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.
by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
It’s always that time right before dinner is ready, when kids are whining because they’re hungry and I’m trying to pour five glasses of milk and no one will set the table like I asked and the soup is boiling over, probably scorching on its bottom because I have no more hands to stir, that I just want to hide in the bathroom and pretend I have disappeared forever.
It’s always that window between Family Time and baths, when craft supplies need cleaning up and boys need to be herded upstairs and no one wants to stop in the middle of creating, including their daddy, but I can feel the clock and its friend crazy breathing down my neck, because I’m pregnant and don’t get to enjoy a glass of wine with dinner anymore that I just want to climb under my covers and pretend the whole world, my world, no longer exists.
It’s always that string of minutes between an alarm clock chiming and throwing back warm covers that I wish they could just get ready for school on their own, without my constant supervision.
And someday they will. But not today.
Today I will pull myself from bed and put their chalkboard schedules beside their bathroom door and I will walk down the stairs in darkness to start the oatmeal, and then I will dish that warm goodness into bowls and set them in their places and climb back up the stairs to take twins to potty before everyone comes trampling down and the madness really begins.
Today I will dress the littlest ones and help the middle one find shoes that are right in front of his face, and then I will remind the second oldest to pack up his red folder, and I will climb the stairs once more to pull the oldest away from the Legos and books he got at his eighth birthday party last weekend and remind him that he has only 15 minutes left to eat his oatmeal before we’re leaving.
Today I will walk exhausted and sucked dry and just a little overwhelmed because some can’t pour milk and some can’t tie shoes and some can’t put socks on without snagging a toe.
It will not always be so.
These days of raising five (going on six) boys 8 years and younger, they’re not easy, ever, but I have learned something in these years between child and adult.
Life is full of seasons, just collections of time we will look back on in the histories of our lives and wonder at how we made it in one piece or that we were chosen to live it or how extraordinarily we were changed.
No season will last forever.
///
Just after my first son was born, I had one week of vacation and worked five more weeks from home so I could feed him when he needed feeding and hold him when he needed holding and love him a whole day long.
The days were shorter then, and my husband got home just after dark during the ending of those days.
My baby boy would sleep peacefully in a swing while I watched him from a couch, waiting for his daddy to get home, and the shadows would come crawling in from windows and I would let them, and there was nothing on the table for dinner and nothing I could do about it and nothing I could think but how we would never get back to the life we had before him.
Those days before a new baby were filled with spontaneous dates and trips to the grocery store when we wanted spinach dip with French bread and nights of full and sweet sleep.
I wasn’t ready for this forever change, not even after the eight months I’d had to wrap my mind around it.
And so, on the fourth night, when my husband came home to a dark living room and a sleeping baby, and when he put his arms around me to feel how my day had gone, I cried into his collared shirt and said the words that had been following me around all day.
Can we give him back? I said. I’m just not ready.
He was the perfect baby who slept and smiled and loved his mama hard.
But it was new and serious and terrifying, and that old life had passed away while I wasn’t looking, and I did not expect the new life to be so…hard.
It didn’t feel anything like a season in the middle of those dark nights, when a baby cried and a mama cried and a whole world felt like it was crying.
///
Maybe we’re not ever ready for the season changes in our lives.
Because there are new babies and there are lost jobs and there is divorce and sickness and death and pain and grieving, and we want to give it all back.
We don’t want this season, because, from where we sit, looking out at all the brand new and the unanswered questions and the fear that follows us in and out of days, it feels like it might last forever.
Forever is just asking too much here.
We can’t do forever. We can’t do every day for the rest of our lives when we can barely even do today, this moment, right now.
It’s not easy to step away from those hard days and remember they will have an end. It’s not easy to look at the future without a spouse or a job or our health or the phone calls from our mom or the presence of our dad and see who we are becoming in the middle of the mess. It’s not easy to feel sickness or a doctor’s question mark or the loss of a baby and know that there is another side to suffering.
But there is. We just have to keep walking or limping or crawling toward that next season.
And if all we can do is lie on the ground and stare at a sky that has turned black and starless, there is hope for us here, too.
