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!
by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
Photo by Helen Montoya Henrichs.
It’s been more than three years, but there are still flashes that remind me of that day—a song or a word or the way the light falls in a room just so.
Tonight it’s words that send me back to a bright-white room where a baby, my baby, died.
“You give and take away,” these are words that hold sorrow in their hands.
I know what it’s like to be given a treasure. I know what it’s like to have that treasure taken away.
I know what it’s like to stand at the end and wish it was The End.
I know what it’s like to die in the places no one can see.
And it doesn’t matter if she was 12 weeks in a womb or 12 years breathing the air of the world, losing a child all hurts the same.
///
It was a Friday. It was a routine doctor’s appointment on a sunny summer day. It was the “we made it safely” day according to all the pregnancy books.
There was no blood. There were no cramps. There were no signs that a baby had died wrapped tight in my warm.
There was only a blank screen where a heartbeat had been, where it was supposed to be now, today, because this was the safe day.
They sent me home and my husband drove me back so they could clean her from the parts of me that had not let her go in the three weeks she’d been dead, and then he wheeled me out of the same place I’d carried out three babies in my arms. Except this time someone else carried her out in a lab jar and those hallways turned ugly and the smooth ride hurt and the whole world went dark.
My husband held me all night, and I woke with a pillow soaked with tears I don’t even remember crying, because I thought I was sleeping, and all her brothers were knocking on the door because life doesn’t care about a whole world ending. It just goes on.
It was a Saturday when he called the pastor of the church where we were serving as worship leaders and told him what had happened, that he’d need a Sunday or two off so our family could process through this loss.
But there was no bereavement leave for a death like this one, because it was just a miscarriage.
It was just a miscarriage, and he should be able to stand on stage two days after her death and sing to a God who gives and takes away, like this God hadn’t just given a daughter and then taken her right back away.
So my husband went. I could not climb from my bed, so I stayed, wrapped up to my chin in a blanket that smelled like him. I cried. I bled. I died a little more in that dark room without him.
Without her.
///
They say we should get over it. They say it’s only a miscarriage. They say it should be easier, because at least we didn’t carry her for nine months and then watch her die, and at least we didn’t raise her for nine years and then watch her take that last shudder of a breath, and at least we never even had to meet her and look in a face that would be stuck in our memories forever.
Except we do meet her. In dreams. In unguarded moments when we see her squished on the couch between her brothers, reading. In the family picture taken just after twins, who would have been her little brothers, were born.
She is there, with her fiery brown hair and her summer evening eyes.
They, the ones who have never held this pain in the corner of their heart, don’t understand how a year later we’ll be saying her name and we’ll get all choked up, still. How two years later we’ll listen to someone else’s miscarriage story and feel that wound open a little. How three years later we’ll hear a song that reminds us of the words we raged from the cold concrete floor when we actually had strength enough to lift our head and shout, how the hearing-again knocks our legs unsteady.
How all these babies, the ones who came before and the ones who have come after, are precious and beautiful and wanted, of course they are, but we still wish we hadn’t lost the one.
Losing a baby in the beginning still feels like the end, because it would have been party of six or it would have been three boys and a girl or it would have been a family that looks much different if she were here.
They don’t understand that we can’t be rushed through this kind of grief, because it is hard and it is still awful and it is still ugly, ugly, ugly, no matter how many children we have or how much time has passed or how strong we seem to a world that expects only strong.
This is a piece of jagged glass we will carry all our days, and we never know when it will pierce us in our tender places again.
We don’t need someone to grieve with us. We don’t need someone to hurry us. We don’t need someone to tell us God will never give us more than we can handle or that all things work together for our good or that He promises us a hope and a future.
We just need someone to understand this sorrow, the way it turns a world inside out and pulls out all the seams and unravels everything we’ve known.
It is a sorrow like any other.
///
There were some who understood.
Four days after that losing one, my husband and I drove out of town for a youth camp. We’d had the worship-leading job booked for a year, and we knew it was too late to find a replacement, and so we sent our boys with family and we drove all that way in silence, because I could not find the words to speak.
He led worship alone that first night, and I hid in the shadows, watching the moon and letting those words sit on my shoulders, because I could not be alone in the dark with all the blood that shouldn’t be there, and standing outside, a football field away from students and the man I loved worshiping a God I could not feel in this losing-place, made me feel less alone.
Two women found me huddled beneath a tree. One of them had been through more than just my one loss, and she gripped my hands and prayed over me, there under the boughs of an oak tree that keeps all the secrets of the world.
