by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
The beginning of a new year means first reviewing the old. 2014 was a great year for this blog, and I just want to say thank you for all your support and encouragement. Here are some of the best posts from the year.
Top 10 blog posts for 2014:
Dear Matt Walsh: We do not choose depression
When who your son is and who “they” say he is are two very different things
Dear 21-year-old me
Where is the beauty in the mess of miscarriage?
When you wish you were expecting a girl instead of another boy
There is a war on women, but it’s not the one we’re fighting
Sometimes I’m ashamed to be a white person in America
Why I haven’t left the church (even though I was hurt)
I never expected my 8-year-old son to be depressed
When we think we might have shared too much in a world that won’t understand
Top 10 poems for 2014:
The end.
Different.
Dress.
Outrun.
Rain.
Shots.
Mine.
Look.
Talk.
Goodbye.
Favorite books of 2014:
Wonder, by R.J. Palacio
A Return to Love, by Marianne Williamson
Mockingbird, by Kathryn Erskine
Tiny Beautiful Things, by Cheryl Strayed
The Whole-Brain Child, by Daniel Siegel and Tina Payne Bryson
Behind the Beautiful Forevers, by Katherine Boo
The Book Thief, by Markus Zusak
Mrs. Hemingway, by Naomi Wood
We Were Liars, by E. Lockhart
The Book of Unknown Americans, by Cristina Henriquez
And since no new year is complete without looking forward, here are a few projects I’ll be working on in 2015:
1. A new novel in poetry, What Came After (working title that could change). The first installment posts today at 3:30 p.m. Don’t miss it!
2. A book for Crash Test Parents, the parenting blog/community my husband and I started in February 2014. If you’re interested in what we’re doing and sharing there, head on over. A parenting podcast will begin in the early part of the year.
3. A marriage book, brainstormed with my husband, later in the year.
4. Saturday stories, a new addition to the blog that will include short stories I’m working on or journalism-type stories that are real life (I will be sure to note the difference, so readers aren’t confused) stories.
I’m super excited about this new year and all it has to offer. I look forward to the journey with you. Happy New Year!
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by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
There is something sweet and sacred and enchanting about a new year, because it feels like a brand new start.
Every year we make our goals for this wiped clean slate, as a family, as a partnership, as individuals, and I feel so hopeful and excited for all we want to see and do and accomplish in the next 365 days.
And yet, something about the year’s end feels disappointing and difficult.
Maybe it doesn’t feel that way, really, until we look back at those last year’s goals, the ones that should have been met but weren’t, because of job changes or children challenges or just no energy left at the end of long days.
Not much turned out like we thought it would, and regret can eat a whole year out of history.
So much left undone. So much we want to do still. So much that feels impossible.
These endings hold evaluations in their hands, like there is some invisible bar of accomplishment we must reach before we can stamp the whole last year successful.
Have I done enough? Have I measured up? Have I met all those goals, or at least most of them?
Have I done anything noteworthy at all?
What if the answer is no?
///
At 16 years old, I had already made it my goal to be the first woman president of the United States.
I wasn’t really interested in government or politics, but I was interested in improving the world, and so I made my plan to major in government studies and then go to law school and practice long enough at a good firm to make a name for myself, so I could then become a Senator.
An election as a state representative would set me on the path toward presidency, because people would see that I was concerned with issues like environmental preservation and education and peace among our foreign brothers and sisters.
In 25 years or fewer, I thought, I would be a shoe-in.
Except when I sat down and really, really thought about it, politics wasn’t what I wanted to do with the rest of my life, because my heart turned wildly toward writing.
But I was class president and had a tiny taste of the importance granted one who leads a student body. Or a country. The way “they” looked at me when I talked president was not the same way “they” looked at me when I talked writer.
I wanted to be significant. Important. Known.
I wanted to be respected and revered and loved.
At the very heart of that president plan was the need to be somebody who did something people would remember.
To be someone noteworthy.
///
The need haunts me even now.
It finds its way into New Year’s goals and stands on the wall between the new and old, shaking its head at the whole last year that looks the opposite of noteworthy.
We always start with good intentions, there at the beginning of the year, and then the months roll on, and there are sicknesses and unexpected setbacks and the day-to-day drowning in the needs of five, going on six, boys eight years and younger.
The end of my years, since becoming a parent, look a lot like this one, with more goals left undone than done, and there are words that stand on repeat like a scratched up CD playing background music for a ring-in-the-New-Year party.
You accomplished nothing of value this year. Absolutely nothing.
No nursing home visits with the family. No published book (yet). Not even a weekly date night with the man I love.
And maybe there were other things we did in this year of finding our feet with toddler twins and getting all kids out of diapers, at least until February, and learning more about playing than just existing, but nothing feels all that remarkable.
The whole year? Did we fail the whole year? Because what do we have to show for it?
A few more gray hairs and too many more tired-lines around our eyes.
We all want to do something grand and noble and significant, and what if this is it?
What if writing rough-draft words in a journal and mopping up puke and doing eight loads of laundry every week so it can sit on a banister waiting to be put away is all the great we can do?