A new season will always come to meet us.
///
Almost two months ago my boy, the oldest, was written up at school 16 times in 20 days for choosing to act outside of who he is, and we had no idea until we were sitting in a principal’s office where she shared his conduct violations in quick succession.
There were no signs at home, because he was his same old self, spirited and strong-willed but loving and kind.
It was unexpected and heartbreaking, knowing he was becoming the kid other parents warn their kids about.
I cried on the walk home from that meeting, and I burned from the inside out, because hadn’t we taught him better, and didn’t we have family values, and didn’t he know that we loved him more than anything he could ever do?
So why was this happening?
Sometimes there are seasons we would rather not trip through, seasons where a boy is acting out and a school psychologist is called in and an outside therapist is secured, because maybe he’ll open up to someone besides a mama and daddy.
Sometimes there are seasons where we have to brave the judgment looks of all those other parents, whose kids have probably told them stories about our boy, and we have to remember that our boy is good and kind and wonderfully delightful beneath all the layers of exaggerated stories and misinterpreted intentions and misguided beliefs.
Sometimes there are seasons when we will have to look straight in the eye a teacher who requested a classroom change because she couldn’t handle our boy anymore, and we have to know that she doesn’t know him like we do.
These seasons can chew us up and spit us out and then leave us to die.
Because they demand hard work, like digging to the very heart of a hurting little boy who has only ever known brother plus brother plus brother and no identity to call his own. They demand seeing past the surface of behavior into the thoughts and beliefs and insights of a child who can feel the stress and anxiety and contempt of others like it somehow tells the story of who he is. They ask us to step off a ledge into a darkness we cannot navigate on our own, because the next step is nowhere to be found.
All we want is to get out of seasons like this one, because they’re relentless, and we’re afraid, and we really, at the heart of it, just don’t want to fail.
Sometimes we need to sit and stay a while.
///
The seasons of life are made to stretch us and squeeze us and make us brand new.
There are the hard and crazy years with children, when we learn how to love in all the hard places.
There are seasons when a job is doing well and money is swimming in and everything we touch turns to gold, when we learn humility and generosity, and there are seasons when the gold turns to dust and the job dries up, when we learn faith and hope and even greater generosity in the lean places.
There are the early romance years, when a relationship glides smoothly through rose-colored days and we dream of forever. There are the seasons when love feels like work and it’s all we can do to stick around and keep that forever-promise.
There are seasons of friends, when we have those support groups propped beneath us and we learn what it means to ask for help and rely on others. There are seasons when friends leave and we must learn to stand on our own.
All of these seasons have something to teach us about life and love and strength and endurance and triumph and truth and courage and wonder and miracles.
We won’t learn what they have to share if all we ever do is wish this, too, would pass.
///
In 30 days my job will disappear.
We got the pink slip six weeks ago, and I haven’t yet done anything about it, because it was unexpected and disappointing and scary.
It still is.
On good nights, my husband and I will talk about our creative pursuits and our dreams and everything we’re good at, and the whole worlds feels like a huge arena of possibility, and we’ll look into the future with excitement and anticipation and hope for the chance to chase dreams.
On bad nights I’ll crumple into his arms, soggy with tears, because there’s the house and all the mouths to feed and a new baby on the way, and what are we going to do?
On these nights this good man reminds me that we have been here before, in another season of life, when the new felt alarming and the unknown stared from the dark and the whole world felt like it was coming to an end.
We always came out on the other side new and changed and better versions of our truest selves.
We will again.
These seasons, they all come and go. They all rise and fall. They all freeze and then they thaw.
And it’s only a matter of time before we thaw out of this one, too.
///
So we wait.
Whatever season life sees fit for us, we walk or run or crawl, knowing that we will see our way out of those hardest seasons, but it will take time.
Sometimes there’s a summer, where we can hardly find a comfortable place to sit because we’re sweating and burning and trying to form a coherent thought in a head that’s on fire.
But summer gives way to fall, when the air lightens and we can send kids outside and the whole world feels kind and hopeful and full of harvest and thanks and warm goodness.
