one they open up to about the girl they think they might love. I will not be the first one to know they are getting married or having a baby or what gender the baby will be or what they’re doing for Christmas or how long he’s had the flu.
It’s okay to grieve this, because it is a hard knowing.
And it’s only in admitting what we want and how we didn’t quite get it exactly that we can clear our eyes enough to see that what we want and what we need are two very different things.
So I am a mother of only boys.
This is something wonderful, too.
///
One day my boys may marry a woman like me.
And I will be right there, cheering from the sidelines, next to their daddy, waiting for them to call me or visit me or share with me—or not.
Whatever that future holds doesn’t change the truth of now: I have been given a great gift, because I am a mother.
I don’t have to live in those future days now. I don’t have to pretend I know how they will end up. I don’t have to look at my boys now and see them all grown up, pulling away, because the truth is, I have no idea what grown up will look like.
I just know that right now they are my boys.
They are my boys right now.
One day they will be gone, but that isn’t today.
So today I will enjoy being the mama of these boys I love so much my heart is near exploding.
I will enjoy being the first one they run to when they’re hurt and the first one they tell when they have some exciting news and the only one they want to hold them when they’re sick.
Yes. This is something wonderful, too.
by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
Photo by Helen Montoya Henrichs.
We’re sitting in my living room, all our bellies full, and the twins are down for their naps while the oldest boys and the newest one are still up, hanging out with their Nonny and Poppy.
My mom holds the littlest one. My stepdad plays with the others.
And somewhere in the middle of our conversation my mom says, “I sure never expected you to have six boys.”
I laugh. “Yeah. Me neither,” I say.
“If your high school friends could see you now,” my mom says.
If they could, I thought. They would not recognize this me I have become.
I am not who I once was. Not even close.
And I am so very glad.
///
When I was 12 years old, I had just lost my dad to divorce. My mom was close to depressed. I lost my center.
I was never exactly popular, but I did have a handful of friends.
And there was a best friend. We were inseparable. We stayed over at each other’s houses—mostly hers, because I was ashamed of my poor. I knew her sister and mother and father, and she knew my brother and sister and mother.
And then there came a day when jealousy flashed its ugly grin and I fell in its web. I don’t know why, exactly. I just know that I was a fatherless child who was lost and alone and sad. Maybe that explains why it happened. Maybe it doesn’t at all.
There isn’t really a good excuse for being a mean girl.
It’s just that I hurt so badly inside that the only way I felt like I could deal with my hurt was to hurt someone else. So she could feel what I was feeling. Except I was too young to understand that when you hurt someone else, you don’t feel any less alone. You don’t feel any better.
We were watching the eighth graders play a volleyball game. Our seventh grade team had just finished. For some reason I was sitting up high in the bleachers, and she was down at the bottom. Probably I had already said something mean, because she was never one who did that.
More mean was on its way.
A mutual friend moved between us. “Why don’t you want to be her friend anymore?” she said when she reached the top of the stands.
“Because,” I said, with my poker face on. “I just don’t like her anymore.”
Our friend walked back down the bleachers and relayed my message, because we were immature little girls using a mediator, and I watched my best friend’s face crumble, her heart breaking that I could just decide one day I didn’t like her anymore.
And why not? A daddy could decide he didn’t like a little girl anymore and up and leave.
I spent five more years in the same school as my former best friend. Our friendship was never the same.
I could not ever quite bear to look her in the eyes.
///
It’s hard to say what changes us.
Love. Children. Years.
Life.
All of those, rubbing at our edges and softening up the rough parts and uncovering the diamond of who we really are.
We are born into the world pure and whole and beautiful, and then we start counting birthdays, and between those first days of life and now, the diamond of our identity starts disappearing little by little, covered by ego and pain and anxiety and fit in and popular and ridicule and normal, whatever that means.
Someone tells us we need to lose a little weight, and we forget that skinny does not equal beautiful. Someone tells us we need a thicker skin and we forget how big emotions can be a great gift. Someone tells us we aren’t any good at something and we forget that opinions are just opinions and we don’t have to be bound by them.
We forget that we are in charge of who we are and who we become, not “them.” Not our circumstances. Not all the hell that has happened to us.