///
The summer before my sophomore year of college, I signed up to go on a mission trip to Mexico, along with the people from my home church and those from another small church in town.
I had only been once before, but this summer was important. For the last few months I’d entertained the glamorous notion of being a full-time overseas missionary, and I thought another trip would help solidify my certainty.
Some team members conducted eye exams for the poorest in a rural town, and a dentist checked teeth while a doctor probed babies.
My job was helping run a Vacation Bible School for the children while their parents stood in line to receive services and health information.
The children loved us. When our van would pull away from the stone-walled Baptist church with no-glass-paned windows, they would run alongside us, waving and blowing kisses.
I cried every time we left, because my heart was tender, and I knew the look of poverty, since I wore it, too, though nothing like theirs.
During those days, I expected a big voice to tell me that this was it. This was what I had been created to do.
Instead, I got a parasite.
It happened the night church members in Mexico decided to cook for us. We were warned by our more experienced travelers to take it easy, since our stomachs weren’t used to the Mexico water and other cooking ingredients.
All those other teammates, though, took one of those sugar cones filled with dulce de leche candy, so I thought surely it would be OK if I did, too.
I was sick, nonstop, for two days, and I got so dehydrated I could hardly climb from bed. I lay in a kind of reverie, where I saw a stage and a microphone and a pen and a notebook, and nothing made the least bit of sense, and the next thing I knew they were half-carrying me to one of the vans, loading me with Gatorade and water, even though every time I drank something I just threw it all back up, and then we were on our way home.
I didn’t know until later, until the parasite had worked its way out and I was one week into my two-weeks-of-just-broth diet, what those visions meant.
I wanted full-time missionary because it was significant and holy and good.
Yet there was another path for my life that I could not see until I almost died (or at least felt like I was dying). Writer. Musician. Creator.
I told myself I would never do something again just because it felt important.
///
And yet here I am, at the end of my year, disappointed that I have not done anything, or much, important in all those 365 days of potential.
So what if I haven’t, by the world’s standards?
So what if I have nothing more to show at the end of a year than a house that is still standing even though it is home to five, going on six, boys, even though it bears their holes in just about every wall, even though there is a layer of dirt caked on everything that lives inside?
So what if I have nothing more to show at the end of a year than a man who still loves me tenderly, the way I still love him?
So what if I have nothing more to show at the end of a year than ten writing notebooks filled with essays and musings and a novel or two that still wait for publication?
Sometimes I forget that the noteworthy I can do happens right here in this very moment.
In every moment.
Change the world, that’s our goal, and we see that mess politics has made of our nation, and we say, “Yes. There. That’s where I want to change the world,” because it’s grand to stand for what we believe in.
Change the world, and we see those bloated bellies of babies and the wounded eyes of windows and the dirty water they’re all drinking, and we say, “Yes. There. That’s where I can change the world,” because it’s noble to feed orphans and comfort widows and meet needs.
Change the world, and we think of all those thousands of people reading the words of others that are published into bound, physical pages, and we whisper it soft. “Here, too. Let me change the world here.”
And all this while, we are already changing the world, right this very minute.
Sometimes changing the world looks like putting a 2-year-old back in his bed for the four thousandth time and kissing that mouth and repeating, with more patience than we really feel, that he is not to get out of bed again.
Sometimes changing the world looks like reading Magic Tree House books with the 5-year-old, because he’s just finding his confidence with chapter books.
Sometimes changing the world looks like building a Lego Star Wars ship with the 8-year-old, because he can’t find all the pieces that are sitting in plain view on his worktable.
I can make myself feel bad about not sending out those publishing letters or not looking for those mission opportunities or not lobbying the government for what I find important, but I have changed the world right here within the walls of my home.
Changing the world of one person, or five littles, still changes the whole world.
We will ring in the new year in three days, and we will fall forward into all the moments it has to offer and leave behind all those used-up moments of the last year.
I hope, in our falling, we will trade the self-named failure of yesterday for the mantra of Mother Teresa today:
“Let us do something beautiful for God.”
Because we have done something beautiful, and we will again.
by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
There is something sweet and sacred and enchanting about a new year, because it feels like a brand new start.
Every year we make our goals for this wiped clean slate, as a family, as a partnership, as individuals, and I feel so hopeful and excited for all we want to see and do and accomplish in the next 365 days.
And yet, something about the year’s end feels disappointing and difficult.
Maybe it doesn’t feel that way, really, until we look back at those last year’s goals, the ones that should have been met but weren’t, because of job changes or children challenges or just no energy left at the end of long days.
Not much turned out like we thought it would, and regret can eat a whole year out of history.
So much left undone. So much we want to do still. So much that feels impossible.
These endings hold evaluations in their hands, like there is some invisible bar of accomplishment we must reach before we can stamp the whole last year successful.
Have I done enough? Have I measured up? Have I met all those goals, or at least most of them?
Have I done anything noteworthy at all?
What if the answer is no?
///
At 16 years old, I had already made it my goal to be the first woman president of the United States.
I wasn’t really interested in government or politics, but I was interested in improving the world, and so I made my plan to major in government studies and then go to law school and practice long enough at a good firm to make a name for myself, so I could then become a Senator.