And then it all turns white and cold and we can only shiver in bed or shiver to breakfast or shiver through a whole didn’t-go-like-I-expected-or-wanted day because branches are cracking and breath is frosting and death of all that is beautiful is coming with a vengeance.
But life waits underneath it all, and it bursts forth in a new day, when we can breathe full and deep again, and what was frozen is purposed anew, wearing green.
We are recreated in all those seasons.
And none of them last forever.
Those anxiety pills you’re on? You won’t take them forever. Those problems you’re having with your boy? You won’t have them forever. Those mornings you feel sucked dry by all the child-leeches in your house? They won’t last forever.
The disagreement you had with your mother-in-law? It won’t last forever. The depression that knocks you to your knees? It won’t last forever. The sickness tying you up in knots? It won’t last forever.
So sit. Stay awhile.
And be transformed.
by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
(Photo by Helen Montoya Henrichs)
In just a few days some of my favorite people will gather around my living room table, and we will talk over turkey and heap a plate with mashed potatoes and gravy and pretend we’re trying to decide between apple or chocolate pie when we know we’ve already planned to take a slice of both.
Some of us will be missing this year because of in-law dinners and lives too many states away, but a small group will sit and celebrate the sacred tradition that is Thanksgiving.
We will start that meal with a prayer, like we always do, and the 4-year-old will grin into my face, because he’s just so excited his Nonny and Poppy are here; and the 5-year-old will try hard to close his eyes but won’t be able to help that roving gaze, because he’s always loved a food spread like this; and the 8-year-old will shift from foot to foot, because his daddy sometimes prays long.
And we will give thanks in our hearts for what has been in the year stretching between the last time we all met around a table and a turkey and two pans of green bean casserole.
Love and hope and awe and wonder meet us here.
///
It’s hard to know when those first memories of Thanksgiving began.
There are flashes of days, down through the years, one at a great-uncle’s house with woods looming behind it and a long wooden swing hanging from the trees that shadowed his yard and pine needles thick like a spiky carpet on the ground.
There is a great-great grandmother’s house, all of us squeezed in the tiny square footage her husband built, where legend had it she slept with a gun under her pillow because she lived alone and the neighborhood had turned a little dangerous for an old woman and she wasn’t in the least afraid to use it, and I remember the way the kids would sit out on her cement porch and swing or drop letters through the little mail slot so they would fall in the middle of her living room, reminding the adults we were still waiting on that food-call.
There is a great-grandmother’s house, after the great-great and the great-uncle were gone, and that gathering looked and felt smaller because so many of the older ones had died, and others had drifted away with the dying, and it was only a handful of kids who went out front to play kickball while the adults and my Nana watched a game on her living room television, and all the kids missed the false teeth flying out when a referee made a bad call, but we heard the laughter of all those adults who saw it and never forgot it.
These early memories are raucous and full of children running in and out of houses, trying not to stick fingers in the pies, and I can still smell that turkey and the fresh bread and those vegetables we didn’t even know the names of.
I couldn’t explain it then, not in words, but I could feel the thanks that burst from the first bite of food, all the way to the last bite of pie, when we all felt like we might pop and surely wouldn’t eat again, ever, after this.
There was something simple and special and sacred about those shared days, because they meant family and freedom and future.
///
Thanksgiving Day has lost some of its magic now.
Maybe it’s because a job demands work until the very day of thanks. Maybe it’s because kids go to school and homework still comes home and schedules still remain the same until Thursday rolls around.
Maybe it’s because of all who are missing.
When all those greats were alive we had so many families gathering around so many tables, and now, this year, we have two.
There are no more greats around for the little children, and those children’s parents are the ones hosting dinners now, and there aren’t even always aunts and uncles who join in the festivities anymore, because we all have our own lives and our own plans and our own families.
Gone are the days of great aunts and uncles all under the same roof for the same day breaking bread and eating their fill and trying not to notice how everyone looks older this year.
I feel a little sad about this. We used to pack a house on this traditional holiday, and now that holiday demands work and dangles big sales and asks families to cut short the one day a year when they might fall asleep on a couch after eating too much turkey and no one would mind their snoring.
