by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
A few days ago we were all invited to take a trip inside an alternate reality and imagine what the world might look like if our sons were treated like our daughters, based on the story of Logan. It’s only fair, I think, to take another trip, inside another reality, and imagine what the world might look like if our daughters were treated like our sons.
Let’s start at the beginning, where a baby girl is born into a boys’ world and you, her mother, watch from the sideline.
In the womb: It’s time for the baby shower. Sports theme, of course, because she’s a girl, and of course it’s expected. Football at the top of the cake. Some soccer balls on the sides. A basketball in the center. Which one will she play? Everyone has a guess. Maybe it will be football, like you. You were pretty good in high school. She’ll probably be good, too, if the onesies have anything to say about it. “I get my muscles from my mom,” one says. “Future first-round draft pick,” another says. Of course she will be.
Birth: Welcome, baby girl! She’s finally here, two days late. Seven pounds. Bearing the name Eleanor, because it’s an old family name, and names were meant to be passed on. She’s healthy and tiny and perfect. “What a little beanpole,” they say when they see her. “It’s okay. She’ll chunk up fast.” Because she needs muscle and bulk, if she’s going to be a successful girl. She needs solid, because that’s what girls are. All those well-wishers wave her out of the hospital, saying, “We’ll see her on a court or a field someday. I just know it,” even while you think what lovely hands she has for piano or painting.
Age 1: Happy first, Eleanor! Here’s the party, with family and close friends, just a small thing, really, a cake decorated with Wonder Woman and Batgirl and Black Widow in skin-tight costumes that show muscle and bulk and everything it means to be a woman, presents wrapped in pink and never green or blue, which might confuse her about what kind of colors a girl should like. She opens her gifts, a soccer ball and a foam sword and a superhero cape, because little girls love to play tough. She tries out the sword, but it’s a little big, and she’s not completely steady on her feet yet, so she falls and skins her knee and starts crying. Everyone says, “You’re okay. It doesn’t hurt,” because she’ll have to learn that big girls don’t cry about silly things like falling over and skinning a knee. Big girls shake it off. Big girls toughen up.
Age 2: Eleanor’s a toddler now, learning about the world from whatever her hands touch and feel and explore. You want to show her how to put that train track together, but they say, no, she can figure it out, you don’t want her relying on someone else for her thinking. Girls think for themselves. The train station door is stuck and won’t let the train through? Well, just keep trying, Eleanor. And she will, because she’s persistent, until she throws it across the room and accidentally breaks a picture frame and gets a swat on the bottom for it. And don’t let her cry because it’s frustrating, even though it is. She needs to get a handle on those emotions. She needs to suck it up.
Age 3: Preschool days have come around. She likes making huge, tall buildings with the blocks. And when a boy comes and snatches one of the blocks she’s using right out of her hands, she takes it back. Only she does it a little too forcefully, and the boy falls over, screaming and crying. She sits in time out for three minutes and then does it all again. Three more minutes. And again. Three more minutes. They call you to come pick her up, because she’s “being a bully.”
Age 4: Every day Eleanor goes to Pre-K, but there are some problems. She can’t sit perfectly still on the carpet like all the little boys. She likes to play by herself because she’s tired of getting in trouble for taking back her blocks. Do normal kids have this much energy? Are normal kids this emotional? Are normal kids this secluded? Maybe she has ADHD. Maybe she has autism. Maybe we should worry.
Age 5: She made it to kindergarten! Time went by so fast! All her teachers are men, but she doesn’t mind, at least not yet. Except they tell her she’s too loud. She’s got too much energy. She needs to learn to reign in those emotions, still. So, to teach her, we’ll have her sit out of recess. We’ll have her do all her work in a corner of the classroom so she won’t be tempted to talk. We’ll have her stand in the line for lunch perfectly still and perfectly straight, so she can get enough practice doing what she’s told, and if she fails, if one foot gets out of line, she’ll sit at a lunch table by herself. Lunch isolation. That’ll teach her. Time with the school psychologist for extensive evaluations. That’ll teach her, too. Different is not tolerated.
Age 6: The tests came back! No autism or ADHD or learning disability. Only a very high, very unexpected IQ, with reading scores close to junior high school level. But girls don’t read well, so it was surely a mistake. Maybe a fluke in the test. After all, she’s only a first-grader. She loves art and she loves music and she loves running around at recess, but there isn’t much time in the day to do these things, because there are more important things to do. She likes to read, but surely it’s not at the level you, the parent, says it is, and the test was a fluke, so let’s give her these books that are way too easy for her so she fidgets and talks when she’s finished, and then she can sit out of recess again for her bad behavior.
Age 8: She’s getting older, and all these years of denying emotions are making her volatile. She explodes in class, collapsing in a heap of tears and is sent to the principal’s office, with a discipline write-up for “disturbing” the class. Three more times it happens, and then she gets in school suspension for three days. We will get a reign on these emotions. We will. Take away PE, take away recess, take away interaction with her classmates, and eventually she will learn. Girls don’t cry. Girls don’t explode. Girls stay calm and collected.