We can spend a whole lifetime trying to uncover that diamond again.
I look back at the girl I used to be, the girl who could hurt a best friend with such irreverent, ugly words, and I am so glad I am no longer her but have become someone much more careful with words and the glass hearts of those I love.
I look at the teenager who lashed out and tore down and felt diminished by another’s success, and I am so glad I am no longer her.
I look at the young woman who never wanted kids because she didn’t want the changed body that came with them, and I am so glad I am no longer her.
I am not who I once was.
///
I would do more over the years. I would hurt other friends. I would say things I didn’t mean. I would try to make them feel what it felt like to live in my skin—rejected, ugly, unworthy.
And then I would find myself on my knees in the middle of a concert hall, moved so deeply by the music that I could not even hold my heaped-with-guilt head up anymore. I could not look into the eyes of the ones there with me. I could only sob.
And I would go back to my dorm and scratch out all my letters and dig through an address list of my old high school classmates, searching for the ones I needed. I would mail those letters off.
I would wait.
And the responses would come, one after another, telling of how touched they were that I had written and apologized, as if I could do anything else, and I would feel some small piece of healing bloom in my heart.
And then, not long after that healing set in, the same thing would happen to me.
A best friend would lash out. She would accuse and hurt and rip me clean apart.
And, God, it would hurt. But those places of forgiveness that others had extended to me would turn into places where I could forgive her, years later.
Because, even then, I was not who I once was.
///
There is a wisdom that comes with love and children and years and life, but we can miss it.
We can miss it because we are bent beneath the weight of guilt for all those things we did before. We can miss it because we are listening to who “they” say we should be. We can miss it because we are walking broken and we are walking breaking, like wrecking balls crumbling anything they touch.
The years twist some of us into smaller versions of ourselves, because they march on hard and violent and unfair.
But the good news is, we get to stamp The End to that victim story. We get to choose to become someone better.
We can heap more dirt on top of that diamond or we can uncover more of its brilliance.
It’s entirely up to us.
It’s not ever easy leaning into our transformation, and it’s not ever comfortable getting scraped and rounding off our edges and cutting out the pieces that no longer belong, but where we end up will be worth all that pain.
Because we will be someone greater, someone truer to ourselves, someone who knows what it’s like to be on the wounded side and the wounding side and has lived to tell about it.
The world can’t help but be changed by our changing.
We are not who we once were. We will never be again.
Thank God for that.
by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
We’re sitting around the table, talking about our days like we always do, when my husband says, “We got a negative podcast feedback today.”
“Oh, yeah?” I say.
He tells me about this product manager with Facebook, who wrote in to say that as much as he wants to recommend the show to his friends, he just can’t do it because of my husband’s involvement, because my husband, according to this man, hasn’t had the kind of success people would expect from a business owner giving business advice.
This exchange comes at the beginning of our meal, just before we get to our thankfuls, and, God, it just thoroughly and completely derails me.
So it gets to my turn, and I can barely think of anything that deserves my thanks, my whole mood shot through with rips and holes and great big tears. I think about my lost job and our money worries and what might or might not come next in the lineup of success, and my stomach twists, way deep down.
My husband knows, of course, because he’s that kind of man. He smiles and says, “It doesn’t really matter. I know I’m successful.”
And I know he’s right and I know he knows, but something about it just won’t let me go.
That word, success, is a dirty one, snaking all through my past.
A man’s hasty criticism sends it striking again.
///
I spent my four years of high school constantly stressed about grades.
Because, you see, I wanted to go to college, and I knew my mother, single and alone in her provision for us, could not afford it.
I needed valedictorian, because it was the only way I would make it to college, since valedictorians in Texas gain free tuition at their college of choice.
So I watched those class rankings, every six weeks, like they were life and death.
And then I came out on top, and my classmates held an election just before graduation for all those yearbook awards, Most Beautiful, Most Talented, Most Athletic, Most Popular.
They voted me Most Likely to Succeed.
“Because you’re smart,” they said. “Because you know so much. Because you always find a way.”
They could never have known the pressure that award carried in its flimsy paper particles and its forever photo buried in a maroon yearbook.