I miss that magic.
///
There is a Thanksgiving that stands out as scary and new and just a little disappointing.
I was nine years old, and we had just moved to Ohio because it was the only way my mom thought we would ever be a family again, since my dad worked in Ohio and Texas was a long way off.
She told us the news a month before summer ended and listened to us cry about leaving our friends, and then she packed us up and we moved into a two-story house in Mansfield, ten blocks from a low-income elementary school.
We didn’t have the money that year to go back home (Texas would always be home) and spend the holiday with my mom’s family, who held all my memories of Thanksgiving to date.
So we spent the day with my dad’s family.
My grandmother was a saintly woman. It wasn’t her fault that she and my grandfather were the only two I really knew in that group of thirty. It wasn’t her fault that I had never felt more like an outsider than I did that year. That day.
Cousins who had grown up together, whose names we didn’t even know and I still can’t remember, played hide and seek in Grandma’s travel trailer, and my brother and sister and I stayed out under the trees, raking leaves, because we didn’t know them and they didn’t know us, and raking leaves at least gave us something to do.
So we raked and we waited for that screen door to open and let us know it was time to eat, and we could finally blame our quiet on food.
When they called, we all trampled inside a house that smelled like cabbage.
I threw up after that Thanksgiving meal, and I never ate cabbage again.
///
I wonder what my boys will remember of Thanksgiving, this holiday that is not so wild and noisy and crowded as it was in my girlhood because there is only them and a grandma and grandpa and, every other year, an aunt and uncle or two who bring a handful of cousins.
Will they remember these Thanksgiving days as thrilling, with a haze of laughter blurring them into gold?
Will they remember adults playing board games and talking until the sun goes down and the whole sky turns dark?
Will they remember how eagerly they waited to sit at the “adult” table, wondering every year if this one might be the year they move up past all the babies?
The spread at our Thanksgiving is nothing like it was for me as a kid, with rows and rows of homemade pies and sweet tea like syrup and a whole table full of steaming food in too-hot-to-touch bowls, but does it still look magical to my children?
Do they feel the people who are missing, all those family members who have come and long gone, or do they see a room-for-more house as full?
Do they notice the lost pieces like I do?
///
Then there was the first Thanksgiving without my grandmother.
She had been there for all of the holidays I could remember but one, short and regal with black and white curls, always quiet in a corner chair so she could observe her family, because she was content just to be in the same room with all of them.
She died in early February the year I only had one baby, and no one was thinking of Thanksgiving the day we gathered inside a church and cried our great loss until we had headaches and swollen eyes and a whole pile of crumpled tissues stuffed in the bottom of our purses.
No one thought of Thanksgiving when it came around either.
It just came and went, without my aunts and uncles or any of the people left who might have carried on this sacred tradition.
We just didn’t carry on.
That year I hosted a small family gathering at my house, where my brother and sister and mom and stepdad and husband and only one baby boy sat down at a table set for six, with a highchair hanging on the end.
It was the smallest family gathering we’d ever seen for Thanksgiving, because the one who held all the rest of us together was gone.
I didn’t know then that it would become the new standard for a family with a missing piece.
///
How much do we lose in this place of smaller family gatherings?
I don’t really know.
As much as I grieve my family’s loss of larger gatherings, I cannot separate myself from something else I have learned in my adult years, something I never had to know as a child.
In our world, there exist those with no family left and those who can’t physically travel to their family and those who have long been rejected by their family, and what about these on a day like this?
There are those who don’t eat half as well as we do on Thanksgiving, or any other day, and what about them?
How do we even celebrate family around the abundant spread of a table when there are those who are lost and hungry and alone?
Maybe the answer to those spaces left in our home by the ones who have gone waits right outside our doors, at the house just beside ours or the one behind the park or the street corner down the way, where the man selling newspapers works just another day of his life.
Maybe we become family for those who have none.
My table will be full for Thanksgiving this year, but there is room still for more. I want to find them. I want to know them. I want to bring them home, into the fold of light and love and laughter like I have known.