She ended the prayer and then she wrapped me in her arms and she whispered some words, and she didn’t care that my cheeks were black with the tears that took my makeup all the way down to my chin, and she did not care that my nose was wet with sadness, and she did not care that I was angry and unsteady and weak on my feet.
She understood that it would never really go away, that pain. But I would learn to carry on.
///
The minute I took that pregnancy test, I called my husband.
Because we had decided now was as good a time as any to expand our child count from three to four, and I knew he’d be just as excited as I was about what the pregnancy test had to tell us.
And he was.
After the first appointment, where her heartbeat showed strong on a screen, we let ourselves settle into the reality of four little ones instead of just three.
We talked about where she would sit in our car and where she would sleep and what kind of room she would have. I picked out the colors I would use to crochet her blanket. I marked the material I’d use for her bibs and dresses and bows.
She was a person, already living in our home.
This is how it happens. We imagine who they will be and how they will fit into our families and whose nose and eyes and hair they will wear.
Before we even meet them, we have already planned their details and we have already seen their faces and we have already embraced them, alive.
And then they are gone, and they will never sit in our car or sleep in that bed or look at the walls of that room we decorated with them in mind.
There is a hole where they used to be, and even though our uterus will shrink again and the blood will taper off and our body will forget it ever carried new life within, we will never forget.
We fly right off the edge in the losing, and it takes time to climb back up.
///
We stood in line to check out, one twin seat balanced in front of the basket, the other inside it, and the woman behind me said, “Such beautiful boys. No girls for you?”
It’s an innocent question that has come before when people see the five boys following me through a store. I turned to answer with my usual, “No. Boys sure are great, though,” but my oldest, 5 years old at the time, beat me to it.
“We have a sister,” he said. “She’s in heaven with Jesus.”
The woman was taken aback by his candor, as we often are with children, and said nothing else, just checked the lines around us to see if there was another shorter than ours. To her credit, she stayed. And my boy told her how his sister’s name is Amarise, which means given by God, and how she died in Mama’s belly and how we never got to meet her but we will someday.
Sometimes it’s just easier to answer that girl question with a simple no, but I wonder if we are missing a piece of healing here. Her brothers know the truth, that she was and is and will always be their baby sister.
She was real. She is real. She is my daughter who died.
Her living was real. Her dying was real. Her memory is real.
I hope we never forget.
///
We don’t talk about it much, we who have been through the horror of losing a baby we never met, but there are many of us out here, spinning to the floor or trying to lift our heads or finally walking out the other side of that crack in a world.
We don’t talk about it because it hurts. We don’t talk about it because we’re afraid that maybe we did something wrong. We don’t talk about it because we should be okay by now, shouldn’t we?
I want to tell you that it’s OK to feel sad and crushed and sick, sick, sick that your baby is the one who slipped away when there are all those others who aren’t wanted or needed or loved.
It’s OK to grieve.
I want to tell you that you can take as long as you need to get over this loss, even when “they’re” telling you you’re taking too long and it was only a miscarriage and at least it didn’t happen later when it would have been harder to say goodbye.
There is no harder goodbye. There is only hard goodbye.
So grieve. Rage. Cry until your stomach hurts and your eyes feel like they’re burning away and you can’t even make another sound.
Keep that sonogram picture, the one that proves she had a heartbeat once upon a time, the one that says she lived. You’ll be glad you did.
It’s hard to see from these days and weeks and months after losing that there is another side to this dark, that one day you will mend this crack in your world and you will run your fingers over that scar and feel stronger and more alive because of it.
You will.
But for now, let the world crack right open. Let the light go out. Fumble around in the darkness until your eyes adjust and you see the flicker of a candle glowing in a corner, waiting for another day.
And then, only when you feel ready, crawl toward that day, because it is still waiting. Let love walk you right back out.
Stay down as long as you need, as long as it takes. And then lift that weary head, so much stronger than you knew, and overcome.
The tiny ones we’ve lost are remembered here, too, in the overcoming.
by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
I almost didn’t share it. I almost didn’t hit publish. I almost let that finished piece, nearly too painful to write and way too painful to send out into a might-not-be-so-kind world, sit in a computer folder marked for my heart and my eyes only.
Because it was hard. Because it was personal. Because it was my son and my family and my self bleeding onto a page I could not bear to show.
What would they think of me, naked like this? What would they think of him? What would they think of our family?
But something told me I wasn’t the only one. Something told me there were more out there who needed to hear the words I needed to write in the middle of a too-emotional week. Something told me healing lived in the baring.
So I did it. I hit publish and then I closed my eyes and my computer and walked away from a piece I couldn’t watch crash and burn in the hands of a world that might or might not understand.