Age 11: It’s time for middle school. Once again, she’s surrounded by male teachers, and this time it matters, because there’s puberty and there are hormones and everything feels wild and out of control. She walks around with raging emotions and unbalanced hormones and a fever of anger because she’s denied those feelings for so long, but all she gets for her explosions is in school suspension or detention. No one thinks to help sort it all out, because she’s a girl, and girls can figure it out. She starts losing interest in her studies, because what’s the point, really. No one really likes her, because she doesn’t play sports like girls are supposed to. And even if she did, they’ve all been playing since they were 3. She’d never be able to catch up.
Age 14: She’s been taking art lessons for years, and she enjoys them more than anything, but art isn’t womanly, she’s told. She has to find some other, more masculine profession. Maybe she should just pick a sport and get it over with. Maybe she should take up welding. Maybe she should quit altogether. She has a friend who tried to slit her wrists, and she wonders what it would be like. Probably better than trying to stuff all these emotions and live up to the expectations of other people. She still wants to do well in school, but girls who do well in school are outcasts, teased mercilessly. She doesn’t have the emotional capacity to deal with teasing, so she just pretends she doesn’t already know all the answers.
Age 17: Time to apply for colleges, Eleanor! But she doesn’t want to go, because education long ago lost its lure for her. Who needs a degree? Not her. She probably wouldn’t be able to make it in college, anyway, since high school didn’t really turn out all that well. What if she fails? Women aren’t supposed to fail. What if she picks the wrong degree? There are only a handful of right ones, ones that could support a husband and a family like she’s supposed to do. Like she’s expected to do. It’s overwhelming. So she just doesn’t try.
Age 23: Eleanor is now an adult. She goes into her office five days a week, eight hours a day, like everyone taught her to do. She’s really starting to get a handle on her emotions now. When her dog died last year, she didn’t cry. When her dream job slipped through her fingers, she shook it off. When her boyfriend broke up with her, she didn’t feel the sadness. She just joined a friend at the bar. She took a drink. Two. Who knows how many.
Eleanor’s story and Logan’s story prove that both genders have a long way to go toward equality. There is much work to be done. There are many Eleanors, and there are many Logans, and they are all struggling to find their feet in their very different places and a society that does not always look kindly upon them.
Instead of denying that gender problems exist, maybe we should use our arguing energies to change a world that needs changing—for both genders.
by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
A month ago we took the three-hour trip to my hometown.
My mom rented the same facility where my husband and I handed out gifts to our parents and our bridesmaids and groomsmen the evening before our wedding.
This time she rented it for a goodbye, because cancer is eating away her stepmother.
She walked into the room, and we all tried not to be shocked by all the weight she’d lost. I tried not to cry when I hugged her thin neck. I tried not to turn away when those wrinkles gathered around her smile as she watched my boys chase each other around the room that had held so much happiness 11 years ago. I tried to watch instead. I tried to soak it in. I tried to feel and remember and know.
And then my grandpa cleared his throat and everyone got quiet and he talked about the birth of my mom and her sister and their baby brother and how it was all joy in the midst of pain, because there was a marriage falling apart yet three children to show for the crumbling.
He had married this dying woman, my step-grandmother, 35 years ago.
And even though this story, their story, is full of pain and heartache and loss, I know, too, that it is full of victory.
People had transformed and lives had changed.
Beauty hid in all that shadow.
///
When I was just 9 years old, my gifted and talented class was assigned a family tree project—where we’d talk about family culture and values and stories and all those limbs sitting green on a sturdy trunk.
It was one of the hardest projects I’ve ever done, because I tried to connect all those names—Papaw with Memaw, except they’d divorced and he’d remarried Granny, and then there was the other side, Grandma and Pop, only he wasn’t my real grandpa because she’d divorced, too, and married him before I was even born.
And then my parents divorced and my dad remarried, and there were half brothers and a half sister, and then my mom remarried and there was a step-brother, and I didn’t even know what to do with all this.
It was so confusing, and those branches of my family tree were all stunted and tangled and torn, and what was left looked more like a gnarled stump than anything that could possibly grow and bloom.
In a family that could not brag of a perfect tree, what could we really know of love and hope and life?
What could we really know of family?
///
What we knew of family were raucous Christmas dinners with aunts and uncles and cousins, when grownups would sit around a table playing Trivial Pursuit while the children begged a turn, too, even though the questions didn’t make a bit of sense to them.
What we knew of family was a grandmother taking in three grandchildren and a grown daughter for a year after a divorce left them poor and broken, a grandmother who had spent her years cooking dinner for her children and now spent another one cooking dinner for three more children who were not exactly grateful, because they hated being here, without their dad, without a space of their own, without the assurance that this arrangement wouldn’t last forever.
What we knew of family was a grandma and grandpa putting aside the bitter of divorce so they could sit in the audience while a graduate delivered her speech, to try to make her forget that one empty seat.
We knew hard, and we knew messy, and we knew awkward, but we also knew devotion.
Family doesn’t always look neat and clean.