An election as a state representative would set me on the path toward presidency, because people would see that I was concerned with issues like environmental preservation and education and peace among our foreign brothers and sisters.
In 25 years or fewer, I thought, I would be a shoe-in.
Except when I sat down and really, really thought about it, politics wasn’t what I wanted to do with the rest of my life, because my heart turned wildly toward writing.
But I was class president and had a tiny taste of the importance granted one who leads a student body. Or a country. The way “they” looked at me when I talked president was not the same way “they” looked at me when I talked writer.
I wanted to be significant. Important. Known.
I wanted to be respected and revered and loved.
At the very heart of that president plan was the need to be somebody who did something people would remember.
To be someone noteworthy.
///
The need haunts me even now.
It finds its way into New Year’s goals and stands on the wall between the new and old, shaking its head at the whole last year that looks the opposite of noteworthy.
We always start with good intentions, there at the beginning of the year, and then the months roll on, and there are sicknesses and unexpected setbacks and the day-to-day drowning in the needs of five, going on six, boys eight years and younger.
The end of my years, since becoming a parent, look a lot like this one, with more goals left undone than done, and there are words that stand on repeat like a scratched up CD playing background music for a ring-in-the-New-Year party.
You accomplished nothing of value this year. Absolutely nothing.
No nursing home visits with the family. No published book (yet). Not even a weekly date night with the man I love.
And maybe there were other things we did in this year of finding our feet with toddler twins and getting all kids out of diapers, at least until February, and learning more about playing than just existing, but nothing feels all that remarkable.
The whole year? Did we fail the whole year? Because what do we have to show for it?
A few more gray hairs and too many more tired-lines around our eyes.
We all want to do something grand and noble and significant, and what if this is it?
What if writing rough-draft words in a journal and mopping up puke and doing eight loads of laundry every week so it can sit on a banister waiting to be put away is all the great we can do?
///
The summer before my sophomore year of college, I signed up to go on a mission trip to Mexico, along with the people from my home church and those from another small church in town.
I had only been once before, but this summer was important. For the last few months I’d entertained the glamorous notion of being a full-time overseas missionary, and I thought another trip would help solidify my certainty.
Some team members conducted eye exams for the poorest in a rural town, and a dentist checked teeth while a doctor probed babies.
My job was helping run a Vacation Bible School for the children while their parents stood in line to receive services and health information.
The children loved us. When our van would pull away from the stone-walled Baptist church with no-glass-paned windows, they would run alongside us, waving and blowing kisses.
I cried every time we left, because my heart was tender, and I knew the look of poverty, since I wore it, too, though nothing like theirs.
During those days, I expected a big voice to tell me that this was it. This was what I had been created to do.
Instead, I got a parasite.
It happened the night church members in Mexico decided to cook for us. We were warned by our more experienced travelers to take it easy, since our stomachs weren’t used to the Mexico water and other cooking ingredients.
All those other teammates, though, took one of those sugar cones filled with dulce de leche candy, so I thought surely it would be OK if I did, too.
I was sick, nonstop, for two days, and I got so dehydrated I could hardly climb from bed. I lay in a kind of reverie, where I saw a stage and a microphone and a pen and a notebook, and nothing made the least bit of sense, and the next thing I knew they were half-carrying me to one of the vans, loading me with Gatorade and water, even though every time I drank something I just threw it all back up, and then we were on our way home.
I didn’t know until later, until the parasite had worked its way out and I was one week into my two-weeks-of-just-broth diet, what those visions meant.
I wanted full-time missionary because it was significant and holy and good.
Yet there was another path for my life that I could not see until I almost died (or at least felt like I was dying). Writer. Musician. Creator.
I told myself I would never do something again just because it felt important.
///
And yet here I am, at the end of my year, disappointed that I have not done anything, or much, important in all those 365 days of potential.
So what if I haven’t, by the world’s standards?
So what if I have nothing more to show at the end of a year than a house that is still standing even though it is home to five, going on six, boys, even though it bears their holes in just about every wall, even though there is a layer of dirt caked on everything that lives inside?
So what if I have nothing more to show at the end of a year than a man who still loves me tenderly, the way I still love him?
So what if I have nothing more to show at the end of a year than ten writing notebooks filled with essays and musings and a novel or two that still wait for publication?
Sometimes I forget that the noteworthy I can do happens right here in this very moment.
In every moment.
Change the world, that’s our goal, and we see that mess politics has made of our nation, and we say, “Yes. There. That’s where I want to change the world,” because it’s grand to stand for what we believe in.
Change the world, and we see those bloated bellies of babies and the wounded eyes of windows and the dirty water they’re all drinking, and we say, “Yes. There. That’s where I can change the world,” because it’s noble to feed orphans and comfort widows and meet needs.
Change the world, and we think of all those thousands of people reading the words of others that are published into bound, physical pages, and we whisper it soft. “Here, too. Let me change the world here.”
And all this while, we are already changing the world, right this very minute.
Sometimes changing the world looks like putting a 2-year-old back in his bed for the four thousandth time and kissing that mouth and repeating, with more patience than we really feel, that he is not to get out of bed again.