It’s Thanksgiving, and we will eat and we will reminisce and we will give thanks for all we have and the people we love and the whole last year’s beauty.
But that is not The End of Thanksgiving.
Because true Thanksgiving become thanks-living, and thanks-living means thanks-giving to the world, to all those who need what we have, be it food or presence or just an invitation.
So this Thanksgiving, I see the hollows and the spaces, and I thank God for them, because, even now, they are waiting to be filled.
Someone is waiting to be filled.
by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
(Photo by Helen Montoya Henrichs)
In just a few days some of my favorite people will gather around my living room table, and we will talk over turkey and heap a plate with mashed potatoes and gravy and pretend we’re trying to decide between apple or chocolate pie when we know we’ve already planned to take a slice of both.
Some of us will be missing this year because of in-law dinners and lives too many states away, but a small group will sit and celebrate the sacred tradition that is Thanksgiving.
We will start that meal with a prayer, like we always do, and the 4-year-old will grin into my face, because he’s just so excited his Nonny and Poppy are here; and the 5-year-old will try hard to close his eyes but won’t be able to help that roving gaze, because he’s always loved a food spread like this; and the 8-year-old will shift from foot to foot, because his daddy sometimes prays long.
And we will give thanks in our hearts for what has been in the year stretching between the last time we all met around a table and a turkey and two pans of green bean casserole.
Love and hope and awe and wonder meet us here.
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It’s hard to know when those first memories of Thanksgiving began.
There are flashes of days, down through the years, one at a great-uncle’s house with woods looming behind it and a long wooden swing hanging from the trees that shadowed his yard and pine needles thick like a spiky carpet on the ground.
There is a great-great grandmother’s house, all of us squeezed in the tiny square footage her husband built, where legend had it she slept with a gun under her pillow because she lived alone and the neighborhood had turned a little dangerous for an old woman and she wasn’t in the least afraid to use it, and I remember the way the kids would sit out on her cement porch and swing or drop letters through the little mail slot so they would fall in the middle of her living room, reminding the adults we were still waiting on that food-call.
There is a great-grandmother’s house, after the great-great and the great-uncle were gone, and that gathering looked and felt smaller because so many of the older ones had died, and others had drifted away with the dying, and it was only a handful of kids who went out front to play kickball while the adults and my Nana watched a game on her living room television, and all the kids missed the false teeth flying out when a referee made a bad call, but we heard the laughter of all those adults who saw it and never forgot it.
These early memories are raucous and full of children running in and out of houses, trying not to stick fingers in the pies, and I can still smell that turkey and the fresh bread and those vegetables we didn’t even know the names of.
I couldn’t explain it then, not in words, but I could feel the thanks that burst from the first bite of food, all the way to the last bite of pie, when we all felt like we might pop and surely wouldn’t eat again, ever, after this.
There was something simple and special and sacred about those shared days, because they meant family and freedom and future.
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Thanksgiving Day has lost some of its magic now.
Maybe it’s because a job demands work until the very day of thanks. Maybe it’s because kids go to school and homework still comes home and schedules still remain the same until Thursday rolls around.
Maybe it’s because of all who are missing.
When all those greats were alive we had so many families gathering around so many tables, and now, this year, we have two.
There are no more greats around for the little children, and those children’s parents are the ones hosting dinners now, and there aren’t even always aunts and uncles who join in the festivities anymore, because we all have our own lives and our own plans and our own families.
Gone are the days of great aunts and uncles all under the same roof for the same day breaking bread and eating their fill and trying not to notice how everyone looks older this year.
I feel a little sad about this. We used to pack a house on this traditional holiday, and now that holiday demands work and dangles big sales and asks families to cut short the one day a year when they might fall asleep on a couch after eating too much turkey and no one would mind their snoring.
I miss that magic.
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There is a Thanksgiving that stands out as scary and new and just a little disappointing.
I was nine years old, and we had just moved to Ohio because it was the only way my mom thought we would ever be a family again, since my dad worked in Ohio and Texas was a long way off.