Sometimes it looks like a great-grandfather who beat his wife and an older half-brother with prison time on his record and thieves and drunkards and addicts.
There are secrets, and sometimes they are ugly and shameful. But it is in these shadow places that we learn what it means to forgive and accept and love.
This is where we learn to be family.
///
He showed up at our door for meet-the-kids-night with two large pepperoni pizzas, and I knew this was the man my mother would marry.
He was younger than her, with a 3-year-old boy, but he looked at me and my sister and my brother like we mattered. Like we were somebody. Like we could put back together two broken worlds.
They married on a sunny day in April. My sister and I wore dresses his aunt made. I sang a love song. My brother held the hand of his son, trying to get him to stand still during the vow-making and the ring exchanging and the kissing.
And then he went to work.
He took us in like we were his own, because that’s what he’d promised my mother he’d do. He sat, bored out of his mind, at my volleyball games and band concerts and all the track meets he could possibly make. He whistled that loud whistle after my brother’s trumpet solo at the football game, because it really was amazing. He drove me to college and stood outside my dorm with my mother, trying not to show his emotions when we all said goodbye.
He knocked down all those walls in the hearts of three children, and he took his place inside, so he was the one who walked them down the aisles on their wedding day. He was the one who didn’t miss a baby’s birth. He was the one their hearts called dad.
And maybe it took a while, and maybe they didn’t make it easy, and maybe it wasn’t the least bit perfect, because what remarriage is, but he stuck around, and that made all the difference in the world.
It was hard and disappointing, that divorce piece, but this piece, the putting-back-together piece, has been wildly beautiful.
///
In the room with my Papaw and Granny, who is the only grandmother left, even though she’s a step and won’t be around much longer if the cancer has anything to say about it, sat my beautiful aunt, by the side of a man who is not my uncle.
She bears the scars of a 30-year marriage, of being left for another, of spending three years flailing, trying to make sense of a divorce and what comes after.
She has lived a story like her mother did, like her sister did, and yet…
And yet there is this man who popped the question to ring in a New Year with surprise and joy.
She said yes and pulled those last limbs from the tree.
There is something I have learned in all of this history, and it is this: Family trees are good and lovely and wonderful, and it’s comforting to take shade beneath their limbs when the day gets too hot.
But a family stump offers something, too.
A stump offers a sitting place, a thinking place, a resting place that cannot be disturbed or shaken by high winds or heavy water or the changing seasons.
This is the gift of a broken family.
But the gift-receiving is up to us.
You see, we can choose to be victims of our broken, stump-of-a-family. Or we can choose to let that stump be our victory.
I don’t know who I might have been if my family had stayed intact all those years ago, if I had come from generations of healthy marriages and unbroken people.
But I can say that this stump of a family, who it has made me, who it has made all these people I love most, is enchantingly beautiful.
One day my boys will ask about this tangled family stump. And I will tell them its stories with all the gratefulness a heart can possibly feel.
On that say-goodbye day last month, my stump beckoned me. It said, Sit and stay a while.
Visit.
Love.
Appreciate.
And I did, until it was only my wildlings and their daddy and the ones they call Nonny and Poppy left in the room.
by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
I am one of the fatherless ones.
According to the statistics, I should have turned my angst toward drugs. I should have run with the racy crowd. I should have dropped out of school and skipped college altogether and raised my parcel of kids on my own.
Instead, I graduated at the top of my class and then became a first-generation college graduate and then married young and had a parcel of kids I would raise with an amazing, loving, creative, one-of-a-kind man.
But all those accomplishments don’t mean I escaped without deep-seated scars and a lifetime of insecurity and a wounded heart that bled at the slightest puncture.
I got all of this, too.
And those scars and insecurities and the wounded heart showed up in things like anorexia and bulimia and perfectionism and isolation and fear and anxiety that chased me through whole days and weeks and months but did not yet have a name.
Then something miraculous happened. Those babies began to slip into my world, and I began to find all my missing pieces.
I began to heal.
This was unexpected. It was extraordinary.
It is one of the loveliest parts of the mother journey.
///
It all began nine years ago, when a Valentine’s Day pregnancy test told me what I wanted and feared most: there would be a baby.
I was young, just two years married to my husband, and those eating disorders felt too near, and the self-image insecurities hid just beneath the surface of an ever-rising scale.
It was hard to watch those numbers adding up over days and weeks and months, hard to watch a belly rounding, even though it held a precious treasure, because I’d worked so hard to make it stay flat.
It was hard not to think about what that belly might look like later, after a baby no longer hid in its dark, because looks were still important, and skinny still equaled beautiful, and maybe I could be beautiful now, with a belly swelling around new life, but would I be beautiful later?
And then he was here on a cold evening in November, and he locked eyes with me and his held words my husband had tried to say, over and over and over again: You are loved because you are you. And the you you are is beautiful.
So all those days after, when people brought meals and I tried to count calories, sometimes not eating at all, and I logged eight-mile runs every day, because I was trying so desperately to get that figure back, I had only to pick my baby up and look into those eyes so aware, so intelligent even then, so indiscriminately loving from the very beginning, to know the truth, that beauty does not live in a body but in a heart.