Sometimes changing the world looks like reading Magic Tree House books with the 5-year-old, because he’s just finding his confidence with chapter books.
Sometimes changing the world looks like building a Lego Star Wars ship with the 8-year-old, because he can’t find all the pieces that are sitting in plain view on his worktable.
I can make myself feel bad about not sending out those publishing letters or not looking for those mission opportunities or not lobbying the government for what I find important, but I have changed the world right here within the walls of my home.
Changing the world of one person, or five littles, still changes the whole world.
We will ring in the new year in three days, and we will fall forward into all the moments it has to offer and leave behind all those used-up moments of the last year.
I hope, in our falling, we will trade the self-named failure of yesterday for the mantra of Mother Teresa today:
“Let us do something beautiful for God.”
Because we have done something beautiful, and we will again.
by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
I heard it first in a call from the school psychologist, called in to get to the bottom of an 8-year-old’s acting-out behavior in the classroom two months ago.
But I heard it again in a face-to-face debrief meeting with his current teacher and the school principal and the psychologist, and it’s the weight of those ugly words, “I’m not as happy as I used to be” and “Nobody ever listens to me” and “I never seem to do the right thing,” collected during an interview between my son and the psychologist, that burn my eyes and the back of my nose.
I try to blink the tears away before all those other calm-and-composed women notice, but I can’t do it, because it’s my boy, 8 years old, and this was not supposed to happen.
Depression was not supposed to happen.
One of the women runs off to get tissues, and I wonder if it’s bad enough to make my eco-friendly makeup run, because it’s easier to worry about the way a face looks than about the way depression looks.
These hormones, I say, with a little laugh.
And even though I’m eight months pregnant, it’s not the hormones, not really.
It’s a little boy’s words.
No mama expects depression in the boy she has loved and adored and cared for and watched and played games with and read to and hugged and kissed, every chance she got, for the last 8 years.
And yet, it is here.
///
Once upon a time in this mama’s child life, there was a boy who exploded with anger, who never wanted anyone to see him cry, even though he was a sensitive boy, who worked hard, from a young age, to break free from the grip of darkness.
But there was a reason.
Because there was a dad missing from those most formative years, and how does a boy learn to be a man when there is no father to show him?
There was a missed-one who called sporadically, making promises that he hardly ever kept, and the boy believed them all, because he loved the one who had left, and every time a promise stood broken, the boy crawled deeper into himself, and darkness gained another foothold.
There was a mom forced to work multiple jobs just to make ends meet, and there were three moves in three years, three starting-overs, three make-new-friends challenges, three learn-how-to-survive-now changes.
One day, when the boy was 11, he complained of burning pain in his stomach, and a mama took him to the hospital, and doctors found ulcers eating up the belly of a child.
His mama called in the troops, a counselor and his teachers at school and the family he loved.
She did her part.
But depression is a tough disease to beat.
///
I know this. I am terrified of it.
I saw the way depression could twist a temper and send it flying out of control. I saw the way it could whisper irrational solutions into the heart of another child. I saw the way it could send a body to bed for days on end.
Sometimes forever.
And now, here is my boy, facing this monster.
And he comes from a different background than the boy of my youth, but there are still so many pieces in the puzzle of anger-turned-inward.
There is his intelligence, high above his grade level so he feels cast out and different and, much of the time, alone.
There is his introversion in a house of four, going on five, brothers, where he is hard-pressed to get a word in edgewise, where he can hardly ever find a place of his own, where he is the oldest and looked-up-to and sought-after one in this tribe of boys.
There is his intuition and his sensitivity and his boredom in a traditional classroom and his dreams and his expectations and his behavior and his big emotions and his inability to do anything acceptable, at least from his perspective, and it’s no wonder we are here.
It’s no wonder he has fallen into this pit.
I am scared to death that he will not be able to find his way back out.
///
One day that once-upon-a-time boy was riding in the backseat on the way to a counselor’s appointment.
He was 11 years old, and he already felt crazy, misunderstood, damaged, and this trip proved what he had known all along.
There was something wrong with him, something no one could fix.
What if no one could fix it?
He faked it through that counseling appointment, like he always did, and he knew what he needed to do next, so he climbed into the backseat of the car, making his plan.
They came to a bridge they’d crossed an hour ago, the one he’d marked as The One, and that boy tried to open the back door and throw himself out.
And maybe he wouldn’t have really wanted to kill himself, when it came down to it and he opened the door and saw the asphalt screaming by and thought about how much it would hurt first, but it didn’t matter, at least not that day.
Because a mama had seen that look in his eyes, and she recognized it, and she made sure to lock those doors before they got 100 feet down the road.
The boy tried and tried, but he could not open the door, and a mama’s love reached right over the back seat and wrapped him in warm tendrils so he finally, finally, finally stopped trying.
///
It was hard to see it, what that psychologist found.
Because my boy didn’t stay in bed all day, and he didn’t lose any of his boy-energy, and he didn’t cry endlessly or isolate himself or lose all interest in life.
He just had a short fuse, and he exploded in anger and he acted impulsively when that anger got the best of him.
There were days when he would open wide and let a mama and daddy see straight to his soul, where he wrestled with thoughts like no one really liked him and he didn’t belong in this family and he should have never been born.