All those hours later, I finally opened my computer again, and there were notifications and words and thank yous, people saying they’d had my boy 21 years ago (and look at his amazing life now), people saying they just couldn’t communicate wha tit means to know they’re not alone, people saying the best words of all: You have gifted some healing to me today.
I couldn’t have known, when I sobbed all through the writing of that piece so words blurred and twisted and floated and almost missed the page entirely, what such a baring might do, out in the world. I couldn’t have known that something so incredibly personal and specific and tender would have touched the hearts of so many.
I only knew I had to write what was hidden behind my closed closet door.
In all these days after, I find myself wondering what might have happened if I had chosen not to share, if I had listened to that fear-voice saying it was too personal and it wouldn’t help a piece of the world at all and I should just pretend that I, a woman who runs a parenting blog, have all the perfectly behaved children, of course I do.
“What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open,” says Muriel Rukeyeser.
I hit publish, and the whole world split open. And now I am stepping through its black hole.
///
When I was 11 years old, I started a new school that was really an old one, after two years away. The first day of school I had it easy, because there were friends I remembered who remembered me. Except I was a different me. I’d come back without a dad.
But I didn’t talk about that. I just pretended we hadn’t come back to small-town living to count all our losses.
Just before school started that year my mom bought the first house she could find that came with a mortgage she could afford on her own. Its porch was more holes than wood, and its windows were more rot than pane, and its floors held a rusty orange carpet that didn’t match any of the shabby furniture we’d been given by family.
It was a house that screamed poor.
I spent years too embarrassed to bring friends home, because I didn’t want them to know what we really were, kids who went to bed hungry and didn’t have enough clothes to make it through a week and shivered through the night in our beds because of the way wind could reach right through closed doors and windows and shake us in our sleep.
In seventh grade I had a dance party out on a blacktop just beside our house, and I prayed hard that no one would have to go to the bathroom during the two hours we’d be out there, because I didn’t want anyone going inside and feeling that soft spot on the bathroom floor that might give out any minute and send a leg crashing beneath a falling-apart house.
I hid our truth because I thought I could. It wasn’t hard. I just never let those friends get close enough to come inside my home.
///
It’s not the way I want to live my life.
I want to open the door of home and let them all peer inside, and I want them to see themselves in my word-pictures, and I want them to hear their own stories in my truth.
I want them to know they are not walking and limping and barely-crawling down this confusing and dangerous warrior path toward overcoming alone.
The only way to overcome is to be known.
I knew that some would look into this tender room of my house and they would judge and they would attack and they would try to solve the problem, because this is what they do for themselves, too, but I let their comments roll off and down and away.
I don’t write for the haters. They like to come around, of course they do, because what would a world be without those who judge without knowing or analyze without fully hearing or give that advice we don’t really need?
But if I’m telling the whole truth, I don’t split open for the ones who will tear me further apart. I don’t bleed vulnerability for the ones who can’t relate, who don’t see themselves in the broken places of the world, who refuse to believe they have ever locked any skeletons in a closet.
I write for me and for all those who are still loved and still accepted and still celebrated for who they are, no matter what their past closet or present closet or future closets may look like.
I open the door and I beckon them through and we sit and stare at all the bones we never thought we’d have the courage to share.
There is a mystery here we might never understand: A closet isn’t so scary once we swing it open and let vulnerability light its dark.
///
A best friend betrayal, years ago, locked all my closets tight.
We were never apart those days of our early college years. We prayed together. We cried together. We planned our weddings together, marking the pages of bridal magazines and imagining those elegant dresses and naming each other maid or matron of honor, whoever made it there first.
We were known, down to the deepest parts>
And then something went terribly wrong.
She took all my secrets and twisted them in her hands and spread them into a world that did not know anything but what the first one to speak said, and the first one to speak was her.
I fell off the wall, hard, and I cracked into a hundred thousand pieces, and it was the first time I had ever split open my life voluntarily for any person, and just look what she had done.
I felt destroyed.
And then I felt angry.
And anger turned to resolve.
I would never, ever, ever let anyone else that far in.
Never.
///
There have been potential friends in the years since that best friend betrayal, and there have been tries to do better, to bare myself more, to open this locked door of my house, but fear is never far.
They won’t understand, it says.
Remember what happened last time, it says.
Don’t let them see how messed up you are, it says.
And so they ask a question, and I answer with a happy, Just fine, and I pretend my life and everything in it is easy and perfect and just blissfully fine at all hours of every day.
