by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
“A happy marriage is a long conversation that always seems too short.”
-Amish saying
Love is…
Warm and enveloping, an arm around me while we sleep, a breath stroking my neck in a so-silent wake-up call.
Soft and gentle, a soulful smile that softens the eyes, the whisper of a kiss on a mostly-asleep cheek.
Extraordinary and remarkable, a knowing that needs no words, a perfect fit that is hand curled around hand.
Passionate and strange, a new territory of disagreement opening a new part of the soul, a story, forgotten, unseen yet familiar, that murmurs, There. Now I know all of you.
Lovely and unforgettable, a single red rose coloring a pillow, love-words whispered in a dim, lamp-lit room.
Sharp and lingering, arms that hold and keep on holding, that say, You are not alone, a dance in the kitchen while little eyes watch.
Surprising and understanding, an immaculate, we-can-see-the-floor-again, cleaned-up room, a lingering look that perceives the deepest of hearts and loves anyway.
Unselfish and hopeful, hands massaging an aching scalp in the dark of night, eyes searching eyes in the middle of a quarrel and still finding love, unexplainable and unchanged and so much the stronger.
Forgiving and unshakeable, fingers brushing a cheek, wiping a tear, smoothing a brow after a remorseful plea, the words I love you forever marked like a stamp on an arm, wrapped like a seal around the heart.
Mysterious and essential, two independent individuals, separate, different, becoming one unit, joined, still different but somehow the same, hearts beating, beating, beating, in time and in step and in love.
Love is you and me.
May we live this twelfth year as Mr. and Mrs. in an intentional, no-regrets, wildly-adoring way. I love you always.
by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
We are the only ones
awake in these early morning hours.
His daddy snores beside us.
It’s been six days since
I met this newest love of mine,
six days watching the
whole world crack open, again,
six days feeling my own heart
crack open and wrap tight and
firm around the tiniest form
of another.
“Love is the whole and more than all,”
said poet e.e. cummings, and it is clear to me,
in these moments of still dark,
that his were profoundly true words.
Love is the end,
and it is the beginning,
and it is everything we need
in the world.
Everything we need to live.
To be. To see.
There was the first love,
who showed up on a sidewalk
outside a ministry building three hours late,
who met me with a smile and a word.
It took time for the friendship to catch fire,
for him to slip a ring on my finger
and wait at the end of an aisle.
Our love looked like late mornings in bed
and forgiveness granted in quiet understanding
and hands held strong through the good and the
bad, the victories and the disappointments.
It smelled like pumpkin and spice and
autumn pies cooked in a temperamental
apartment oven. It felt like meeting-new-family
nerves and adjusting-to-life-with-a-man frustrations
and overwhelming moments of adoration
for a love so big like this.
It tasted like meals cooked at home
because we couldn’t afford to eat out,
like hope and dreams and a future
that stood before us, good and promising.
It sounded like music in the
late hours of night, songs written
of love and life and time standing still.
We learned that love could hold hands
with life, that it was the only way
to hold hands with life.
And then came the first one,
added to the two, who slid into the world
on a late night in November, three hours late,
who met us with a frown and eyes like mine.
It took time to find our way in this new world
of patchy sleep and caring for another’s needs
and raising up a child, but we locked hands
and walked into it together. Always together.
And love looked like a body rising from deep sleep
in the middle of a night to watch a baby feed
by the light of a lamp, and it looked like
a blanket spread on a floor so a mama
could read to her tiny little boy, just four days old,
and it looked like staring into the fixed gaze
of an infant, together, and feeling the overwhelm
of helpless emotion at a gift so precious and beautiful.
It smelled like cinnamon and cloves and pine,
because it was Christmas, and this baby was our gift.
It felt like the hope of a husband opening the front door
and folding a weary mama in his arms at the
end of a day when a baby had been crying for
hours and hours and hours.
It tasted like a rare dinner out,
because free babysitters were hard to find.
It sounded like a song, written on a birthday
for a birthday girl who needed to hear what
he had to say about beauty and dreams and forever-love.
We learned that we were deeply loved and strong in that love,
and we learned that we loved deeply and were courageous
in that love, too.
Then came the second one,
who welcomed us with a semi-smile
and his daddy’s eyes, and our love
lurched and stumbled into deeper knowing.
It took time to match our steps, because
there were two of them now, and so many more
needs and the same number of hours in a day.