And he would grow and show me in a million more ways these eight years he’s been mine—in pictures he’d snap with an old camera, even though I was still in pajamas and didn’t have any makeup on, “just because you’re beautiful;” in that knock on our bedroom door when we’ve closed up for the night, just because “I forgot to give you another kiss;” in the smile he wears when I dress up for a date with his daddy.
It took the eyes of a child to show me just how beautiful a woman could be, in her love for a child.
And so these days after having another baby, these days when a stomach needs shrinking once more and it takes more time, because it’s the fifth time, I don’t worry or stress or obsess like I would have done all those years ago.
Because I know I am loved for more than just beauty.
And I know I am beautiful just because I am me.
///
The second one met me with a compassionate heart and his daddy’s blue eyes and all those emotions that took us by storm when his brother felt hurt or when he felt alone or when he accidentally broke something that was important to him or someone else, like the paper monster named Xerxes his brother was building.
He burned all my bridges down.
Because every time tears turned blue eyes to glass, I heard the voice from my past:
I’ll give you something to cry about.
Big girls don’t cry.
You’re weak like her if you cry about something as small as this.
Something as small as someone else’s dog getting run over or a handicapped child unable to cross the street by himself or an old man out to dinner alone, still wearing that wedding ring.
I looked at my sweet boy with his so sweet heart, and I called that voice’s bluff.
Because I learned from a little boy the beauty of emotion, the way feelings can heal a broken world, how tears can wet a dry ground and bring forth something new and green and marvelous, how big emotions can walk us deeper into life.
And every time I reached my arms out to my cares-a-whole-lot-about-everything boy, I felt those pieces of my soul shift and the empty spaces fill, because he was me and I was him, and the emotion was a gift, not a curse like I had been told once upon a time.
I let it go, and I learned to live.
I could cry without shame.
I could hope without disappointment.
I could love with abandon.
I could live.
///
The third slid into our lives on a late afternoon in July, and he had the eyes of the first and the heart of the second and a lion’s share of courage and daring and trust.
All those growing days he was the little brother who wanted to be just like his bigger brothers, so he flipped off couches at 18 months and hung upside down off monkey bars when he was 2 and jumped off moving swings when he was 3, and I watched it all with trepidation mixed with hope, because he, too, was finding pieces of my soul that had gone missing.
Mine had been a forced courage all my life, a measured courage that only tried what I knew I’d be good at, because failure always waited for that one little mistake, that one not-quite, that one whoops, and if I failed, who would I be then?
I would not be a daughter they could be proud of or a wife he could be proud of or a mother they could be proud of.
And then I watched my daring, courageous, fire-cracker-of-a-boy try that bike without training wheels when he was too young for a bike without training wheels, and I watched him wobble and lose control and fall and then get right back on and do it again.
I watched him try that back flip on a trampoline and land on his knees instead of his feet and get right back up and do it again.
I watched him propel himself from the height of a swing so he flew for one second in time, and he slipped all the way down the hill and landed on his behind and giggled about it before getting back up and doing it again.
It took the bravery of a 4-year-old to show me that trying and failing and trying again, in spite of the failure, is the real test of courage, not doing only what we know we’ve already mastered.
He was still loved, even though he had failed.
I could fail, and it would not change how much I was loved.
I could fail, and it would not change who I was.
I could fail, and it would make me stronger.
///
The fourth and fifth came to us in late March, and they spent 21 days in the neonatal intensive care unit, testing the will and patience and trust of a mama and daddy, and then they came home and life blurred, the whole year flashing by without our really knowing what was happening.
We could do this, and we would prove it.
And then they turned 2, and they stripped our self-sufficiency right off the skin of our backs, and people came to us from our amazing community, offering their help, and the desperation answered for us. Yes. Please. Anything you want to do to help.
All my life I’d pushed away the help of others, because I could do life myself, alone, and if I couldn’t, then it was failure. It was not enough. It was shame on you.
Two babies changed it all.
Because we needed help from the people who came to sit with three so we could visit the other two stuck at the hospital. And we needed help from those couples who offered their presence so a strung-tight mama and daddy could have a few hours away, a date of sorts. And we needed help from all those people who gave us extra baby clothes and gift cards for baby things and casseroles stacked on refrigerator shelves.
Our babies did not care that we needed help or that we couldn’t do it on our own. They just loved.
It took the acceptance of two little boys to help me see it true: that asking for help was not weakness, a deficiency that proved our mistake in having so many.
It was strength, because we are all in this life together.
We all march on, together.
I was not alone, ever. Not even in this.
///
And now, this last baby, who slid into the world the day before my birthday.
He has healed a heart, too, already, in his eighteen days of living, because there was a birthday, when he looked into my eyes and gave me another missing piece.
You see, I’ve never had a great relationship with birthdays, not just because of the getting older, but because, too, every birthday I waited on a call that did not come, from one I still loved even though.