Except I’ll be in a conversation with someone and find myself blinking away tears because of something they said that reminds me of something my heart has hidden away and I want to dig it from its hiding and throw it out into the world, but I excuse myself, instead, with a hasty, Sorry. Don’t know what’s wrong with me.
We are created to share. We are created to be known. We are created to open wide for the people in our lives so they see all the good and all the bad, too.
Because we all have good and we all have bad.
There will always be those who don’t understand the stories we tell, about the depression we’re living with and the suicide we watched steal the ones we love and a baby who was not exactly what we expected.
But there will always be others who do, and if I can be a piece of healing for the black holes, the locked-tight closets, of this world, I want to be.
It may mean that I have to slide out of the heavy-handed grip of what others think, and it may mean I have to rub away that bruise of judgment more than I’d like (because it will always come), and it may mean I have to turn my back, for now, to the ones who only know how to condemn and criticize and fix a gray problem with a black-and-white, one-size-fits-all solution.
“The only way to know the truth is to live through its casing of lies,” Mark Nepo says.
Its casing of lies looks like a cold, dark closet. It keeps us hidden. It keeps us “safe.” But it keeps us alone, too.
///
Two weeks ago, I sat in an intercessory prayer session with a good friend.
It was for me. I was falling apart, because there was a job that has an end date and no begin-again one, and there was another boy on the way, and there was a first boy whose behavior was writing a story I didn’t want it to write.
My partner prayed and I hunched on a couch, crying, and it didn’t take long for that spirit of rejection to show itself, zipped up tight like a layered winter coat binding generations of parents and grandparents and greats. Binding me.
We prayed its unzipping.
Three times during that two-hour prayer to peel away that rejection and reach toward acceptance and hope and love, I heard the words, Be brave.
No, I wanted to say. I can’t.
Because I knew what brave meant for me, and I knew what it would do to me, and I knew I wasn’t this.
But she heard it, too, and she scrawled the words on a white computer page, along with all those others we heard, and I have that love-letter tucked in my purse for all the moments I forget, when I want to close my mouth instead of tell the truth and I want to close my closet doors instead of open them wide and I want to close my computer instead of share my hard stories.
I re-read those words often.
///
Be vulnerable. Be transparent. Be known. This is what brave looks like.
I am limping into brave, and it is not easy.
It takes courage to tell the story of who we are with our whole hearts. It takes courage to let go of who we think we should be. It takes courage to walk into a world naked and unarmed and unashamed.
Sometimes I don’t have what it takes to knock those protection-walls down. Sometimes I don’t have what it takes to open the door. Sometimes I don’t have what it takes to shine light on all the shadows and dust and secret places in the corners of my heart.
But I have to do it anyway.
Because I know that we are all as unique as the stars in the sky, but we are all the same, too, in our deepest parts. We may not have the same details, because you might be short and I am tall, and you might have one kid and I have five, going on six, and you might carry the rejection of divorce or abuse or homosexuality and I carry the rejection of abandonment and perfection and skinny equals beautiful.
“When I look deeply enough into you, I find me, and when you dare to hear my fear in the recess of your heart, you recognize it as your secret that you thought no one else knew,” says Mark Nepo.
The stories that make a difference in our world are not the ones that point and judge and reprimand. The stories that make a difference are the secrets of our lives.
They’re the stories about a marriage that doesn’t feel quite as easy as it was in the beginning, but we are choosing to keep on keeping on, or we are choosing to let it go. They’re the stories about an anxiety disorder we were ashamed to admit we had. They’re the stories about a postpartum depression so thick we thought we might die.
It’s easy to pretend in a world of social media and too-busy-to-answer-the-how-are-you-question-honestly lives that we don’t all carry a cross, that we don’t all bear the scars of an imperfect life, that we don’t all have wounds that are bleeding through their bandages.
If all we ever do is pretend we don’t carry a cross, we miss the opportunity to help others carry theirs. Because even though our crosses all look different, there are pieces that look the same, and if that same piece is spread to the backs of two or three or five hundred people, it’s a much more bearable load.
So I’ll keep sharing. For me. For you.
For a world that needs splitting wide open.
This is how we begin to heal all the broken places.
by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
We walk into the school, turning the corner down toward his classroom, and I can feel the tension and sadness pulsing through his hand in mine, and when I turn to him for this morning goodbye, his pupils are so big his eyes look nearly black.
By this time next week, my boy will be in a new classroom, with a new teacher, with new anxieties biting his heels.
Today he will walk into his old classroom, after three days in school suspension for a mistake he made that was sorely misinterpreted, and he will sit at his old desk and he will look around at those old classmates he’s shared a room with for two years, and he will know that it is his last day here, with a teacher he loved but who no longer has the patience and stamina to handle his emotional outbursts.