Love looked wild and tangled around the three
in an impossible-to-explain way,
and it looked like late-night Harry Potter movies,
and it looked like three stretched on a floor
to touch and talk to and stare at the new baby.
It smelled like early morning coffee before
he left for the job that paid our bills.
It felt like sun-warm on a spring day
and walks to the park and exhaustion
that turned to joy in the daylight hours.
It tasted like sour jelly beans offered in a
plastic egg, because it was Easter that year.
It sounded like a toddler voice and an infant voice
all mixing as one, and the laughter that would
come later because a little brother loved a big one so.
We learned that love would not lessen
when two became three, but would become
greater and different and much more beautiful,
like four souls finding pieces of themselves
they never knew were missing.
And then came the third,
just fourteen months later,
and he met us with the first brother’s eyes
and the same scowl and a heart that would
only know full house. It took time for us
to find our feet in the overwhelm of
two toddlers and an infant.
Love ran desperate and unmoored
and out of control, like a haze we
couldn’t quite see through, because
it was all around and everywhere and
could not be contained.
It looked like dirty blankets
in the middle of the night,
because a stomach virus would not let us go;
and it looked like dishes stacked in a sink
because we couldn’t possibly catch up;
and it looked like a mama home crying
with a daddy at work, because love was so dang hard.
It smelled like lavender sprinkled in the wash,
to erase the vomit smell that stuck around too long;
and it smelled like coffee stuck to the fibers of his shirt,
because we needed insurance somehow, some way;
and it smelled like summer nights and sweat.
It felt like a hand on a shoulder, a back, a face,
just to say, I know, I understand,
I love your overwhelmed heart anyway.
It tasted like frozen yogurt in the late night hours
when kids were asleep, because life was too stressful
and this was our “date night” and we were too tired
to do anything else or even leave the house.
It sounded like a little boy laughing at his big brothers
and the second boy wondering aloud where his
little brother might be, because he was already
so hopelessly in love with him.
We learned that love for one did not steal
love from another, because we love in our giving,
and so we gave them ourselves,
and we gave each other ourselves,
and we crawled into our new reality
where love had no age or limit or death
but only offered abundant life.
Then came four and five,
who slid into the world six weeks early
and spent twenty-one days away from home.
It took time to crawl through the struggle that
strained our faces and burned our throats,
but we treaded the water of survival,
loving the ones at home and
loving the ones at the hospital.
Love looked like two babies,
caught in incubators, wrapped in wires,
held in the arms of their mama and daddy,
every night from 10 to midnight.
It smelled like milk on the breath of two,
soap at the entrance of neonatal intensive care,
sterilization in the open room of a hospital.
It felt like panic in the back of a throat,
panic that those babies would never be free,
panic of what if?
It tasted like wine,
sipped slowly at the end of the day,
after a hospital visit finished, so a mama
could sleep before another day with a divided heart.
It sounded like machines beeping in time to hearts beating,
warnings of oxygen dropping too low,
the whispered words of mothers willing
their babies to grow and eat and thrive.
We learned that love could bear anything
and everything that comes along, because
there we were drowning with divided hearts,
walking weary but wonder-filled,
and here we are still alive.
And then came the sixth, the last,
who slid into the world three weeks early
and met us with a face sweet and
small and so very lovely.
It took time to find our way
into yet another reality, to learn
this new way of being.
Love looked like a flickering smile
on the face of a boy and a mama nearly
brought to tears by the gift of it.
It smelled like baby skin and lavender lotion
and a tiny new breath on a mama face,
like home-baked cookies and
simmering roast and tomato soup.
It felt like the tiny weight of a baby,
once more, resting in the crook of an arm
or on a chest or across a lap.
It tasted like fizzy fruit juice to
settle nerves and homemade bread
to fill a belly in the least amount of time
and baby kisses in the still moments of a night.
It sounded like the tiniest cry, like all the
wild voices of boys turned quieter
because there is a new baby,
like a washing machine constantly going
trying to keep up, even though we can’t possibly.
We learned that love never, ever stops growing
but expands into a great and mighty force
that gathers all those loved ones near and
safe and tight within the arms of family,
and we could all feel our souls meeting and
joining and locking ever more strongly
together.
Love is life’s greatest delight,
a mystery that explains itself in giving,
so the more you give, the more you have to give.