I went off to college, 126 miles from home, and I had never been away from home longer than three weeks at a time, and by month two, I wanted so very badly to go home I cried myself to sleep every night.
I missed my mom. I missed my whole family. I missed all the familiar.
But I could not go back, because that is not something a person who was Most Likely to Succeed would do.
So, on the worst nights, I pulled out that coloring page my 15-year-old sister had sent me, the one with Garfield and Odie colored in muted oranges and yellows, the one that said, “Wish you were here,” in a little cloud bubble beside Garfield’s scowling face.
And I whispered what I could never, ever admit to anyone.
I do, too.
///
Success comes breathing down our necks, and its breath is foul and suffocating and inescapable.
Because it is everywhere in the world. In magazines profiling the “most successful” people in the world, according to how much they’re worth in a year’s salary. On billboards where famous personalities tell us to watch their shows. In books and on screens and next door to us, where the Joneses live.
Success looks like how big a business you build in the least amount of time or how much money you have in your bank account.
It looks like big houses and luxury cars and a name that means something when spoken.
Success, the way the world defines it, carries pressure in its scales, and it can hypnotize us into believing its shallow lies.
It will tell us what to do and how to live and who we should be.
I can see its venom weaving in and out of all my younger years. I took jobs and turned others away because of it. I bought a two-door silver five-speed car because of it (two doors looks more successful than four, silver is sleeker than blue, five-speed is faster than automatic). I wanted a bigger ring because of it (because the bigger the diamond, the greater the catch, right?).
I fell hard into its nest.
And then something happened.
///
As college graduation approached, I did not worry like all my friends.
I already had a job at the Houston Chronicle. I had a brand new car and thousands in the bank. I had an engagement ring on my finger.
I was going to be prolific.
For a time, that Most Likely to Succeed award felt just right. I was proving it true.
Money? Check.
Prestigious job? Check.
Husband? Check.
By the end of that year, I would add several writing awards to the list, and later we would start a band and play around town and then the state and then all the way up through the Midwest.
On the road home from a gig in New Mexico, my cell phone rang. It was my mother. My grandmother, she said, was dead.
My grandmother, the one I’d lived with for a year during my childhood, when my parents were divorcing. My grandmother, who had offered her house for six months during that Houston Chronicle job and cried the day I left for San Antonio’s paper. My grandmother, whom I was too busy to sit beside those nights she watched the news and I holed away in a room planning my elaborate Cinderella wedding.
It devastated me, her death. I counted back all those married months, 40 of them, and I had only seen her three times—once after we returned from our honeymoon and she picked us up from the airport and begged us to stay the night, because it was too late to drive from Houston back to San Antonio and she knew we were tired from the flight, and we said no, because we just wanted to get home and get on with our married lives; once for our year anniversary trip to Disney World, when we needed her to drop us by the airport; once when she came down for my firstborn’s baby dedication, when I watched her hold him from the stage while I cried through singing the lullaby I’d written for him.
How had this happened?
My grandmother was a school accountant for all her working life. She never made much money, never had any money in savings because she was too busy buying her grandkids gas so they’d drive to see her or treating her kids to dinner or writing a check for a granddaughter’s wedding dress. She stayed put in a no-chance-for-promotion job because she enjoyed the summers off and the way she could keep her grandkids for whole weeks at a time.
I learned something the day we all gathered to celebrate her life.
I learned, or maybe I always knew, that she was the very definition of success.
///
Success lives in who we are, not what we have.
Success is found in the way we look at our spouse in the middle of an argument. It’s found in the way we talk to our children when they’ve done something wrong. It’s found in the relationships we keep with family and friends and neighbors and strangers.
It’s found in the deepest spaces of a heart.
The world, the ignorant words of others, the critical eyes of people, can make us forget this.
Sometimes people will look at our choices—having and raising six children, turning down a promotion because it would take too much time away from those children, remaining a one-car family because we don’t want the debt—and stamp us unsuccessful because we don’t look like the ideal.
But success can never be measured on the outside. It is held within.
I wish I had realized that sooner in my life.
I will never get back the time I spent pursuing a twisted version of success.
But I can redeem it now.