And then there were days when he sat happily with his brothers playing a game of chess or Battleship or Jenga, and he would crack jokes and smile widely and laugh until his stomach hurt.
There were other days when he clamped tight, and he sat listening to an audio book for hours on end and immersed himself in creating detailed Twister Man comics and bent over his desk putting together and taking apart and putting together again all those Legos.
It didn’t seem all that unusual, but we weren’t looking for depression.
This is the kind of thing that can smack a parent in the face and heart and deep, deep down in the gut.
Because there was another boy who fell into the pit of depression, pushed from behind by a broken family.
And we’re not a broken family, but we’re all broken parents, and what if we caused it? What if our boy never quite recovers because we are still here? What if healing is too far for our love and support and acceptance to reach?
How do I keep him from doing what those others of my past have done?
I just don’t know. Maybe I never will.
///
No one else was up the night I was reading in the living room and he slid past me into the bathroom that could never be locked because the door didn’t close all the way.
He was 18, I was 17. It was another year when a dad had disappeared, just after a call had come telling us he’d been in a work accident, trapped under two tons of equipment. There was the call and then there was nothing, for months on end, and we did not know whether he was alive or dead.
It was a year when a boy would graduate and life waited and he did not know if he was up to the challenge, even though he was brilliant and talented and could have grabbed any job he wanted.
It was a year when a boy would be leaving, growing up, becoming a man, and he just didn’t think he knew how.
He was holed up in the bathroom for 45 minutes, and then he walked back out with tissues around his wrists that he tried to hide.
I didn’t make a sound, but I couldn’t breathe there on the couch. I tried to shake off the uneasiness, tried to concentrate on the open book in my lap, tried to settle what I had seen.
Those tears came hot and thick, though, because I knew what he’d done, what he’d attempted, and hadn’t I tried it myself a thousand times, in more subtle ways, starving myself, going whole days and weeks without eating not just because I wanted to be thin but because I wanted them to watch me wasting away, so they knew how much it hurt to be me?
It was the easiest way for me to die.
Something about depression wraps around an ankle and never lets you go.
///
This is not what I want for my son.
Two months ago, at the height of his behavioral issues at school, his daddy and I found a counselor for him.
Every week he sits in a room full of toys and he plays and talks and maybe, just a little, heals.
And yet today, when I am sitting in that school room, with all those women who don’t know him like I do, I listen to them talk about helping him through transitions with a timer and providing him a cool-down place for his big emotions, but all I can hear are those words on repeat in my mind.
My son is depressed. My son is depressed. My son is depressed.
What if?
What if he doesn’t beat it?
What if there are darker days ahead?
What if there is suicide?
All those questions can tie a mama in great big, tight knots, but they are the wrong questions for this day, today.
The question today is what can I do to help my son?
It’s a question without a simple answer.
Spend more one-on-one time with him. Pursue a hobby together. Understand and accept and fully embrace him, without trying to change him.
Sometimes part of beating depression is teaching an 8-year-old boy what to do with his anger, how to rise above it, how to feel it and not be afraid of it, how to crawl all the way through it and stand back up on the other side.
If all we’re told is that our anger is unjustified or wrong or unacceptable, we will do the only thing left.
We will turn it inward, and the darkness will get another grip on our heels.
He is a boy with anger huddled somewhere deep inside him, and we must do the work of digging it out, letting it out, dragging out that darkness until it meets the light.
Every day. Every moment. Every encounter.
We cannot just hope it will change. We cannot pretend it doesn’t exist. We cannot hide it.
Because these hearts of our children are worth more than saving face.
And so we sign him up for that extra help at school, and we show up every week to those counseling sessions, and we do everything we can at home to help heal a heart whole.
And there is Another who speaks life into the places where darkness has swallowed the light. There is Another who carries truth into the hearts of men and women and little boys and whole generations. There is Another who lifts their heads and breaks those chains of depression.
My son knows and loves this Other.
And there will come a day, I know there will, when my boy will beat this disease. IT WILL NOT BEAT HIM.
Because he has a future and a hope, and it is good and bright and beautiful.
This is enough for today.
by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
The book came three days late.
But it wasn’t a big deal. We could read one devotion in the morning and one at night and be right back on track in three days.
Except the first night we got all caught up in talking about the awesome day two boys had a school, how one made a really pretty picture of a flower in art class and another got one more jumping bean in his GT class and how he just can’t wait until the moths come out of the beans and he can release them into the wild.
And then we listed all our thankfuls and talked about how Mama, on the way to work, saw a homeless man in a wheelchair with a patch over his eye, holding a sign with three fingers instead of five, and how I didn’t have any money or food in my purse to give him.
We just never got around to that second-of-the-day devotional.
But there was always the next day, and we were still only three days behind.
Then came the weekend, when schedules run more fluid and kids get to play and a mama and daddy try to put back together all the ways a house can fall apart in a week, and instead of reading extra, we skipped a whole day of the devotional.
Four days behind now.
I tried hard to ignore it, but failure clamped a heavy hand on my shoulders and stared me down and whispered, This will mean the ruin of an Advent season.