It grows its garden in the rockiest soil,
blooms gently in the hardest of places,
like marriage, like parenting, like family,
these worlds shared and sacred.
Love is blind. It is costly.
It is freedom and joy and the
only way to life.
Love is all.
by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
Time has been holding my hand these last few weeks.
Not in the way of an intimate friend, but in the way of an impatient parent trying to drag a slow-to-get-ready-child out the door so they won’t be late.
It’s not the last stage of pregnancy that makes me feel so brittle and bruised. Not really. It’s the birthday coming up that I don’t want to mark, because I don’t like marking my climbing age anymore.
I know I couldn’t have always seen birthdays like this, because I was a really young child once, and every really young child dreams of growing up someday. But for as long as I can remember, I have hated getting older.
It’s not the birthdays, exactly. It’s their number, the way they creep around every year, the way they whisper things like time is running out and you haven’t done enough with the years you’ve been given and you should be further along the writer path than you are today.
Birthdays, for a long time now, have looked down on me in disappointment, tallying up those years and stretching their hand across all my past, as if to say, This is all there is?
Yes. This is all there is.
I wanted it to be more, but time was never exactly kind, and days rushed toward dark, and weeks ran toward months, and whole years, when I didn’t really know what I was doing or where I was going or who I even was, slipped right through my fingers.
///
I don’t know exactly when those birthdays began breathing down my neck.
Maybe it was the ninth one, when I blew out candles on a ballerina cake my mother had ordered before an instructor told me I was too “chunky” to continue lessons with her, a day when my friends and family all surrounded me except for the one who had missed so many other days like this one, a day when “chunky” got all tangled up around “gone,” a day when I used my wish to say, Let him come home.
Or maybe it was the twelfth one, when I stood on our front porch waiting for my whole invited class to show up and only a few did, a day when there was no call or note or card from the missing one; a day when there were no candles to wish upon, because I was too old or maybe she was too poor; a day when I still made my wish on the first star in the sky: I wish I could be pretty so he would come home.
Or maybe it was the twenty-fifth one, when I had just quit a dream-come-true newspaper job to follow my husband on a church-planting adventure, a day when I decided I would just spend my time writing, a day when I peed on a stick and it said yes, a day when I still made my wish on the candles my husband lined up on a cake he’d made himself: I wish I could publish a book.
Maybe it was all of them, because a tenth birthday came around, and he did not come home; and a thirteenth birthday came around, and my beauty, or lack of it, did not bring him home; and a twenty-sixth birthday came around, and I had not published a book.
Birthdays did not feel like friends at all, even to a 9-year-old girl. They felt like fingers pointing to all the ways I had disappointed time.
///
I wish I could say it’s different this time around, but it’s not.
The day after my birthday rolls around, my job will end. It’s the first time I have never worked for someone else.
And all that space feels more like an expectation, not a possibility, because there is a birthday climbing on my back and whispering in my ear, Another year older, and what have you done?
The answer is not much, and so this birthday takes my words and cackles and throws all those other years, when wishes didn’t come true, right back in my face.
So when my husband asks if I want to celebrate with friends and family, I say no.
Who wants to mark another year gone when there is nothing to show for it?
No published book, still. No job. Not even a family that is “put together” and “doing it” and functioning past the overwhelm that raises tempers and flings words at each other we don’t really mean.
Only an aching back, because kids have pulled all the joints out of whack. Only anxiety that still claws at a neck, even though we’re practicing meditation and exercising and learning to change our thoughts and popping that pill every day.
Only a collection of dreams and wishes that never came true.
///
When I was 8 years old I saw the movie The Goonies (still one of the best movies of all time), and I remember how, for days, I dreamed about all those skeletons.
I would sit in the bathtub, and my mom would come check on me, and I would see a skeleton walking through the door.
My little sister would be fast asleep in her bed when I came in, and I would see a skeleton lying between the pink sheet and the purple-striped blanket.
I would imagine my dad, wherever he was in the world, slumped in a corner, in skeleton form, looking like One-Eyed-Willie, except there was no treasure waiting on a lost ship.
What I’d seen in a childhood movie had thrown reality at me, proven that one day we would all die, and one day we would all turn to skeletons like the ones Mikey and Bran and Mouth ran into.
Death terrified me, because it looked like those brittle bones, and sometimes it looked even scarier, like the wax figures lying in a casket, and neither one was what I wanted to be.