So tonight, in front of my boys who will one day be men with a whole world and its people trying to tell them what success means, I look my husband in the eye and say, “You are successful in all the ways that matter.”
And then I tick them off, all those successful attributes so much a part of who he is.
We may not have a bank full of money we couldn’t spend in a lifetime or two luxury cars sitting out front or a vacation home in that place we always wanted to live. But what we do have, this life full of laughter and presence and joy, is so much better than all that.
The world can take its success definition and cash it in for an empty life.
I’ll take my full one any day.
by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
Some days I know the truth, and some days it gets buried so far beneath those old lies I can hardly remember its echo.
This morning I woke up feeling out of sorts. Not unexpected, since there is a baby who had trouble sleeping. Since there was a brain that just wouldn’t turn off. Since there is work and anxiety and worry that has, lately, followed me right into sleep.
But this was something different. Something deeper.
This was me. This was my body. This was lie, a pair of them, rising up from the graveyard, where I thought I’d buried them long, long ago.
You see, I wrote an article that got a whole lot of publicity, and here came all those haters, and their voices stirred those ghosts from their graves.
While I was sleeping, the corpses came walking, and when I looked in the mirror this morning, they opened their mouths to speak.
Six weeks you’ve had, they said. Six weeks you’ve had to lose that belly. AND IT IS STILL HERE.
And then they smiled with their rotten teeth and told me the worst part of it all.
Unbeautiful, they said. This is unbeautiful. You are unbeautiful.
I could not argue. Not right now. Not today.
Because today, this moment, their words feel true.
///
The first time I heard their voices, I was too young to know them for what they were.
But I listened to commercials and all those teen magazines and the Hollywood ideal of thin and pretty, and I stopped eating lunch when I was 12. I stopped eating breakfast when I was a freshman in high school. I stopped eating the last meal of the day my first day of college, because, for the first time in my life, there was no one to monitor what I ate or didn’t eat.
I thought I could get away with it and that I would finally reach my target weight, which was bony and completely fatless, but I had a roommate who cared. She noticed my rapidly dropping weight and dragged me to dinner at a dining hall every chance she got.
So it wasn’t long before I started purging those suppers.
I would walk with her to the dining hall and eat whatever I wanted, and then, when she was preoccupied with our friends across the hall, I would slip off to the bathroom and do what needed to be done.
When she noticed, I made my excuses. Something I ate made me sick. Stress. A virus, maybe.
She didn’t buy it, so the next stop was laxatives, because that was easier to hide. It was my course load, the pressure to make good grades, the stressful news job that kept me in the bathroom all the time. Laxatives got me through the rest of that semester.
Anorexia got easier when I moved off campus. I kept cans of green beans in the pantry, and the days I felt especially hungry, I’d allow myself one can a day. My roommates were too busy to notice.
Then I met my husband, and there came a night when he left a note on my computer at the newspaper office.
Skinny does not equal beautiful, it said.
And for some reason, I believed him.
I looked at that note every time I sat down in my office chair and every time I got up to leave. It rescued me before my heart could stop from the sickness, but there are other ways to die than the physical ones, and I was already well on my way, gripped by the claws of anorexia and bulimia.
///
Today is a reckoning day, six weeks postpartum, a day when I will visit my doctor again and stand on that scale. A scale that will tell me how much I have left to lose. A scale that will tell me, just a little bit, who I am now.
I hate that this is so.
All this time I’ve stayed away from the scale, because I said it didn’t matter, and I meant it this time. I really did. Because he’s my last baby, and I just wanted to enjoy him without worrying about what I look like.
And that’s exactly what I did.
Until now.
I dressed for the morning. Those after-pregnancy transition jeans fit. A transition shirt hid the pooch.
I got my hopes up, I guess.
And then I walk in the doctor’s office and I step on the scale and I see how much weight is left, and I thought it would be different, not as much, and those voices start their howling.
Guess you should have tried harder, they say.
Guess you should have exercised more, they say.
Guess you should have worried about it a little more often, instead of indulging in your son, they say.
I try to swallow the disappointment, and then the nurse takes me to a room with a mirror, and I have to look at my body before I wrap a flimsy sheet of paper around it, and I can’t help it. I turn away, because I don’t want to look.