This morning I can’t even make it all the way to his door because of the emotions clogging my throat, pulling tears from their unending reservoir down my cheeks, so I stop, two rooms away, and the only person I see in that hallway is my son, trying to breathe, trying to be brave, trying to overcome all this rejection and misunderstanding and a label that sticks hard to his 7-year-old back.
I try not to let him see my tears, brushing them away quickly like I did this morning, when he showed me the note he’d written to his teacher with that picture of her in a classroom and him sitting at a desk, crying, and a thick wall between them, and those few words, I will miss you. Love, Jadon.
But he feels their water trail when I bend over him and press my face to his and whisper the same words I’ve whispered in his ear every morning before dropping him off: Remember who you are. Honor your teacher and your classmates. Love them and love yourself well.
And then I watch him walk through that classroom door for the last time, not sure how this day will go after the last sixteen.
Will he remember who he is, or will he remember who they say he is?
Because they are two very different things.
///
Four days ago I sat in an office with the school principal and her assistant principal to talk about the latest of his conduct violations, misinterpreted from my perspective, but it joins 15 other conduct violations—for tearing up his already-graded homework when he felt angry and signing his name as “stupid jerk” when he felt sad and collapsing into a crying pile on the floor when he didn’t get to use the magnifying glass for his science project like everyone else in the class did—in the last 20 days, and they are telling me something must be done because his classmates are afraid of him and his teacher doesn’t think she’s a good fit for him anymore and all of it is against the school’s code of conduct.
This boy has always been our impulsive child, and his daddy and I have worked diligently over the years to give him the tools and space and practice to handle his big emotions, but there are days and whole weeks sometimes when those big emotions grip him and refuse to let go.
I try to tell them what we’ve learned from each of the write-up incidents, at least the four of them we’ve seen, because the story, from his perspective, tells much more than those words written on a discipline violation page, but how do you argue with a school administration that sees only the bad behavior and not the boy behind them?
This last incident, the worst of them, happened when it was time to leave, and he was finishing up an art project, trying to cut out his picture before he needed to leave, and the substitute tried to grab the scissors away, but he beat her to it, throwing them into a corner of the room where no classmates were because they were all packing up their backpacks like they were supposed to be doing, and then he ran out of the room to escape the fire of his own anger.
But the sub, who had been “warned confidentially” about him, wrote up that conduct report and never waited to hear why he might have felt the way he did or never stopped to consider what emotion might have caused a display like that one.
And it’s not okay, of course it’s not, to throw scissors and run from a room where a teacher is charged with keeping students safe, but sometimes a word or two about how hard it is to put down an art project when there are no minutes left for working, instead of grabbing scissors from the hands of a focused boy, might prevent it all in the first place.
Maybe not, but sometimes it’s worth a few extra minutes to try.
Those administrators, in the meeting, said they wanted him to stay in school suspension for three days for this latest incident, so he’ll “learn his lesson this time.” And I can’t help but wonder what this lesson is that we’re trying to teach, because here is a boy, 7 years old, and at the depths of his heart, he doesn’t want to mishandle his emotions or scare people or spend a whole day or three of them in isolation from all the people he loves.
He slumped against me when I broke the news that he would not be returning to class just yet, because he wasn’t expecting it, because, in the mind of this boy who doesn’t watch television and doesn’t play video games and doesn’t have exposure to violent movies, throwing a pair of dull-tip scissors into an empty corner of a classroom wasn’t an intentionally threatening gesture.
I read the despair in his eyes that day, and I could feel the give-up, waiting just around the corner.
How does a kid who’s led to believe he’s the “bad kid” ever become anything but a bad kid?
That’s the question that stood between me and those administrators that day.
So I pulled him tight against me, and I held him through those words he sobbed, I just don’t understand why they don’t believe me. I didn’t do what the substitute says I did, and then I held him through all the minutes after, when those emotions shook his body quiet.
I told him that sometimes what we intend to say with our words and actions and what others interpret are two very different things, and we have to be careful about how we come across, but I don’t even know if he understand this communication nuance, because he’s just a boy.
And then the bell rang and it was time to leave, and his little brothers were still waiting patiently for the walk home.
But before I left, I whispered words I hoped would stay with him all day in the quiet of an isolation room: You are loved deeply. Remember who you are. You are not these mistakes, ever.
It hurt my heart to leave him in that room all by himself, but I did.
I cried all the way home.
///
Once upon a time, when I was a senior in college, I substituted for a “troubled” school district near my university.
Every time I took a job, there were students the teacher warned me about. And all day long I would wait for the trouble.