When I imagined getting older, I imagined death.
And just like that, a little girl broke off what should be a happy relationship with her birthday.
She didn’t want to grow up. She didn’t want to get any older. She didn’t want to die.
///
So, you see, getting older has never been exactly easy for me.
I was never the girl who couldn’t wait until she turned 10 or 16 or 21, because every one of those years felt like a step closer to death.
And even this week, when another birthday has come and gone, it passed with more dread than excitement.
It’s silly, when we get down to the heart of it, that we fear getting older. We, especially women, can feel time ticking so loudly—this many years until I can no longer have a baby, this many years until my hair turns all gray, this many years until they will no longer think of me as “young.”
What does it really matter?
Because there is a great gift in getting older, too, a wisdom that begins to settle into our bones when we realize that life is not really about these little things—having a job or not, publishing a book or not, making a name for ourselves or not.
Life is really about who we become in all these years.
Who we become in our families and in our communities and in our selves.
Will we become people who believe accomplishment and accolades and just-right circumstances tell the whole story of who we are?
Or will we become people who believe that our true worth is really tied to who we were created to be, who we already are when we peel away all the layers a world can wrap us in?
We are all born with a diamond down deep inside us, and the diamond is brilliant and visible for a time, and then the world covers it in a great heap of armor, and then we spend the rest of our years trying to uncover it again so we can see and know and believe the treasure we already are, without the qualifications and accomplishments tagging behind our name.
And if getting older means uncovering more of that brilliance, one shovelful at a time, then I want to embrace this getting older.
So this year, on my day, I didn’t check for more gray hairs and moan about the wrinkles that have begun to gather around the corners of my eyes from smiling too much at my boys, and I looked, instead, toward the gift that time holds out to me every single birthday: one more chunk of a diamond revealed.
And then I whispered my wish.
by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
He’s home from school now, this day when he was recognized by his teacher as Star Student, a lofty award, for his courtesy and help and kindness, and he hasn’t stopped grinning since he walked through the door.
It’s a badge of honor for this 5-year-old boy who has watched friends accept the award and wanted, desperately, to get it, too.
And he did, and it’s a victory of sorts, a validation in his little boy mind, so much a part of him today that when we talk about a family movie night for Family Time and his brothers start throwing out suggestions, he puffs out his chest and says, No! You don’t get to pick because you weren’t Star Student today.
He’s been doing it all afternoon, choosing what game they play together on the trampoline because he was Star Student, getting the biggest cookie because he was Star Student, asking to be excused from after-dinner chores because he was Star Student.
This time he looks at his daddy and me, as if we’ll agree. We hardly know what to say. Hardly know what to do.
I feel the annoyance clogging the back of my throat, though, because who is he to think he is better or more privileged or more special than all of his brothers just because of some award?
The annoyance almost hijacks my tongue, and then I remember that I was once him, too.
///
Elementary school, junior high, high school, I lived for those awards, because they validated who I was.
They made me forget my reality of fatherless, penniless girl and let me be someone important. Someone admired. Someone who could rise above.
My seventh grade year, when I’d been playing the clarinet for eighteen months, I played a scale for a chair test and missed a note. The boy who sat second chair played his scale perfectly while I sat in my seat, holding my breath, hoping, hoping, hoping he would miss two notes so he wouldn’t knock me from the top spot I’d held all this time.
The band director had us switch places, and I saw the whole world crumbling apart around me, because who was I now that I wasn’t on top?
I cried hysterically in the bathroom all through that next class period, because the world had ended.
It was the same with academics. I lived to be someone smarter, someone more talented, someone more important than that crowd of classmates, because I did not know then that I was great without one single accolade to prove it.
In high school every subject award went to me, because I worked hard to stay first in my class, to stay smart, because I believed I could lose smart the same way I could lose an award.
I lined all the awards up on my dresser at home, where I could see them every morning as I brushed my hair and put on makeup for school.
So I could remember who I was.
I let those pieces of wood and brass tell me who I was, and I let them lock me in chains that said I could not fail, ever, and I could not let someone else collect an award, ever, because failure and forfeit would tear my identity into tiny little, can’t-put-back-together pieces.
I still have those awards, packed into a bin somewhere. They are rusting now.
///
This morning my 8-year-old randomly said that in his more than two years of public school he has never been chosen a Star Student.