I know what’s there.
Sagging skin that may or may not shrink back this time, because this is the sixth time. Lines that mark my midsection and a belly button that’s hardly even a belly button anymore it’s been stretched and pulled and rearranged so often.
Those voices grab all of it and fling it right back in my face. Right back in my heart.
This is what unbeautiful feels like.
///
Just after the first was born, I did not know how a woman’s body worked. So when he slid out and that belly turned to mush, I cried.
It wasn’t supposed to be like this. I wasn’t supposed to look like this.
Our first day home from the hospital, when my body had only spent thirty-six hours recovering from a thirteen-hour labor, I went for a walk, because exercise has always been my crutch.
Three weeks after he was born, I was out running, with a uterus that hadn’t even fully shrunk and hips that were only just sliding back into place and joints that could not really take the jarring pressure of a five-mile run.
So when I injured myself, because my body wasn’t ready for what I was demanding of it, I quit eating. I pretended I wasn’t hungry. I let my husband eat those meals people so kindly dropped by.
And then one day he shook me by the shoulders. You have to eat, he said. This isn’t the way to do it.
And I knew he was right. But it was so hard. So hard. Because every time I looked in the mirror, what I saw was unbeautiful.
Anorexia and bulimia make it hard to see anything else.
///
So this is what unbeautiful feels like.
It feels sad and sharp and hard and achy and impossible and shocking.
Most of all it is shocking.
We can go whole years knowing and believing and living the truth, and then one thing, one tiny little thing, can raise the dead and make them walk again.
It happens for many reasons, this feeling unbeautiful. It happens because someone says an insensitive comment about our bodies that hits us right where it hurts. It happens because we live in a society that tells us skinny equals beautiful and don’t you dare argue. It happens because we look in the mirror and the body looking back is not the one we think we need or want.
Unbeautiful, the kind that makes us starve or cut and bleed or stick a finger down our throat, it is a sickness. An addiction. There is no cure.
There is only one day at a time.
Every day we are offered the choice to look in that mirror and shake our fists at those living-again lies and say, No. I don’t believe you. This body is not unbeautiful. It is strong. It is amazing. It is the loveliest beautiful there ever, ever was.
Because this is the truth.
So after my doctor finishes her examination and releases me and walks from the room, I return to the mirror, and I dress again and then snap a picture, because I want to remember.
I want to remember the day I looked at my body and finally, finally, finally said out loud, if only to myself, what was true.
This body, I say. I am so very proud of what it has done. It has housed and carried and nourished six boys and a girl we will meet in glory. So what if there is still an after-belly six weeks later? THIS BODY HAS DONE SOMETHING AMAZING AND BEAUTIFUL. It needs to revel in that. So I will let it take its time.
And I mean it.
Those corpses, the anorexia and bulimia that have breathed down my neck all morning, start crawling back to their graves, because you know what?
They know, too.
This is what beautiful feels like.
by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
Just a few days ago, I got a precious letter from a reader, thanking me for one of my Huff Post Parents articles.
She found it because she was looking, because she’d just lost two babies, twins, and she needed some comfort.
I have written many versions of this story, about the daughter who died before I could meet her, because writing is my way of working through something hard and unthinkable and tragic.
Writing is my way of finding my feet again.
The day they wheeled me into the operating room, where they sucked a dead baby from my uterus in the same way they take live ones from the women who don’t want them, I wrote the pain onto my phone until the anesthesia knocked me out. And then I started writing again as soon as I woke, when the agony of an empty womb ran red and bled through my fog.
I wrote in all the days after. All the months after. All the years after.
And now, three years later, there is a woman searching for comfort, and she finds my words, and she feels less alone in her sorrow, even though we are thousands of miles apart.
We count it all joy.
We count it all joy that a day as sorrowful as that one could do this: Heal another heart, or at least some small piece of it.
///
The year I turned 11 a letter came in the mail for my mother.
It told her secrets she had known for years but didn’t dare believe, because even in the humiliation, even in the shame, even in the disappointment, she still loved.
The letter told a story of a man and a woman and a child and a baby on the way. It told the truth of heartache and betrayal. It told the future of a single mother.