And it would always come.
I was quick to write up those conduct violation sheets, because I had been warned it would probably happen, and I’d been shown where they were kept, and I’d been directed how exactly to fill them out.
I know now that those problems probably came because the kids knew I was watching, since someone was always watching. They knew I was waiting, because someone was always waiting. They knew that whatever they did they wouldn’t be able to win—my word against theirs, no matter their intent.
When you believe a kid is a problem, all you’ll ever see is the problem.
I wish I could go back to all those kids I sent to the office with a condemnation sheet in their hands. I wish I could tell them, You are more than this problem they warned me about. I believe you can do better. And I am not waiting for you to fail. I am waiting for an opportunity to help you succeed.
I feel sad that my young son is that kid, but being on this side of it helps me to see that they weren’t just “problem kids” like we teachers were trained to believe. They are not problems to be solved. They are little precious people crying out for help because of emotions too big for them to understand and communicate.
That doesn’t make what they do to communicate their plea for help right. But it does mean that we have to become a child and see from their perspective and always assume good intent, because sometimes what we see a child doing and what they think they’re doing are two very different things.
I wish I had known it back then. I wonder how it might have changed the lives of those kids.
///
My boy has been through a lot in his short 7-year life.
There was a sister-death when he was 4. There was the twin pregnancy, a few months later, when a mama was in and out of hospitals and doctor offices because we thought we’d lost them and we hadn’t and we thought we’d lost them again and we hadn’t, and then they were finally here, and they spent 21 days in the neonatal intensive care unit, and a mama and daddy left boys with a rotating babysitter every night so we could spend two hours with the tiny babies who needed us in that short window of time and still be home for the three older boys who needed us in the larger chunks of a day.
And then those twins came home, and we don’t even remember that whole first year because twins were so hard and we had no help and there was a mama and a daddy, nearly going crazy for all the needs and chaos in a home.
In the middle of that year he started school, this brand new environment not so different from home in terms of chaos and noise and bodies, except there were 24 other students a boy could get lost behind, and the only thing he knew to do to get noticed was to act out.
His actions said what he could not say: Help me. Help me process what I’m feeling. Help me feel understood. Help me know what to do with these overwhelming emotions.
And no one in those classes would listen, because they were there to learn, not to heal, and a boy, 5 years old, built up that armor so thick nothing could penetrate it.
It has brought us here, where it’s starting to crack and a boy doesn’t know how to deal with those pieces he’s hidden for so long that are leaking out faster than he can patch the hole.
This is the reality that isn’t shown on a conduct violation sheet.
When I started my parenting journey, I never thought I would be the parent of a child who had trouble in school, a child who is brilliant beyond his age and getting all the right grades, a child who is a minefield of emotions.
I probably should have.
Because I was a kid who preferred a room of five or six to a room of 24. I was a teenager who preferred staying home to read Wuthering Heights and Pride and Prejudice and Dr. Zhivago out back in the hammock to going out with friends. I am still the woman who waits in the school pickup line with my heart pounding, hoping no one will look me in the eye, because then I might have to talk, and I hate small talk.
I often wonder how I, a big emotion, highly sensitive introvert, would have fared in today’s classroom of pods and constant required group activity and no real space of my own.
It’s no wonder my boy, walking around with a fever of frustration, wondering where he really belongs, over-stimulated on an hourly basis, is crying so loudly for help.
And when a child cries for help, we must listen first and “fix” after.
Sometimes there are ways to bully a boy that have nothing to do with fists and words and threats that scare him into cooperation. Sometimes there are lonely lunch tables and sitting out the 15 minutes of recess he needs and isolating him in an office for three days.
Sometimes bullying can look like kids tattling five times a day on the one boy they’ve learned will always get in trouble, the one teachers will always believe did something wrong.
Sometimes bullying can look like writing up a boy 16 times, making him feel like maybe he might have been born a bad kid.
No kid is born a bad kid.
And if all we’re doing is writing up a kid for a behavior violation, and we’re not doing the work to find out why it happened, we all lose.
///
Just last night my boy sat in his bed while his daddy and I tucked him in. It was there we told him he’d be changing classrooms.
His first words were, What if I’m sent to the office again?
And then he cried and begged not to go to school anymore, and he is 7 years old, for God’s sake.
He is 7 years old, and in his mind, everything he does anymore means he’ll get told on by another student. Every action he chooses is the wrong one. Everything about him is a problem.
And how does a parent speak truth into a heart that believes he’s a problem, an inconvenience, a “bad kid” who will never learn to control his impulses, because this is what all those discipline write-ups in a 20 day history tell him, and this is what a teacher not wanting him anymore tells him, and this is what an in-school suspension sentence tells him.