And just yesterday I’d gotten an e-mail from his kindergarten brother’s teacher, saying the 5-year-old had been chosen Star Student for this week, but no one knew it except his daddy and me.
Every Friday their elementary school has an assembly for the first 20 minutes of school time, where kids with birthdays and kids who have done something noteworthy and kids who are chosen Star Student are honored.
His daddy looked at me and then told our boy, Maybe you can ask what you could do to be considered, but this answer doesn’t’ feel right, because the requirements for an award like this one lie outside of who he is on the inside.
And we can’t ask a kid to act outside of who he is, just to snag an award.
Ten minutes later, we watched our 5-year-old beam while the announcer read what his teacher had written, how he can always be counted on to offer help, how he is almost always kind and courteous to his peers and adults, how he loves people and always looks forward to his lessons.
And it’s hard not to feel proud, because this is exactly who he is, who he has always been, skilled at interpersonal relationships and always looking for the places where he can help and encourage others.
Yet I can’t help but think of my 8-year-old, sitting with his second grade class, watching his little brother get an award he has never been honored with.
Will he feel less than? Will he think he needs to be someone different? Will he believe that who he is is not good enough, because there is no award telling him any different?
What kind of damage are we doing here?
///
My second job out of college was working as a reporter for the San Antonio Express-News. Every day I’d crank out my stories, one after another, so I could help fill all those blank pages.
I took care with all my words, because I wanted to get them right, and I wanted to get them beautiful, too, especially for the feature stories, and so I’d practice and revise and revise again, diligently perfecting every letter, every word, every turn of phrase before turning them in.
The Hearst Corporation, which owns the Express-News and a whole family of other reputable newspapers, would every quarter hand out awards for best news story or feature story or op-ed column or page design.
It was an award every reporter wanted to take home, not just because it came with a cash reward, but also because it came with bragging rights and admiration in the newsroom.
Our editors would call a meeting on the second floor of the newsroom, where all the news reporters worked, and I would walk with my colleagues in features down a flight of stairs, wondering who might win this time.
Winners were announced in front of the entire editorial staff.
I won two of them in my three years with the newspaper, and I could not have known how they would twist my confidence like a sadistic lover.
When I was winning awards, I was a real writer. When I wasn’t, I was no writer at all.
Awards can do this ugly thing to us. They can make us forget all the really talented writers who join our ranks, who deserve those awards, too. We start thinking we can do it better than they can, and we start thinking we need to do it better than they can so we can win an award and prove our worth, because people will only know what we’re worth with an award to back us up.
We start thinking we might not have what it takes if we don’t win.
It’s an ugly place to be, waiting on a prize so you can know more surely who you are.
I didn’t know it then, but I can see it now, how those awards wrapped their pressure around me and whispered in a young-reporter ear, You are nothing without our validation. Win or quit.
///
I don’t want this for my boys.
I especially don’t want it for the 8-year-old one, who may never get Star Student in his whole elementary career.
He’s a boy who has his own ideas about things, and he’s not afraid to question everything, and he’s as strong-willed as they come.
They aren’t the traits that are typically awarded in a little boy. They aren’t even encouraged.
For weeks I’ve listened to my 5-year-old talk about wanting to win Star Student, because this is the pinnacle of success at their school, but is it the pinnacle of success for us, to be Star anything?
I hope not.
I hope, at the end of a day, I can say I am more interested in helping my boys stay true to who they are than I am interested in adding another award to the stack of to-keep memories from their school days.
Some Star Students are awarded for helping keep their classroom clean and tidy. And some are awarded for their consistency in doing everything they’re told the first time, and some are awarded for staying on task and never daydreaming about what they’ll do as a filmmaker when they’re grown.
But these are not the most important things in the world.
We reward kids for doing all the things that make our lives easier, but the world is sometimes better served by the kid who will stand up for what he believes in and challenge the status quo when it doesn’t make sense anymore, even when it’s inconvenient to us, the adults.
If all we had in the world were perfect rule-followers, which is what awards like this tell us we need and should be, how would anything significant, like a civil rights movement or a “women deserve the right to vote” protest or save-the-environment programs ever happen?
Yeah, it’s easier and more convenient to be the parents of the kid who does everything he’s asked to do, without question, who waits for instruction before starting a task (and completes it), who always has a kind, encouraging word to say, like my sweet 5-year-old.
I have a few of these in my house.