She told us the news a month before summer ended and listened to us cry about leaving our friends, and then she packed us up and we moved into a two-story house in Mansfield, ten blocks from a low-income elementary school.
We didn’t have the money that year to go back home (Texas would always be home) and spend the holiday with my mom’s family, who held all my memories of Thanksgiving to date.
So we spent the day with my dad’s family.
My grandmother was a saintly woman. It wasn’t her fault that she and my grandfather were the only two I really knew in that group of thirty. It wasn’t her fault that I had never felt more like an outsider than I did that year. That day.
Cousins who had grown up together, whose names we didn’t even know and I still can’t remember, played hide and seek in Grandma’s travel trailer, and my brother and sister and I stayed out under the trees, raking leaves, because we didn’t know them and they didn’t know us, and raking leaves at least gave us something to do.
So we raked and we waited for that screen door to open and let us know it was time to eat, and we could finally blame our quiet on food.
When they called, we all trampled inside a house that smelled like cabbage.
I threw up after that Thanksgiving meal, and I never ate cabbage again.
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I wonder what my boys will remember of Thanksgiving, this holiday that is not so wild and noisy and crowded as it was in my girlhood because there is only them and a grandma and grandpa and, every other year, an aunt and uncle or two who bring a handful of cousins.
Will they remember these Thanksgiving days as thrilling, with a haze of laughter blurring them into gold?
Will they remember adults playing board games and talking until the sun goes down and the whole sky turns dark?
Will they remember how eagerly they waited to sit at the “adult” table, wondering every year if this one might be the year they move up past all the babies?
The spread at our Thanksgiving is nothing like it was for me as a kid, with rows and rows of homemade pies and sweet tea like syrup and a whole table full of steaming food in too-hot-to-touch bowls, but does it still look magical to my children?
Do they feel the people who are missing, all those family members who have come and long gone, or do they see a room-for-more house as full?
Do they notice the lost pieces like I do?
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Then there was the first Thanksgiving without my grandmother.
She had been there for all of the holidays I could remember but one, short and regal with black and white curls, always quiet in a corner chair so she could observe her family, because she was content just to be in the same room with all of them.
She died in early February the year I only had one baby, and no one was thinking of Thanksgiving the day we gathered inside a church and cried our great loss until we had headaches and swollen eyes and a whole pile of crumpled tissues stuffed in the bottom of our purses.
No one thought of Thanksgiving when it came around either.
It just came and went, without my aunts and uncles or any of the people left who might have carried on this sacred tradition.
We just didn’t carry on.
That year I hosted a small family gathering at my house, where my brother and sister and mom and stepdad and husband and only one baby boy sat down at a table set for six, with a highchair hanging on the end.
It was the smallest family gathering we’d ever seen for Thanksgiving, because the one who held all the rest of us together was gone.
I didn’t know then that it would become the new standard for a family with a missing piece.
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How much do we lose in this place of smaller family gatherings?
I don’t really know.
As much as I grieve my family’s loss of larger gatherings, I cannot separate myself from something else I have learned in my adult years, something I never had to know as a child.
In our world, there exist those with no family left and those who can’t physically travel to their family and those who have long been rejected by their family, and what about these on a day like this?
There are those who don’t eat half as well as we do on Thanksgiving, or any other day, and what about them?
How do we even celebrate family around the abundant spread of a table when there are those who are lost and hungry and alone?
Maybe the answer to those spaces left in our home by the ones who have gone waits right outside our doors, at the house just beside ours or the one behind the park or the street corner down the way, where the man selling newspapers works just another day of his life.
Maybe we become family for those who have none.
My table will be full for Thanksgiving this year, but there is room still for more. I want to find them. I want to know them. I want to bring them home, into the fold of light and love and laughter like I have known.
It’s Thanksgiving, and we will eat and we will reminisce and we will give thanks for all we have and the people we love and the whole last year’s beauty.
But that is not The End of Thanksgiving.
Because true Thanksgiving become thanks-living, and thanks-living means thanks-giving to the world, to all those who need what we have, be it food or presence or just an invitation.
So this Thanksgiving, I see the hollows and the spaces, and I thank God for them, because, even now, they are waiting to be filled.