How do you convince a child he is loved, that he is good, that he is more than his 7-year-old mistakes, when those conduct violation sheets tell him a different story?
The question follows me into sleep.
And there is a dream, like there has often been on nights I needed to know something—when my brother would be in a car accident and I saw that overturned vehicle in a dream before it happened, when he might have gone on a deep-sea fishing boat but I dreamed of waves too high and dangerous and begged him not to go, when I saw our third son lying in a baby swing with his head wrapped in a bandage weeks before that head injury happened in a church nursery.
This one is no less clear.
In it, we were walking down his school hallway, and suddenly, I somehow had his new baby brother, Asher, in my arms. He was minutes old. I sat down with my oldest at the door of his classroom, and my boy was very gentle and sweet. He leaned down to kiss Asher and said his brother’s name once.
Then he sat back against the brick wall, and his face got red, and his eyes filled with pain and tears, and he said his newest brother’s name again. “Asher,” he said, except this time his voice held sadness and all the despair of his world. I knew what to do in my dream. I put Asher down in the middle of the hallway, and I took my biggest one in my arms instead. I held him for as long as he sobbed, which was a long, long time.
I woke to an answer that felt clear and awful, all at the same time.
My son has lost his significance in his family at home and his “family” at school, and he is asking for help the only way he knows how.
The last three years of his life he has only ever known one brother after another encroaching on his world, and now there will be another.
Who is he in the six of them? Who is he in the 24 others at school? When will someone listen to hear him? When will someone care enough about his emotional state to help?
Behind all those discipline write-ups, beneath all those words scrawled on a behavior violation page, this is the story told.
This is the armor that has begun to crack, because a 7-year-old can only self-repair for so long.
So we are peeling the rest of that armor away. We are rolling away the stone from this grave that sits in the corner of a little boy’s heart. We are fighting, in all the ways we can, for a child who is significant and beautiful and precious, no matter the mistakes he has made in the last 20 days.
We are unwrapping the grave clothes. We are whispering truth. We are writing his name on the tablet of his heart: Gift.
Because this is who he is, even if a school system has flagged him as something else entirely. Still we hold him as a gift.
And there is Another who holds him and fights for him, too. There is Another who will speak his true name and burn up that false one stamped on his back by a world that doesn’t understand.
There is Another who promised victory.
And so we wait and hope and love in all the spaces we can.
by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
We walk into the school, turning the corner down toward his classroom, and I can feel the tension and sadness pulsing through his hand in mine, and when I turn to him for this morning goodbye, his pupils are so big his eyes look nearly black.
By this time next week, my boy will be in a new classroom, with a new teacher, with new anxieties biting his heels.
Today he will walk into his old classroom, after three days in school suspension for a mistake he made that was sorely misinterpreted, and he will sit at his old desk and he will look around at those old classmates he’s shared a room with for two years, and he will know that it is his last day here, with a teacher he loved but who no longer has the patience and stamina to handle his emotional outbursts.
This morning I can’t even make it all the way to his door because of the emotions clogging my throat, pulling tears from their unending reservoir down my cheeks, so I stop, two rooms away, and the only person I see in that hallway is my son, trying to breathe, trying to be brave, trying to overcome all this rejection and misunderstanding and a label that sticks hard to his 7-year-old back.
I try not to let him see my tears, brushing them away quickly like I did this morning, when he showed me the note he’d written to his teacher with that picture of her in a classroom and him sitting at a desk, crying, and a thick wall between them, and those few words, I will miss you. Love, Jadon.
But he feels their water trail when I bend over him and press my face to his and whisper the same words I’ve whispered in his ear every morning before dropping him off: Remember who you are. Honor your teacher and your classmates. Love them and love yourself well.
And then I watch him walk through that classroom door for the last time, not sure how this day will go after the last sixteen.
Will he remember who he is, or will he remember who they say he is?
Because they are two very different things.
///
Four days ago I sat in an office with the school principal and her assistant principal to talk about the latest of his conduct violations, misinterpreted from my perspective, but it joins 15 other conduct violations—for tearing up his already-graded homework when he felt angry and signing his name as “stupid jerk” when he felt sad and collapsing into a crying pile on the floor when he didn’t get to use the magnifying glass for his science project like everyone else in the class did—in the last 20 days, and they are telling me something must be done because his classmates are afraid of him and his teacher doesn’t think she’s a good fit for him anymore and all of it is against the school’s code of conduct.