This will mean the ruin of children.
Because they need to be taught what this season is really about, and I wasn’t doing my part.
Expectation tied its knot around me.
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Expectations have always tied their knots around me.
They were never imposed, at least not that I can remember. But there was a dad who left, and I was expected to prove he’d made a mistake. There was a mom who worked three jobs just to make ends meet, and I was expected to make the home life as easy as possible. There was a future, because a mom sacrificed herself, and I was expected to make the most of it.
They were all my own expectations, but they were big and real and heavy.
And then came valedictorian and voted-most-likely-to-succeed and a full-ride college scholarship that could only be kept with a 3.8 grade point average.
That first semester of college, I sat in a history class my high school history teachers had sorely prepared me for, and the teaching assistant handed back a test, and a big red C- sat at the top.
I had never in my life made a C. I had never even made a B.
The whole room blurred around me, and the back of my throat burned, and I willed myself not to cry, not here, not now.
I waited until I got to the hallway, until I stumbled into a communal bathroom, and then I let loose as silently as I could.
I would never recover from a C, that’s what I thought. I would lose my scholarship, and my family didn’t have money for college without it, and my whole future had just gone down the drain because of this one test.
In a less emotional moment, I made a plan. I scrawled dates and descriptions on flashcards, and I wrote practice essays and I studied until my eyes crossed.
I aced every test after that first one.
But the expectation, the fear of failure driving it, never really left me, not until that final A+ posted on a permanent transcript.
It would take me years to learn how to breathe past all the pressure I could put on myself.
It would take me years to learn how to spot unrealistic expectations and banish them to their rightful place.
///
Even today, I am still learning.
Here, in this crazy season when kids are in school and presents need wrapping and a job is sucking me dry, it’s easy to cave to expectations.
Because if we don’t read about the birth of Jesus every single day, they will forget it in all the holiday hype.
And what if they don’t choose the way of Jesus because we didn’t read day 3 or 4 or 6 days of that Advent reading, and what if they miss the whole point, and what if I am setting them up for failure like mine—inconsistent and sporadic and only when we have time?
I read about all those other people, somehow doing these devotions with their families, walking kids through a formal teaching time, and I want to be them, but, you see, I started reading this morning, and one of the twins needed to use the potty, and if I’m not there watching he’ll have every Band-Aid in the first aid basket plastered to the floor, and he’ll dump rolls of toilet paper in pee water, and he won’t even decide to climb on the potty before he wets a little in his pants, since there are much more interesting explorations to make.
And then, by the time he strapped himself back in his seat, another one spilled his milk, and it went all inside the cabinets and into drawers, and it took me 10 minutes to clean it all up, and that’s how long it would have taken to read the dang thing.
And, see, they’re talking anyway, and no one is really listening, and I have to interrupt every other sentence with a Please be quiet reprimand until my face burns and my hands clench and those words come screaming out, like a didn’t-get-her-way 4-year-old: NO ONE IS EVEN LISTENING!
I slam the book closed and toss it on a counter and walk away, trying to breathe, and my boys watch me with wide eyes.
I was listening, Mama, my oldest one says, but I can’t meet his eyes.
Because I’ve tried and we’re never going to catch up and this season is just ruined.
But mostly because this is not who I want to be.
///
Two years ago my oldest started school.
Before that time, I could take long mornings to read my own devotionals, and I could take long minutes to read them to my children, too.
Before that time, I was doing my part in this spiritual teaching.
Every morning I would set out a yellow and a green and a blue plate, and my boys would eat in silence while I wove those Biblical stories around them, and I could hear and feel and see the truth sinking into their hearts.
And then school started, and those mornings had a deadline, and I had to get breakfast on the table and lunch packed and somehow, in the middle of feeding two infants and three other boys and helping a 5-year-old pack up in time and signing all the necessary papers that hadn’t gotten signed yesterday because we were playing kickball out in the cul-de-sac, I had to read a Bible story and a devotional.
We tried an Advent study that year, and we made it 17 days before we got too far behind to catch up and just put it aside for another, easier year.
We tried again with Lent. Twelve days into reading we quit, again, because we had fallen too far behind to catch up.
Morning devotionals were patchy, because mornings were unpredictable, and I felt frustrated and discouraged and disappointed that this wasn’t going exactly the way I’d planned.
What kind of mother couldn’t find the time to read a Bible story to her kids before their day began?
Sometimes the pressure is just too heavy for our shoulders to bear.
///
Sometimes we just need to let it go.
Because the truth is, there will be mornings when a kid is sick and we’ll have to clean up a mess in the bathroom that we weren’t expecting, and our presence and our patience and our soft-spoken words are the gift of Christmas to that child.
And there will be mornings when the 8-year-old is dragging his feet and we need to leave already and there’s no time left on the clock to read that Advent selection, but our peace and mercy and commitment not to hurry is the gift of Christmas to him.
And there will be evenings when we will be so completely engaged in conversation or a game or laughing at the brother who just burped in the middle of a word and sounded exactly like a monster growling, that we won’t even think about playing catch-up to all those readings we’ve missed, but these things, engagement and laughter and just being, are the gifts of Christmas to them.