Someone is waiting to be filled.
by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
I watch my boy from where I sit, his back curved just the littlest bit while his head hangs over the Star Wars book he’s reading, and I marvel at how his brow is missing the soft spot between eye and forehead, how his face has thinned out of the baby cheeks and chin, how his mouth moves in silent speaking while he is so lost in the world of a book.
My boy is no more a baby, but he will always be my baby.
In two days he will celebrate eight years since his birth day, that day when my body bore down and his body tore through, a day when boy became first son and girl-woman became Mama.
“I know how I was made, Mama,” he said last year on his day, when I set that birthday brownie-cupcake in front of him. “God took a piece of your heart and made me.”
He has a gift with words and truth and insight, this one, because he saw it exactly right.
All these babies are a piece of my heart walking and jumping and racing around outside my body, and it’s scary and risky and agonizing to let loose those heart strings so they can learn to walk on their own, but this is how we learn to really live.
The love between a mama and her boy is wide and deep and strong enough to knock us all flat.
What I have learned of love, what I have learned of grace and forgiveness and joy, what I have learned of life I could not have foretold that chilly night in November, four days before Thanksgiving that year.
I have never been the same.
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He slid into the world late, when the sky was pitch black, and it was a perfect, by-the-books birth, with a perfect, rosy-cheeked baby and a perfect love all the way from the beginning.
And then they released him to two young parents who didn’t know what to do with a seven-pound, fifteen-ounce baby except let him steal our hearts.
We laid him in a Peter Rabbit bassinet that first night, after reading him a bedtime story, and then his daddy and I found sleep to the sound of a new being breathing just beside our bed.
I woke before he did for that early, early morning feeding, and he was still sleeping soundly, but the darkness, all above his bassinet, was moving, swirling, like something lived in the dark, something sinister and sharp and full of a death that did not steal breath but something greater—life.
I picked up my baby boy and held him in my arms, and I prayed while he fed, and when he was done I held him and prayed some more, and when my arms got too tired to hold him anymore, I laid him in the bassinet, but I didn’t stop praying until the first shards of light reached right through my window, until that twirling dark lifted from the corners of the room, until the fingers that fought to reach an innocent baby’s form had completely disappeared.
It was my first all-night vigil for this boy whose name means Jehovah has heard.
It would not be my last.
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Just a few weeks ago, I tossed and turned and prayed and listened and tried hard to find my way out of a confusion too dark to see through.
My boy had spent three days in school suspension for choosing to act outside of who he is, and I was sick to my stomach and sick at heart, trying desperately to crawl my way toward understanding.
I tried to find the words that came so easily all those years ago, at my first all-night vigil, but the only words that would come sounded more like, Help. Please.
Over and over and over again.
He is too big to hold in my arms all night, but I held him in my heart.
It was all just weeks after announcing we were expecting boy number six, when all those people filled a comment box with those words, I guess you’re just really good at raising boys, but here was my firstborn, the boy who first stole my heart, proving them all wrong.
There was more he had to teach me here, this child who has always been strong-willed and incredibly creative and a wild hurricane of love.
Sometimes our parenting journey takes us right up against the places where it feels like we don’t know what we’re doing and it feels like we are not enough or we were never enough or we will never be enough and it feels like we are failing in a midnight where all the stars have gone out.
Sometimes we need to stall here and stay a while.
Because our children will show us the way back out.
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The day before Thanksgiving that year we raced him to a children’s ER, because he hadn’t produced a wet or dirty diaper in 12 hours.
Your milk will come in, my mother had told me the day we brought him home and I could not even pump an ounce and could not say for sure that my baby was eating anything at all.
I sat in the emergency room, holding my 4-day-old, watching the way he slept so peacefully even though my whole body shook with the knowing that he could have died from his dehydration.
They called us back and woke him with a needle, trying to find that tiny vein so they could hydrate him again. He cried and screamed and writhed on a table while they poked the bottom of his foot and then his arm and then another hand and then, after all the others slid out of their grasp, the largest vein in his forehead.