But there are times when I wish they would rebel like their oldest brother, because he is the one who shows me clearly where rules don’t make much sense anymore, and he is the one who always has those out-of-the-box solutions, and he is the one who will tell me true when I’m being a complete ass (without the word, of course, only the very-accurate description).
Who’s to say which one is better and which one deserves an award?
They both make me a better person.
My 8-year-old will try, for a time, to be the “model” Star Student, but he cannot deny who he is.
And I’m so glad.
His disappointment will open for us an opportunity to let him know that the people who take up the least space in a classroom or who demand the least amount of attention or who always do everything they’re told the first time are not the only ones who can make a difference in the world.
He will make a difference in this world, too, with his constant questioning and his creative mind and his rebellion.
That’s good enough for me.
by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
Five days I’ve been sick, and nothing comes out right, and I’m tired and cranky and frustrated that even after all this time my eyes still burn and my throat still feels like it’s holding shards of glass and my nose is the heaviest appendage on my face, except for my ears when I try to lie down and sleep.
All these hours I’ve been trying to pull myself from bed, because it’s the last week of winter break for the two boys in school, and I never get to spend quality time with them, but all I really want to do is stay in bed, alone, and rest until I can hold up my head without the whole world spinning.
They’ve been watching movie after movie, because it’s too cold and wet outside, and the whole house is falling apart, since I just can’t bring myself to care, and guilt rides my heels, because I’m not being a mama to my boys, I’m just laying on a couch hoping the movie will keep them fully entertained until lunchtime and I can summon the effort to climb from these piles of blankets and fix them something healthy that I won’t want to eat because I can’t taste anything anyway right now.
This is not how I wanted to ring in a new year.
///
Weeks ago we made our plans to sit out in our cul-de-sac to watch the neighbors set off their fireworks, and we intended to catch up on their holiday news and their hopes for the new year, like we always do.
We were going to let boys stay up later than usual, because fireworks are exciting and beautiful, and the noise of them would keep them all up anyway.
And before all that, we were going to sit and talk about our goals for the new year, as a family, and then we were going to solidify all the others, as a couple, but I can’t seem to stop sniffling and sneezing and hacking up whatever is hanging out in my chest.
I guess I just really didn’t expect to start a new year with a filthy house and an early date with the bed and a miserable cold or flu virus that will probably, in the next few days, work its way right along to the other three in my family who haven’t had it yet.
It’s disappointing to end an old year with sickness and ring a new one in with that same sickness.
We have all these expectations for what the days or weeks or the whole new year is going to look like, and then there are all these setbacks and unknown variables that come sweeping in, even in the first few hours, and it’s hard to know what to do with them all when we are clinging so tightly to the way we wanted things to be.
Maybe it’s not so much the sickness that feels disappointing in this first day of a new year. Maybe it’s just the expectations.
///
Somewhere along my life journey, I began to connect the way we rang in a new year with the way a whole new year would go.
So if we rang a new year in jobless, that’s how the whole next year would go. If we rang it in tired or frustrated or disappointed in the way the last year had gone, that’s how the whole next year would go, too.
If we rang it in sick, we could expect sickness in the next year.
Over the years, I have let that belief put a whole lot of pressure on me, so I always tried to start a new year with a perfectly clean and tidy house (because who wants to spend the whole next year in a dirty, out-of-control house?), and I always tried to patch up relationships with bosses (because who wants bad communication in the job for the whole next year?), and I tried to shake off the anxiety, for at least the one day that turned into a new year (because who wants anxiety hanging around for a whole new year?).
And this year beat them all, because there was a job ending and anger aimed at the people who had chosen to end it two weeks before a new baby will be born, and there was anxiety about the future and a big black hole of unknown sitting on top of all those new months of a year.
And then sickness on top of it all.
What kind of year would 2015 be, with all of these dark spots already showing up?
What chance did it have, in the shadow of all this?
These were the questions walking me right into the new year.
///
There was another year when sickness rang in a new year.
It was a plague, four years ago, a stomach virus that just wouldn’t leave us be.
Forty days we fought it, forty days of scrubbing toilets and washing blankets and soaping up hands until they were chapped and raw, and then came the day when no one puked or dirtied their pants, and I started finally, tentatively, hoping that, for God’s sake, it was over.
We were creeping up on a new year, and I wanted to be virus-free when that clock said 2010 had turned into 2011.