She didn’t feel brave enough to do it, but she did. She filed for divorce and bought a house with the last of her savings and got a second job so she could raise her kids on her own.
It wasn’t all neat and pretty, because she was lonely and heartsick and sad, and sometimes it was near impossible to see a way out of the mess.
But she put one foot in front of the other and marched on, like a heroic woman warrior, because she had three kids who needed food and shelter and more than a dad who was gone.
We grieved, all of us, and then we moved on.
There came a woman, years later, who visited her Sunday school class, who broke into tears when the leader asked for prayer requests, who could barely say what she needed to say about leaving a husband and two kids to feed and not really knowing how or if she would make it on her own.
And my remarkable mother knew the answer to this woman’s wondering.
Yes, she said. Yes, you can make it. And here is how.
The miraculous part of it is that my mother, in comforting another woman who had lived the same story, found her way fully into forgiveness.
We count it all joy.
///
It’s not easy, this counting it all joy.
Because there is a baby who died, and there is a husband who is husband no more, and how can this dark night turn to sun-bright day?
Maybe it’s hard to see from the suffering side of it, that our pain will one day, months or years or decades from now, be used to comfort another ripped-in-two heart.
Maybe it doesn’t seem fair that we would have to go through death and divorce and abandonment and shame and disappointment and fear and pain and anxiety and heartbreak so that one day down the road we will walk someone else through their own.
Maybe we wouldn’t choose it for ourselves, not in a million years.
But all those maybes don’t change the truth: that our sorrow places, those chasms cut with knives that hurt, hurt, hurt, are the very places we can be filled with the deepest joy.
Of course it’s hard, and of course it’s unwanted, and of course we would never dream of asking for the opportunity to suffer, but this is life and this is unfair and this is what happens when we choose to risk and love and live.
In the sorrow places we learn how to live with our hearts wide open. Our lives wide open. Our selves wide open.
We learn how to count it all joy.
///
When my third son was born, our pediatrician, an amazing, empathic man, breezed into the room and shook my husband’s hand, pulling him into an embrace, because he was just so excited that another Toalson boy had slipped into the world.
And then, when the congratulations were done, he took out his devices to look over the baby.
The air in the room shifted when he listened to my boy’s heart. He tried to act like it wasn’t a big deal, but I could see the alarm in his eyes.
“It sounds like there’s a murmur,” he said, and he looked at my husband, not me, because he knew, he knew what those words would do to me. “It’s probably just one of the valves that hasn’t closed up yet. Sometimes that happens. It’ll probably correct itself.” He put his devices away and then said, like an afterthought, “Come see me Monday so we can make sure.”
It didn’t correct itself.
He referred us to a specialist, and it was two weeks of dreaming about a boy whose lips turned blue while I watched and there was absolutely nothing I could do about it. Two weeks of agony, waiting for that appointment, waiting for someone to tell me if something was wrong with my baby boy’s heart.
I would put my older boys down for their nap, and I would hold my newborn while I should have been sleeping, because sleep was the least important thing in the world if I had to say goodbye. I would pull him into bed with me at night, because I was so afraid it would be the last night. I would cook dinner, holding him in my arms, my tears dropping into the chicken noodle soup.
And then, finally, finally, finally, came the appointment. I took him into the room while my husband stayed with the two other boys in the decked-out waiting room full of toys, because this was a heart doctor for children with heart defects.
I sat beside the doctor and her assistant, who was there to hold down the babies who decided they didn’t want to do an echocardiogram, but my boy slept right through it.
He slept through a doctor pointing out all the perfection, running her finger along the lines of arteries that pumped and pulled blood. He slept through a mama sobbing because of the incredible, miraculous beating of a tiny little heart, pulsing on a screen, lighting up with red and blue flashes. He slept through a mama sobbing harder, if possible, when the doctor said, “Just perfectly healthy. Nothing to worry about here.”
“I’m sorry,” I kept saying. “I’m sorry. It’s just…”
I couldn’t even find the words for something so big and yet so small, but that doctor understood. Of course she did. She sees it all the time, these tiny veins and tiny organs and tiny perfection pieces keeping a baby alive. She patted me on the arm and sent me out the door with the words, Go enjoy your healthy baby boy.