I can beat myself up about falling behind, about sleeping those extra 10 minutes, about not predicting the argument that took 20 minutes to resolve, and I can step away from the morning feeling bruised and battered and bloody.
Or I can remember that the greatest gift we can give our children, ever, is our presence.
Love lives in the words we speak and the life we live in front of them, not in the pressure we put on ourselves to read someone’s Advent book every day this season.
Our life is writing its own Advent book, every single moment of every single day, when we choose love in the hard places and seek understanding in the mystery places and welcome acceptance in the wish-they-were-different places.
They see Christ most not in words written on a page, read aloud at the same time every morning, but in the words we, their parents, write on their hearts every time we set that book aside and say without words, You. You are important enough to tend to, right now, this minute, even though I had other plans.
This is the spirit of Advent.
by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
(Photo by Helen Montoya Henrichs.)
It happened just a few days ago, during the greeting time at church, when a woman I’ve known for years hugged my neck and kissed my cheek and then said, You look so beautiful.
I managed to hold back my laugh, but I couldn’t stop words from sliding out after hers. I sure don’t feel beautiful.
We never do, she said, and she smiled and walked back to the seat beside her husband.
Those words. They have chased me since.
We never do, do we?
We who are carrying the beauty of new life, who are right here in the middle of backs aching and stomachs stretching and clothes cutting into places they shouldn’t be, even though they’re supposed to be made for this, we are not often the first ones to say we feel beautiful.
We feel lumbering and awkward and swollen and heavy and achy and frumpy and all those things that disqualify us from beautiful.
It took everything I had today to put on those getting-uncomfortable stretchy jeans instead of the yoga pants I wear almost every day. It took everything I had to pull on that form-fitting green-sleeved maternity shirt that shows the round ball throwing off my center of gravity, instead of hiding behind an oversized T-shirt I stole from my husband’s side of the closet.
And even though I made this great effort, I feel anything but beautiful.
The realization makes me feel sad.
///
I never really wanted to have children.
I was young when I became aware of my body, comparing it to others and noticing the differences. I was never as thin or as strong or as beautiful, and I worked hard to measure up.
I watched what I ate and started skipping meals and made bargains with myself before I even knew what it all meant, before I knew how it would lock me in chains.
If I can just be as small as her…
If I can just get a stomach like hers…
If I can just fit into the same size she wears…
And then I got older, and I watched high school girls in grades ahead and grades below swell with unplanned babies, and I never wanted to be them.
I would never lose my body like that, I said.
I wrote it in my journal.
I told my mom.
I whispered it in the dark hours of the night, when I thought of the hips I already hated and the stomach I had to kill myself to make flat and the arms that required an hour a day to stay cut.
And then I met my husband.
We were married two years, and the longing to start a family came knocking.
I almost said no, because I was the thinnest I’d ever been and I finally felt good and strong and almost maybe beautiful. But then I missed a period, and I took a pregnancy test and three more just to be sure, and then I sat in a bathroom and cried over the plus signs lined up in a row.
I cried because I was happy, because I would be a mother.
I cried because I was terrified, because I would be a mother.
I cried because somewhere along the way beauty had become tangled around thin. Skinny. Hot body.
Those plus signs told me I was losing something, too, and I didn’t know how to reconcile the loss.
///
When I’ve talked with people about body image, about the eating disorders of my past and the still-present constant striving to always be thinner and the way that crooked desire never really leaves us, I often tell them that the struggle seemed to get better with children.
But the way I feel today, with nine weeks left on the countdown, I can’t say it’s completely true.
Because I stopped looking at myself in the mirror five weeks ago.
I don’t care to see the way my belly has stretched so thin there are veins running up and down my skin so it all looks blue and bruised.
I don’t care to see the varicose vein that just showed up on the back of my left knee two weeks ago, the one I thought might be a blood clot but is, instead, a “normal” part of pregnancy.
I don’t care to see the fuller face staring back at me.
Every time I feel that pinch in the middle of my back, I feel unbeautiful. Every time I feel hungry enough to eat, even though I just ate an hour ago, I feel unbeautiful. Every time I step on a scale and see all the pounds added, I feel unbeautiful.
So I stand in front of a TV screen and gasp through pregnancy interval training. I bend my body into positions that hurt like hell during prenatal yoga. I speed walk until I’m breathing too hard and sweating too much and my back is screaming, because I have to get 30 minutes in before I’ll let myself quit.
I try to pretend their good-natured jokes and comments, “They’re sure it’s not twins, right?” and “Sure one isn’t hiding?” and “Wow, you sure got big fast. Twins again?” doesn’t hit me right where it hurts.
Here I am, in my last pregnancy, and I cannot just let myself be pregnant.
Why can’t I just let myself be pregnant?
The real truth is, pregnancy does not heal something like this. Sometimes it only makes it worse.
///
I blew up in that first pregnancy.
Forty pounds added to my frame over those nine months, and then he was born and I still had 25 to lose.
They were just numbers, but they were everything to me.
I hated that after-pregnancy body, where jeans I’d worn for years didn’t fit right anymore, all tight in the hips and butt and thighs.