Two days down, and I thought for sure we were in the clear.
Three days with no vomit or diarrhea and I braved going to church for the first time in more than a month, and then as soon as we walked in, my 20-month-old, holding to the side of his five-month-old brother’s stroller, bent over and heaved all over the floor.
I would be marking a new year with a washer full of blankets and soiled clothes, just like I’d spent the last 40 days.
I cried in those shocked moments, partly because I was mortified but mostly because I just couldn’t do it anymore, and then I walked them all back out the door, the oldest, 4 years old at the time, screaming that he wanted to stay at church with Daddy because we hadn’t been able to leave the house in too many days.
It would never be over, that’s what I thought. It would ruin the whole of 2011, that’s what I thought.
We would never recover from this beginning-of-the-year setback.
And we almost didn’t.
///
I don’t want to be this person anymore.
It’s a silly way to live.
Just because something is plaguing us when the old year turns to new doesn’t mean it has the power to define the whole next year.
That’s a lie that keeps us afraid and timid and ineffective.
One day does not mean a whole year down the drain. Two days don’t mean a whole year down the drain. Two hundred days don’t mean a whole year down the drain.
Half the picture doesn’t tell the whole story.
So much of what we do and accomplish in life, so much of our success or our failure, hangs completely on our attitude toward it all.
We can meet those setbacks with defeat already on our minds and clenching our hearts, and they will be our defeat.
Or we can meet those setbacks with grace, and they can turn into a year of learning all there is to know about resilience and positivity and choosing gratitude in the hardest of places, and they can be our victory.
Sometimes it’s easy to forget, in the middle of trying times, when we’re laid up in bed too sick to talk and someone forgot to pay the water bill and the checkbook hasn’t been balanced in 30 days, maybe more, that it’s not what a year can do to us so much as it is what we can do to a year.
We are stronger than we know. We are braver than we know. We are more resourceful than we know.
Life is not something that happens to us. It is something we can mold and steer and change.
Even if the way my new year started, with lingering sickness and question marks surrounding the employment piece and hours of playing games and doing puzzles and watching movies with the older ones while the younger ones sleep, is the way the whole next year goes, what’s so bad about that?
What’s so bad about spending a whole year learning how to rest and trusting our future to God’s hands and practicing staying present with the little ones we love, who won’t be little forever?
What better way to live a year than fully present in the moment, like this day has demanded of us?
So, instead of feeling defeated at the disappointing, not-according-to-plan start to a new year, we claim victory and let that new year word frame all the days to come: Presence.
And then we commit to living into it.
by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
Five days I’ve been sick, and nothing comes out right, and I’m tired and cranky and frustrated that even after all this time my eyes still burn and my throat still feels like it’s holding shards of glass and my nose is the heaviest appendage on my face, except for my ears when I try to lie down and sleep.
All these hours I’ve been trying to pull myself from bed, because it’s the last week of winter break for the two boys in school, and I never get to spend quality time with them, but all I really want to do is stay in bed, alone, and rest until I can hold up my head without the whole world spinning.
They’ve been watching movie after movie, because it’s too cold and wet outside, and the whole house is falling apart, since I just can’t bring myself to care, and guilt rides my heels, because I’m not being a mama to my boys, I’m just laying on a couch hoping the movie will keep them fully entertained until lunchtime and I can summon the effort to climb from these piles of blankets and fix them something healthy that I won’t want to eat because I can’t taste anything anyway right now.
This is not how I wanted to ring in a new year.
///
Weeks ago we made our plans to sit out in our cul-de-sac to watch the neighbors set off their fireworks, and we intended to catch up on their holiday news and their hopes for the new year, like we always do.
We were going to let boys stay up later than usual, because fireworks are exciting and beautiful, and the noise of them would keep them all up anyway.
And before all that, we were going to sit and talk about our goals for the new year, as a family, and then we were going to solidify all the others, as a couple, but I can’t seem to stop sniffling and sneezing and hacking up whatever is hanging out in my chest.
I guess I just really didn’t expect to start a new year with a filthy house and an early date with the bed and a miserable cold or flu virus that will probably, in the next few days, work its way right along to the other three in my family who haven’t had it yet.
It’s disappointing to end an old year with sickness and ring a new one in with that same sickness.