And this year on my birthday I sat in a hospital bed, just eight hours after delivering another beautiful boy, and I held that boy and kissed his lips and forgot all about that call, because here was a piece of perfection, and it was all I ever needed in this world.
Those birthdays used to come and go, and the silence spoke of another silence, of another Father who probably didn’t remember my birthday, either.
Except there was this: a boy born to me safe and healthy and ALIVE, even though we had wondered and worried about the alive, because of a condition I developed in my liver this time around. A condition that might cause stillbirth.
That day before my birthday, that day of my birthday, I held a precious, costly gift, and he was ALIVE, and he stared at me and I stared at him, and I heard words that he could not speak and yet could, because a soul can connect and speak to another soul.
You have never been forgotten. You see? That’s what the voice said.
And I did see. I saw a tiny hand on a breast, and I saw eyes that might stay blue blinking hard and then fluttering into the peaceful sleep of a newborn on a mama’s chest, and I saw beauty and perfection and love in the rise and fall of a tiny chest, in the silk of a rounded cheek, in the cute curve of a nose.
I saw the love of a Father who could give new life in the hours before a birthday.
It took the presence of a newborn to remind me that I have never, not in the hardest of all my years, been forgotten.
And every year on the day that is my birthday linked to his, I will remember.
///
I did not know they would do this.
I did not know the exhausting-yet-precious presence of six boys would heal me in the ways I have been healed. But they have.
There is a miracle in motherhood: that we become exactly who we were created to be in all their chafing and stretching and rounding off of our edges so we can see a world and ourselves more clearly.
It’s unexpected. It’s startling. It’s hard and intense and humbling.
And there is nothing more beautiful in all the world.
by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
It’s the familiar smell of his skin, the way it stretches across his back, just waiting for my touch; and it’s his arms wrapping all the way around me, even when I’ve been a little crazy and weepy and anxious; and it’s his voice, filling the house with music always.
It’s the way he keeps hope when I can’t seem to find mine, the way he believes in the me I was created to be when I’m acting like a not-so-nice version of the whole, the way he trusts me with something as fragile as his heart.
He’s there beside me, watching “The Walking Dead” when I go to sleep in the evening, and he’s there, breathing his own dreams, when I open my eyes.
This man with curly black hair and six days’ chin-and-cheek stubble and pure and devoted love is mine, a gift of the greatest significance.
I call him husband. Lover. Friend.
///
Eleven years ago we stood in an old historical church, beneath that dim lighting that turned eyes to diamonds, and we said those vows we wrote each other, and we meant them with every in-love breath we took before speaking.
I looked like Cinderella, in white with a crown, and we talked about dreams coming true and love that could light a whole world and happily ever after.
And then we danced and visited and he ate and I talked, and the time came to drive to that hotel where we shook our way into the married life.
Dawn broke and he could not find the wallet he needed to board the plane for our honeymoon trip, and a groomsman waited for a ride to the airport with us, the newlywed, and this just wasn’t at all what I’d expected 12 hours married.
It was the first time I realized that marriage did not start on a mountaintop like I’d thought. It started there at the bottom of a peak, and it was an uphill climb to make those two lives full of 21 years of beliefs and ways of living and separate ideas fit cleanly together.
It was going to take some work.
///
There are days we love well, and there are days we just don’t.
Because even after 11 years, we are still learning pieces of each other we didn’t know before, like how sometimes all he needs is one encouraging word to believe he can conquer the whole world in a day, like how his heart does not beat so much as sing for all that music bound up in every inch of his body, like how he prefers his frozen yogurt with hot fudge and peanut butter cups and butterfinger crumbs and Reese’s pieces poured liberally on top.
Like how he can capture the attention of boys for hours at a time with old when-Daddy-was-a-little-boy stories and how sometimes he puts plates with food scraps in the sink side instead of the disposal side and how he tries hard to hide his anxiety but it’s still there, even though he never showed he worried at all.
There are days we are each other’s best friend, but there are also days we are each other’s worst enemy.
And maybe we don’t always like each other (because what friends always do?) and maybe sometimes what we do annoys the other, and maybe sometimes we wonder what we could possibly have been thinking all those years ago, but there is something that threads through all those bad days and good days alike.
It is love and it is forgiveness and it is belonging.
It is forever.
No matter how many days we have logged forgetting what we knew surely 11 years ago, no matter how many weeks scream exactly the opposite, no matter how many months we ask the hard questions in the hidden parts of our minds, there is a truth we know: we were made for each other.
His positivity made for my negativity. His acceptance made for my perfectionism. His dreaming made for my realism.
His eyes made for my body. My words made for his heart. His soul made for mine.
Even on the worst of days, this truth lights the dark.
///
It didn’t take us long to find our first fight.
He worked as a youth and music minister at a church on weekends and a personal banker on weekdays while I spent my days writing stories at the city’s largest newspaper.
There came a day when we planned to take care of some errands, because the church had handed him his monthly check that morning and we needed to deposit it so we could pay some bills.
Except when he opened the planner where he thought he’d put it, that check wasn’t there.