I watched my baby, hooked up to a hydration drip, and I noticed the way those glassy eyes stared at the nurse whose face hung over him, how he searched the room for his mama when he realized the face wasn’t the right one, and I cried and cried and could not stop crying.
My body had failed him already, four days in.
I had failed him already, four days in.
It would take all the days after for him to set me straight. I had not failed him, not really, because I was still his mama, and that was all he needed.
I loved him and he loved me and that was enough.
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Love would always be enough.
Even on the days when strong will met frustration. Even on the days we yelled and said those words we didn’t mean. Even on the days we walked bruised and bloodied and broken for all the mistakes we made.
Every mistake, every failure, every less-than-ideal moment was remaking me.
It was not just this boy who slid from a womb eight years ago. It was me, too.
A child, this child, and all his little brothers living inside my home have led me deeper into the way. They have drawn me closer to the Way.
So it is not just his birthday we will celebrate in two days. It is my birth-anew day, too.
As hard as this journey has been, the ways he has taken apart all our parenting philosophies and rearranged them completely, the times we have walked shaky and unsure off the ledge into a boy-world, I would not trade it for all the easy and predictable and certain in the world.
Sure, there have been days when he has raged and I have thrown my rage to meet his and we both bled through tears and words and wonderings, but I would not give away those days, those opportunities he has given me to practice asking forgiveness and limp toward a better vision for parenting, because they have taught me about humility and grace and freedom.
Sure I used to watch the 2-year-old nursery where all those kids sat on their designated seats while my boy climbed onto the one he’d already chosen before the teachers pointed out a different one, and I would wonder how the other kids could be so obedient and well-behaved and calm, but I would not wish a perfectly obedient, minds-all-the-time child in his place, because he has taught me acceptance and joy and great, deep-down belly laughter.
Sure, there would be days when he walked out the door and threw back those words, I’m going to run away, and I wanted to let him, but the truth is I would chase him down to the ends of the earth, because he has taught me how to love in all the hardest places, and I DON’T WANT TO STOP LEARNING.
The only time my boy was ever easy was when he was a baby, but I’m glad. What he has taught me in his challenge whispers truth about a mama’s strength, so much greater than she knows, and a mama’s hope, so much wider than she can see, and a mama’s great love, so much deeper than she could ever understand.
Thank God he is alive.
Thank God he is mine.
Happy birthday, my sweet.
by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
I started reading parenting books when my oldest was just a baby.
Maybe it’s because I didn’t really know what I was doing. Maybe I wanted to hear from people who knew children better than I did. Maybe I just needed a way to feel like I was improving my chances for raising a healthy human being.
Today, I average about two parenting books a month.
But there is one kind of book you will not see on my shelves: Christian parenting books.
Maybe it’s unfair to group them all in the same class, because, admittedly, there are a few I’ve read (out of many) that are actually good and had some valuable takeaways that I felt comfortable using in my own parenting journey (Give them Grace, by Elyse M. Fitzpatrick and Jessica Thompson and Say Goodbye to Whining, Complaining and Bad Attitudes…in You and Your Kids, by Scott Turansky are two that come to mind), but the majority of the ones I’ve picked up have one major piece that always rubs right up against my spirit.
When I read the words of those authors, about how if parents spare the rod we will spoil our children, the Spirit in me comes out swinging.
It’s not so much the idea of this “spare the rod, spoil the child” that is so controversial to me. It’s the philosophy built around it.
All those authors point to that verse in Proverbs: “Whoever spares the rod hates their children, but the one who loves their children is careful to discipline them” (Proverbs 13:24).
But then they don’t tell us the real meaning of discipline, just say that it’s hands or a belt or a real “rod.”
I signed on to this way of thinking for the first four years of my parenting journey, and then the Spirit gently whispered to my heart, This is not the way discipline has to be.
That whisper came at a breaking point with a 4-year-old who was strong-willed no matter how many times he met the “rod” they all told me he needed, and it made me think…
To read the rest of the post, visit Miller Time. (Guest posting over at Miller Time today. Finish the article and stick around. He has some great things to say!