But I worked hard to lose it all, and then came number 2, and five months after him we were pregnant with the third, and I lost track of all the weight I needed to lose to make my pre-pregnancy goal again.
Then came the fourth pregnancy, when I was five pounds from reaching my goal, and I knew I didn’t want to blow up like I had for all the others, so I counted calories and kept running and told myself if I could keep from breaking out the maternity clothes in the first 14 weeks, it would be some kind of victory.
Except week 11 started creeping closer, and those pants were getting tighter and tighter, and I stressed and worried and worked all the harder.
I walked into the doctor’s office for that finally-made-it-to-the-safe-point appointment, and the scale hadn’t changed, and I felt a small victory that only showed in my smile.
And then they looked for her heartbeat, the same one I’d heard four weeks ago, and it was gone.
It took me a long time to forgive myself for that little celebration I felt in my heart, for the no weight gain that really only meant a baby had died.
It felt all wrong, the way I’d obsessed over weight and worked so hard and kept to my don’t-gain-too-much plan, the way I’d cared more about maintaining a body than embracing and growing a baby.
I would never, ever do it again.
///
And yet, here we are, in this place where my husband asks a simple question, Are you hungry? and my brain goes to war.
No.
Yes.
No, no, no.
But yes. Yes. So hungry.
I really tried to enjoy it this time around, because it’s my last, because this baby is the last one who will need room in my womb, the last one who will keep me from sleeping in these weeks before meeting him, the last one who will stretch me in all these ways I can see and all the ways I cannot.
But still I felt that relief when I spent the first fourteen weeks too sick to eat, and the scale dropped. Still I felt glad when a stomach virus in the second trimester knocked me out for three days and the scale dropped more. Still I felt victorious when I reached the halfway point and the file showed no weight gain at all.
I know better than to let a number on a scale define me. I do.
It’s just that, even now, I can feel its haunting in my knees carrying all this extra weight and my back arching in unnatural ways and the stomach muscles I can’t even see anymore.
I’ve made my after-baby lose-the-weight plan, and I am counting down the days until I can get started.
I know it’s wrong. But I want to be the woman “they” all point to and say, I can’t believe that body has had six babies.
Because it’s a badge. Or something like that.
Beauty, even after all these years, is still tangled around thin.
And I just want to be beautiful again.
///
Three months after the baby-losing we got pregnant with twins.
Ten weeks in I woke from a nap and went to the bathroom. Blood dropped out in a great gush.
I sat on the toilet while my husband ran to the corner store, because we were on our anniversary vacation and I hadn’t though to bring any period-related items with me, since I was pregnant, and then he rushed me to the hospital while I cried beside him because I thought we’d lost two more.
I had a blood clot, caught between my uterus and the placental wall, and no doctors could tell me if my babies were safe, because there was no knowing.
They sent me home on bed rest.
I spent seven months on bed rest, when I could not even walk for exercise, because no one knew what might tear the placenta more.
And I did it. Because I could not lose another baby.
I didn’t worry about my weight, even though the pressure sat right behind my eyes, where it always sits when I try not to think about it.
It took me two years after having twins, two years of intense interval training and three-minute planks and four miles of running every other morning, to finally reach a place where I was even close to my pre-pregnancy goal.
I would never do that again, either.
///
So here we are.
Here we are in a place where I can hardly eat without feeling guilty, where I work too hard to stay fit, where I cannot even look in a mirror without feeling that anxiety creep into the back of my throat.
Here we are in a place that feels anything but beautiful.
What is it about this time, when new life is demanding room, that makes it so hard to believe our swelling skin and fuller face and sturdier legs are all beautiful?
What is it about these last few weeks, when we can barely walk without pain twisting in a back or a leg or our feet, that make it so hard to feel beautiful?
What is it about those first six weeks before a doctor signs off on the safety of exercise, when our skin feels flabby and disappointing and destroyed, that make it so hard to know that new mother is the most beautiful skin we can wear?
We look around at all those other pregnant women, and we wish we could be them, because I bet their scale hasn’t reached the number ours has, and they’re so much cuter pregnant than we are, and they’ll probably drop the weight in no time, while we’ll have to struggle along for years.
Maybe we will not ever feel beautiful here, because we know about the stretch marks we work hard to hide, and we know just how many pounds we’ve added, and we can’t help but compare what we have with what those magazine mothers have.
Maybe we won’t always feel beautiful. Maybe that’s not even the point. Maybe we just have to know that WE ARE.
We are not exempt from this body image struggle, the one that has chased us all our lives, just because our body is being used to create new life. But we can choose to turn our backs on its voice.
So today, when a little girl, not more than 4 years old, comes up to me at my boys’ school and says, Do you have a baby in your belly? and I say, Yes I do, and she says, You’re so beautiful, I choose to believe her.
We are beautiful.
We are beautiful with our big bellies and our shiny jagged lines in the hidden places and our clothes that have stopped fitting.
We are beautiful with our increasing scale number and our puffy didn’t-sleep-last-night eyes and our feet too swollen to even wear shoes at this point.
We are beautiful with our new life.
Believe it, achy sister. Know it. And then live into it.
I will be limping along, right beside you, trying to live into it, too.