Rent was due in two days, and we didn’t have the money in our account to pay it, without that check.
And my mind ran fast from no money to no home to trying to keep a marriage together on the streets.
I sprawled on that shared bed like the whole world was ending and he searched the entire house and still didn’t find it, and he didn’t know all the words that swam through my head that day.
He can’t keep track of a check. He can’t take care of us. How will I live with this?
For richer or poorer, is this what those vows meant? Because I didn’t know if I could do it.
///
Those thoughts can feel like a fire, burning love on its altar, because there are expectations we hold like they are life and death.
Of course this shared life will never be perfectly wonderful, because we are two different people with two different backgrounds and two different personalities, and who can ever be fully themselves all the time, every day?
Of course they will not be able to measure up to who we thought they’d be. Neither do we.
Of course there are days we’ll think it’s just easier to throw in the towel, because we are human and we don’t always love like we should.
If all we ever do is see the ways he does not measure up to our expectations, how this marriage does not measure up to our idea of happy, how these days spent together are not anything like we’d imagined them to be, we will never make it.
Maybe it will take a year or five or 15, but that crumbling will catch up, and we will be burned in the fire of discontent.
The truth of marriage is that not every day is beautiful and smooth and light-filled. Some days are ugly and thorny and full of a dark where thoughts and attitudes and beliefs will trip us up, and we will wonder if this one is really The One.
But there is a part of love that doesn’t make the least bit of sense, and sometimes we just have to keep climbing, arm locked in arm, up that so-hard hill to forever, because the top of the world is still waiting, and it is still for us.
We can’t look down or back. We only look at each other, and when we see those eyes that still, even today, shine like diamonds, we know.
We know that sometimes love is not a victory march or a kiss that takes away the pain of a lifetime or 30 years of adoration and trust and beauty. Sometimes love looks like showing up on a day we don’t really want to, sticking around when it feels too hard, lifting that cold and broken hallelujah for the years logged behind and the ones left ahead.
This is pressing on toward real love.
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One day he and all the other band mates quit their full-time jobs.
Because we were going to travel, we were going to see the world, we were going to share our music with all who would listen.
Except there was a baby already and another on the way.
So I held on to that steady income, because we needed something, some way to pay bills, and my job was flexible and allowed travel, so it made sense that I’d be the one to stay.
Year after year after year I spent working a job and caring for a baby and then two and three and five, traveling with our music in all the margins, and that dream to write sat stiffening under the weight of impossibility.
There was no time to pursue my dream, because we were pursuing his, and someone needed to collect a steady income.
And then one day I sat exploding in a prayer session, because that dream had stayed in its place, under all that weight, for too too long, and I felt the cold bitterness that came with knowing it might not ever be my time.
The strength of my resentment surprised me.
If this was for better or for worse, what would I choose from here?
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It was a whole week of arguing, what felt like one big fight that was really lots of little ones, and we were drowning under the overwhelm of brand new twins added to three other littles, and we walked through the house out of sync and exhausted and wound up too tight.
And then came the night it was all just too much, and I slammed the bedroom door and he walked out the front and I heard the car rev and those tires squeal, and I thought it was the last we’d see of him.
Because it was a night like that when it was the last we saw of my dad.
We come from a long line of divorce, generations of people giving up on each other, people walking out on each other, people choosing others over their beloved, and what makes us any different?
Those anniversaries visit me in subtle ways I can hardly name, like shadows I can’t shake, 14 years for my parents, fewer for his.
What makes us any different?
I cried into my pillow that too-much-fighting night, and it felt like hours but was really only minutes before he came back and wrapped me in those arms and said the words it always comes back to. I love you.
I sat up in our bed and I faced him and my fears, and I told him what I think about when those years of our parents come and go, and he looked at me and pressed my hand and said, We are not them. Their story is not our story.
We come from these backgrounds, and we carry around these cracked hearts, and we feel those pasts like they somehow tell our futures, but the truth is we make our own stories.
We are not what has come before. We are not even what comes after, at least not right now. We are who we are in this moment right here, this moment where we choose love and forgiveness and reconciliation or we choose to turn our backs and let marriage fold in on itself.
We are our own story, and just because our parents only made it 14 years doesn’t mean our love has the same expiration date or that it holds an ending at all.
Our love story is full of its own twists and turns and whole years of unexpected, but it is ours to make and choose.
And so today, five days from marking 11 years of love, I remember that I would choose it all over again, this love that is hard and wild and strong and brave, this love that burns away all the pieces of two lives that don’t belong to the one, this love that walks us steady toward the top of forever.
I choose him still. Now. Always.
by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
(Photo by Helen Montoya Henrichs.)
(For my beloved, who has always been The One, even when I didn’t yet know.)
In these years of marriage, I have watched my love bloom and grow and change, and I have learned that evolution is real, that it is here in this heart, here in this friendship, here in this love.
There was new love, the meeting, the great big moment of possibility when love shone white and pure and unknown, because maybe, just maybe, he might be The One and how would I know for sure?