And I did.
And then.
A year later, a friend’s daughter was born with what doctors suspected was a murmur.
I knew what it was like. I knew the agony of waiting and the torture of anxiety and the way worry can take a whole birthing day and wring the life right out of it.
So I shared my story. I let her know she was not alone in her fear, that someone else had walked her shoes, that she was not forgotten or unseen but known in her suffering.
We count it all joy.
///
There is a catch here, too.
Of course there is.
Because we can suffer in silence. We can crawl into our shells and pretend life is grand and we have not a care in the world, and we can show them that worry and anxiety and suffering do not touch us.
We can grieve secretly, alone, in our closed-off places.
It’s more comfortable there, because our shells are thick and dark and hidden, and “they” don’t have to know that we questioned the purpose of life when our baby died, and “they” don’t have to know that we worried we would not make it as a single mom of three kids, and “they” don’t have to know that we doubted the very existence of God in the moments we thought our boy could die.
Or we can set those secrets free.
We can let our sorrow loose to light up the world, because the beautiful piece of sorrow is that the darker it looks on this side of it, the brighter it turns on the got-through-it side.
How do we let loose our sorrow?
We share. We tell our stories. We carry on.
We’re not the first or the last to walk through this specific sorrow space, but it is only in our sharing that we see it clearly: That we are never alone. That we can bear each other’s burdens. That we can heal, together.
That we can count it all joy.
by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
It was so unexpected, the way it showed up.
There is someone staying with us, someone helping out in these crazy days of adjustment, someone who burned the side of a chair because of a not-thinking mistake, and when I came downstairs the early morning after I smelled melting microfiber but was too exhausted to investigate, I ran my hand along the ugly, startling black of an arm that should have been cream, and I cried.
And cried and cried and cried.
Because it can’t be fixed, because it’s a whole black arm, because we’ve tried so hard to keep pieces of our life normal and nice and presentable, and it’s next to impossible with six rowdy boys, and this destruction wasn’t even done by one of the children but by someone who knows what a hot pot can do to fabric.
It felt like reality giving me a big, fat slap in the face.
You will never have or keep or make anything that will survive destruction, it said.
You will never not be embarrassed to have the neighbors over, it said.
You will never have a nice home, it said.
In this home there are holes in walls and milk splatters on doors and dining room chairs with loose legs we can’t trust will hold us when we sit. There are mirrors with perpetual finger smudges and plants that are dying and carpet that has seen much better days.
There is a favorite armchair with a blackened arm.
This is a home that is shabby and ragged and worn out.
This is a home I would like to change, make better, beautify.
///
The first home I remember I only see in flashes, a trailer in a sunny place with a playground in the backyard, or somewhere close, where my brother and I would kick our feet high enough to reach the sky, or so we thought. It was bright and small and charming.
And then there was a home across the street from a school, where I watched my brother walk out the door at the beginning of a day and then walk back in at the end, knowing he’d sit and teach me all he’d learned in his kindergarten class.
In this home I remember a playroom where my mom found a snake in our toy box and ran out of the room screaming so we all chased her like it was some kind of game. I remember sharing a room with my brother and sister, rolling from the top bunk where my brother slept and hitting the floor so hard I couldn’t even cry, could only lie there on a hard floor and try to remember how to breathe.
I remember seeing my mom hacking snakes into pieces with a hoe and listening to someone playing piano so it echoed through the wood-floor living room and watching my dad driving away on a motorcycle and the way the yellow curtain above the front door swished, swished, swished, until I could not hear his motorcycle anymore, the way it felt like I’d just fallen from the top bunk again, because his leaving hit me so hard I couldn’t cry, could only lie there and try to remember how to breathe.
This home was dark and light and sad and funny and ugly and beautiful and full of paradox.
///
There was another home with magnolias in the front yard and so many pecan trees in the back that my Nana would pay us to gather them when she came to visit, and because it was money and it was for Nana’s pecan pie, we’d do it for hours and hours, bringing in buckets of pecans.
I remember forts in climbing trees and a tire swing we used to make our kittens dizzy and watch them walk and blackberries we’d soak in milk and sugar for an afternoon snack.