We have all these expectations for what the days or weeks or the whole new year is going to look like, and then there are all these setbacks and unknown variables that come sweeping in, even in the first few hours, and it’s hard to know what to do with them all when we are clinging so tightly to the way we wanted things to be.
Maybe it’s not so much the sickness that feels disappointing in this first day of a new year. Maybe it’s just the expectations.
///
Somewhere along my life journey, I began to connect the way we rang in a new year with the way a whole new year would go.
So if we rang a new year in jobless, that’s how the whole next year would go. If we rang it in tired or frustrated or disappointed in the way the last year had gone, that’s how the whole next year would go, too.
If we rang it in sick, we could expect sickness in the next year.
Over the years, I have let that belief put a whole lot of pressure on me, so I always tried to start a new year with a perfectly clean and tidy house (because who wants to spend the whole next year in a dirty, out-of-control house?), and I always tried to patch up relationships with bosses (because who wants bad communication in the job for the whole next year?), and I tried to shake off the anxiety, for at least the one day that turned into a new year (because who wants anxiety hanging around for a whole new year?).
And this year beat them all, because there was a job ending and anger aimed at the people who had chosen to end it two weeks before a new baby will be born, and there was anxiety about the future and a big black hole of unknown sitting on top of all those new months of a year.
And then sickness on top of it all.
What kind of year would 2015 be, with all of these dark spots already showing up?
What chance did it have, in the shadow of all this?
These were the questions walking me right into the new year.
///
There was another year when sickness rang in a new year.
It was a plague, four years ago, a stomach virus that just wouldn’t leave us be.
Forty days we fought it, forty days of scrubbing toilets and washing blankets and soaping up hands until they were chapped and raw, and then came the day when no one puked or dirtied their pants, and I started finally, tentatively, hoping that, for God’s sake, it was over.
We were creeping up on a new year, and I wanted to be virus-free when that clock said 2010 had turned into 2011.
Two days down, and I thought for sure we were in the clear.
Three days with no vomit or diarrhea and I braved going to church for the first time in more than a month, and then as soon as we walked in, my 20-month-old, holding to the side of his five-month-old brother’s stroller, bent over and heaved all over the floor.
I would be marking a new year with a washer full of blankets and soiled clothes, just like I’d spent the last 40 days.
I cried in those shocked moments, partly because I was mortified but mostly because I just couldn’t do it anymore, and then I walked them all back out the door, the oldest, 4 years old at the time, screaming that he wanted to stay at church with Daddy because we hadn’t been able to leave the house in too many days.
It would never be over, that’s what I thought. It would ruin the whole of 2011, that’s what I thought.
We would never recover from this beginning-of-the-year setback.
And we almost didn’t.
///
I don’t want to be this person anymore.
It’s a silly way to live.
Just because something is plaguing us when the old year turns to new doesn’t mean it has the power to define the whole next year.
That’s a lie that keeps us afraid and timid and ineffective.
One day does not mean a whole year down the drain. Two days don’t mean a whole year down the drain. Two hundred days don’t mean a whole year down the drain.
Half the picture doesn’t tell the whole story.
So much of what we do and accomplish in life, so much of our success or our failure, hangs completely on our attitude toward it all.
We can meet those setbacks with defeat already on our minds and clenching our hearts, and they will be our defeat.
Or we can meet those setbacks with grace, and they can turn into a year of learning all there is to know about resilience and positivity and choosing gratitude in the hardest of places, and they can be our victory.
Sometimes it’s easy to forget, in the middle of trying times, when we’re laid up in bed too sick to talk and someone forgot to pay the water bill and the checkbook hasn’t been balanced in 30 days, maybe more, that it’s not what a year can do to us so much as it is what we can do to a year.
We are stronger than we know. We are braver than we know. We are more resourceful than we know.
Life is not something that happens to us. It is something we can mold and steer and change.
Even if the way my new year started, with lingering sickness and question marks surrounding the employment piece and hours of playing games and doing puzzles and watching movies with the older ones while the younger ones sleep, is the way the whole next year goes, what’s so bad about that?
What’s so bad about spending a whole year learning how to rest and trusting our future to God’s hands and practicing staying present with the little ones we love, who won’t be little forever?
What better way to live a year than fully present in the moment, like this day has demanded of us?
So, instead of feeling defeated at the disappointing, not-according-to-plan start to a new year, we claim victory and let that new year word frame all the days to come: Presence.
And then we commit to living into it.