All during that summer I worked as a reporter and he worked an office job, and I just happened to open that first e-mail from a boy I didn’t know, and he was bold and daring and interesting, asking questions no boy had ever asked, about me, about my life, about who I wanted to be. We learned one another on the keys of a computer, and the world that summer was bright and beautiful.
We planned the meeting, after a worship band practice he would attend, except he never showed, and I walked up the hill to work disappointed until I recognized his steps and I looked up and there he was, standing before me with that tight, curly black hair and those blue eyes looking like he knew it was me, too. We said hello, shook hands, and then we went our separate ways. Love whispered and waited.
And then, two years later, love turned yellow, like a warm maybe-promise, and my love began to speak, softly and slowly, during those group dates bowling and watching Harry Potter and sitting in the stands at football games.
My love murmured, could it be? I watched him play volleyball with my friends, and I watched him charm the people closest to me, and I watched him, somehow, grow larger right in front of me, taller and more important and significant because I saw him now with the eyes of my heart. I noticed the way he opened my car door before going round to his own like I was worth the extra effort and the way he looked in my eyes like I had something important to say and the way he guided me through doors with a hand on the small of my back because he was always, first, a gentleman. And the small of my back burned like my heart.
But I quieted that singing, shushed it down deep because I didn’t know if his heart was singing it too, and what if it wasn’t?
Oh, what if it wasn’t?
Suddenly, unexpectedly, love turned orange, a gentle fire-glow just a month later, and I knew in a way unexplainable that he was The One, and the whole world came alive, like the birds outside my window and the rain tapping pavement on my evening run and his steps marching up stairs to my apartment were all singing the same song that rose and fell in my heart.
And how was I to know I’d wear that flaming red dress the same night my love turned flaming red, the same night he stood on a stage to bend the knee and ask that question, the same night he would slip a ring on my finger and I would stare and stare and just keep staring at that beauty marking skin?
How was I to know that music, those dancers twirling through the Nutcracker, was but a prelude to the way my heart would bend melody after the unexpected question got its answer?
And then came the marriage-day, and my love turned orange and yellow and red and blue at the base so it blazed wild, burning where he touched with a touch as sweet as I could bear that first night I fell asleep with the man I called my husband. That love held passion and hope and expectation in tender arms, and the world beamed as it had never done before, a sky lit brilliantly by sun and fire and dreams in the middle of a night.
We spent those days honeymooning in Florida at the happiest place on earth, and my love turned pink, a sweet song that sang of all the world drawing toward decay except our love that would last forever, and we walked with hands wrapped tight and feet hardly touching stone, and I could see the yellow, the promise, there at the edges of that pink.
Those first months in a tiny apartment, my love turned purple, fiery and passionate like the red of before, yet storm-blue because it was hard, hard, hard living with this new, not-like-me person who took off shirts in the living room and squeezed the toothpaste from the bottom instead of the center and cleaned the shaved hair out of the sink but left the shaving cream spots, and some days my love glowed red-violet and some days it glowed blue-violet, because who knew it would be this hard living together, without end, all the days of my life?
“But we loved with a love that was more than love” (Edgar Allan Poe), and love began to build its mansion on all the rubble of self, the rubble of him mixed with the rubble of me, where two were becoming one, and we began to understand that love could not be whole in any place that had not yet been rent. So we let ourselves be torn and shredded, and we filled the holes of one another so our hearts started singing that love song together, instead of alone.
We learned the deep secret places in each other, and our love turned brilliantly green, like a new plant bursting through mud and earth. We pardoned and forgave and tried and tried again, because our love was great and wide and true, and we leaned on the places we loved and began to heal the places we didn’t, and we held on through moves and disappointments and changes, and we celebrated every victory like it was proof of life, because it was.
Then came children, and our love stretched like a rubber band, and it turned wild and pale purple and desperate, and all we knew of love was that love is all there is, and we helped and raised and survival-breathed so our song sang louder than those cries and shouts, stronger for the stretching.
Here we are, moving into those comfortable years, where we know all the strengths and all the weaknesses and all the places where we’ve grown up together, and our love has turned into a sunrise, yellow and orange and green and pink and purple and blue, like a sky filled with all the beauty of the earth, and our song is smooth and clear and lovely, like a dancing-close waltz.
Our love has bloomed flower-like, and our friendship stands like a great, sheltering tree because we know, now, that the survival of marriage lies not in changing but in being changed, and so we let it happen, over and over and over again.
Our sun-rise love serves one another because we know we’ll stand or fall in this, and we know it’s all a choice, this loving and being loved, this serving and being served, this being changed, and that’s why it glows like a sunrise, like the promise of a new day breaking.
We have not reached the growing old years, not yet, but I imagine them to look like a sunset, with colors like our sunrise except brighter and more vivid and more magnificent, because we will have lived a life of love in every color, and we will have loved all the smiles and all the tears and all the breaths of each other, and our love will have transcended death.