I remember sitting on my dad’s lap with a bowl of cucumbers soaked in vinegar, and I remember the dark hallway I could never walk down, only sprint down, and I remember birthday parties with lines of kids playing Red Rover and getting clotheslined by the solid of two clasped hands.
This home was chipped and wobbly and not quite secure, in a way that could not be explained, like the old porch swing that hung out front.
///
The years turn a little hazy after that, because there was a move out of state and a move back, and those homes were unexpected and traumatic and lonely.
There was the one in Ohio, where I slipped down cement stairs the day of my birthday and tore my new pantyhose all the way down the leg; where we came home to an empty house and locked all the doors tight behind us, because there was no money to pay someone to watch us and it wasn’t exactly the best neighborhood; where I slept every night with a doll I’d had since I was a baby, even though I was too old for dolls, resting the back of my hand on her cool face all those nights I could hear a mom and dad fighting through the walls.
It was the home that told us the truth about a man we loved and another woman and a baby on the way, all laid out on an answering machine because someone thought we should know.
It was the home that said life would never be the same. And it wasn’t.
That home led to another home, one we shared with a grandmother, because a divorce was coming, and I don’t remember much of this home, only frustration and resentment and a bitter root that had to be carved out, years later.
I remember a brother with ulcers and a mom who had to work too much and three kids once more squished into one room, even though they were all too old to share.
I remember pine cones and watching out a window to see who would be first, Mom or Memaw, and Metallica blasting from an open garage, speaking what we could not.
That home was cold and disappointing and hard, like the sidewalk out front where we would roller blade for hours, just to get out of the tension that threatened to break us all.
///
My last childhood home is the one where my parents still live today.
The day we moved in, the windows had a film of dirt so thick you could hardly see through them. The carpet was rust-colored and shabby and smelled ancient. The porch bent in the middle.
I remember feeling afraid to bring my first boyfriend there, because surely he wouldn’t want to be with someone as poor as me. I remember, for the first time, not wanting to have my birthday parties at home, because what would all those classmates think? I remember wishing I lived in her house or in his or in that one so much nicer than mine.
I was ashamed of that home.
It didn’t matter that this home held memories of a sister falling asleep in the closet while she was dressing for school and how we laughed about it so hard we were crying, for the first time in years. It didn’t matter that it held the miracle of a brother walking the road to a canal where he would fish and find himself. It didn’t matter that it held the victory of a mother who groped her way back through the dark.
It didn’t matter that it held a second chance in all its rickety, peeling walls.
Because all I could see, then, were those holes in the porch and the way the front door stuck when we tried to open it and all the dirt and dust still left in the corners after hours of trying to scrub it clean.
All I could see was what glared from the outside.
///
All I can see in my home is what glares from the outside, too.
Holes in walls. Splatters on doors. A burned arm on a cream chair. Especially that.
But in all these days after, the truth of home begins to bloom.
Home is not a place. It’s not four walls and a roof and perfectly arranged and preserved furniture.
It’s them. It’s me. It’s a heart-space.
Home cannot be contained. It is carried. Given. Received.
I can see it all the way through the time line of a life, the leavings, the moves, the starting-overs. Home never changed, even though those houses did, year after year.
Home is love, overwhelming, pure, unbridled, burning the arms of a mama wrapping all her boys in hugs.
Sure, I might grieve the destruction of that favorite chair, because it’s real, and it can’t be fixed, at least not right now, and it will always stare at me from a room inside my house, but it does not tell the whole truth of my home. It never will.
Home is more than a chair where a mama fed all her babies.
Home is an 8-year-old writing a sweet, sweet note to his little brother, and it’s a 5-year-old helping a twin put on shoes so he can play outside, too, and it’s a 2-year-old saying that what he’s thankful for tonight is his mama’s beautiful eyes, even though she spoke a little too harshly to him half an hour ago.
Home is a husband making his wife lunch every single day, because he knows she won’t take the time to eat unless he does, and it’s a 4-year-old playing Battleship with a brother, and it’s a last baby grinning at a mama in the early morning hours, when no one else is awake.
This home is radiant and wild and free.
It is lovelier than any home we could build with two hands and a bank full of money.
And I am so glad I get to live here.