Because we will have learned it true, that “there is only one happiness in life, to love and be loved” (George Sand).
by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
Valentine’s Day is not a hugely important day in our home—maybe one of those “minor holidays” that fall somewhere behind the birth of Christ and the birth of each other. I mean, we buy the boys a little box of chocolates and maybe a new stuffed puppy and talk a little bit about love and what it means to love each other and what God’s love looks like compared with ours. Sometimes Ben and I go out to dinner. Sometimes we don’t.
But it’s really not a huge, make-the-date-plans, cancel-work-to-celebrate kind of day.
This year, though, as Valentine’s Day approached I started to think about love and what it really means and how Ben and I exemplify it in our lives and to our children and to each other. And when I began to think about love, I began to think about all the ways my husband, on the last twelve married Valentine’s Days and on all the days between them, has demonstrated a sacrificial, knows-no-bounds kind of love. He is an amazing example.
So here are some of the ways I have learned about love, through the actions of my husband, the man who wrote me love-poem vows the day we were married, the day I first had a glimpse of this beautiful love when he held my gloved hands, even after I had to wipe my nose because the tears just wouldn’t stop.
Disclaimer: This is not to say that our love is perfect. We still fight, and we still say things to one another that, an hour later, we regret saying. I still make him mad, he still makes me cry. We are both still hard to love some days. But I think the difference lies in his commitment to honor the covenant we made Oct. 11, 2003, when we pledged to love each other, with the help of Christ. Love is always a choice, and even on my ugliest days, he has always chosen to love me.
Love is getting up out of bed, even though it’s cold enough to make your teeth chatter, even though you were half asleep already, because the computer monitor light is on and you know I can’t sleep unless it’s turned off.
Love is stepping in when the stress of disciplining wild children has become too much, taking the reins so I save face in front of those children, explaining to them how much we love them but why this isn’t allowed in our home.
Love is walking up and down the stairs more times than you can count on your days off just to make sure I always have plenty of cold water in my stainless steel water bottle.
Love is choosing to believe, when I’m saying those things I’ll probably regret later, or when I’m not saying those things and choosing to play the silent game instead, that this is not really me, that the real me is tucked away somewhere inside this sleep-deprived, achingly uncomfortable, hormone-imbalanced body.
Love is seeing my beauty even on my un-beautiful days.
Love is watching The Help on movie night, even though it’s a chick flick, just because you want to be next to me.
Love is turning off your cell phone and signing off all those social media sites so you can look in my eyes because this, what I’m saying, is really important.
Love is doing the dirtiest work—cleaning the bathrooms and taking out the trash and making store returns—just because you know I don’t like doing them.
Love is volunteering to change that dirty diaper because you know I’ve changed one too many today.
Love is saying the hard things, in gentle and loving ways, that help me gain perspective.
Love is letting me nest, even though it means your honey-do list is pretty endless, even though time is running out, even though I can have some high expectations, and reminding me that some priorities can wait until later, that some things are a work in progress, that such limited time inevitably means limited accomplishments.
Love is listening, not fixing, when I’m having a difficult day.
Love is letting me take the day off when you know I need it.
Love is not pointing it out when I figure out I’m wrong.
Love is patiently waiting for me to find my shoes and fix that hair that’s out of place and gather all my knitting essentials, even though my last-minute searches and fixes and gatherings are going to make us late.
Love is hanging out with me, doing absolutely nothing, during our much-looked-forward-to anniversary trip because an unexpected hospital visit put me on strict bedrest for the duration of that vacation.
Love is planning a day of shopping at Barnes and Noble and Half Price Books and Hobby Lobby for my birthday because you know what kind of day I’d like to have.
Love is believing in me—that I can publish that book, that I have other books in me, that I could make a living out of this—even when I’ve forgotten how to believe it for myself.
Love is not complaining about the tossing and turning, even though it keeps you up at night, too.
Love is massaging my head when the headache’s so bad, even though you need to go to sleep because it’s late and you have an early morning ahead of you.
Love is asking me, every single morning for the last twelve years, how I slept—not because it’s just something you do but because you’re genuinely interested in whether I got enough rest or not.
Love is doing one Pinterest project a month with me because it gives us just one more thing to do together.
Love is staying up (almost) all night so we can launch just a functional version of the Web site I’ve been waiting to launch for a year.
Love is trying that homemade deodorant, even though it has to be applied with your hands.
Love is saving that last cookie for me, even though your sweet tooth reminds you it’s there every time you walk into the kitchen.
Love is camping out with me in the gameroom, on a love seat too short for your legs, just so I can see if I’ll sleep better on a back-supporting couch and I don’t want to sleep in the room alone.
Love is talking sense into me when I feel like my world is falling apart.
Maybe it’s simple enough to say I love him. Maybe it’s supposed to be more complicated than that, complicated enough to say he’s been a pure, bright, unwavering light that has guided me through my doubt and my hesitation and my despair, guided me toward a place of peace and hope and comfort. He is my home, not these four walls we live in.
What a beautiful, unknowingly accurate picture he has been of God’s love for me.
Thank you, my love, for showing me, day after day, month after month, year after year, what it means to really love.