This boy has always been our impulsive child, and his daddy and I have worked diligently over the years to give him the tools and space and practice to handle his big emotions, but there are days and whole weeks sometimes when those big emotions grip him and refuse to let go.
I try to tell them what we’ve learned from each of the write-up incidents, at least the four of them we’ve seen, because the story, from his perspective, tells much more than those words written on a discipline violation page, but how do you argue with a school administration that sees only the bad behavior and not the boy behind them?
This last incident, the worst of them, happened when it was time to leave, and he was finishing up an art project, trying to cut out his picture before he needed to leave, and the substitute tried to grab the scissors away, but he beat her to it, throwing them into a corner of the room where no classmates were because they were all packing up their backpacks like they were supposed to be doing, and then he ran out of the room to escape the fire of his own anger.
But the sub, who had been “warned confidentially” about him, wrote up that conduct report and never waited to hear why he might have felt the way he did or never stopped to consider what emotion might have caused a display like that one.
And it’s not okay, of course it’s not, to throw scissors and run from a room where a teacher is charged with keeping students safe, but sometimes a word or two about how hard it is to put down an art project when there are no minutes left for working, instead of grabbing scissors from the hands of a focused boy, might prevent it all in the first place.
Maybe not, but sometimes it’s worth a few extra minutes to try.
Those administrators, in the meeting, said they wanted him to stay in school suspension for three days for this latest incident, so he’ll “learn his lesson this time.” And I can’t help but wonder what this lesson is that we’re trying to teach, because here is a boy, 7 years old, and at the depths of his heart, he doesn’t want to mishandle his emotions or scare people or spend a whole day or three of them in isolation from all the people he loves.
He slumped against me when I broke the news that he would not be returning to class just yet, because he wasn’t expecting it, because, in the mind of this boy who doesn’t watch television and doesn’t play video games and doesn’t have exposure to violent movies, throwing a pair of dull-tip scissors into an empty corner of a classroom wasn’t an intentionally threatening gesture.
I read the despair in his eyes that day, and I could feel the give-up, waiting just around the corner.
How does a kid who’s led to believe he’s the “bad kid” ever become anything but a bad kid?
That’s the question that stood between me and those administrators that day.
So I pulled him tight against me, and I held him through those words he sobbed, I just don’t understand why they don’t believe me. I didn’t do what the substitute says I did, and then I held him through all the minutes after, when those emotions shook his body quiet.
I told him that sometimes what we intend to say with our words and actions and what others interpret are two very different things, and we have to be careful about how we come across, but I don’t even know if he understand this communication nuance, because he’s just a boy.
And then the bell rang and it was time to leave, and his little brothers were still waiting patiently for the walk home.
But before I left, I whispered words I hoped would stay with him all day in the quiet of an isolation room: You are loved deeply. Remember who you are. You are not these mistakes, ever.
It hurt my heart to leave him in that room all by himself, but I did.
I cried all the way home.
///
Once upon a time, when I was a senior in college, I substituted for a “troubled” school district near my university.
Every time I took a job, there were students the teacher warned me about. And all day long I would wait for the trouble.
And it would always come.
I was quick to write up those conduct violation sheets, because I had been warned it would probably happen, and I’d been shown where they were kept, and I’d been directed how exactly to fill them out.
I know now that those problems probably came because the kids knew I was watching, since someone was always watching. They knew I was waiting, because someone was always waiting. They knew that whatever they did they wouldn’t be able to win—my word against theirs, no matter their intent.
When you believe a kid is a problem, all you’ll ever see is the problem.
I wish I could go back to all those kids I sent to the office with a condemnation sheet in their hands. I wish I could tell them, You are more than this problem they warned me about. I believe you can do better. And I am not waiting for you to fail. I am waiting for an opportunity to help you succeed.
I feel sad that my young son is that kid, but being on this side of it helps me to see that they weren’t just “problem kids” like we teachers were trained to believe. They are not problems to be solved. They are little precious people crying out for help because of emotions too big for them to understand and communicate.
That doesn’t make what they do to communicate their plea for help right. But it does mean that we have to become a child and see from their perspective and always assume good intent, because sometimes what we see a child doing and what they think they’re doing are two very different things.
I wish I had known it back then. I wonder how it might have changed the lives of those kids.
///
My boy has been through a lot in his short 7-year life.
There was a sister-death when he was 4. There was the twin pregnancy, a few months later, when a mama was in and out of hospitals and doctor offices because we thought we’d lost them and we hadn’t and we thought we’d lost them again and we hadn’t, and then they were finally here, and they spent 21 days in the neonatal intensive care unit, and a mama and daddy left boys with a rotating babysitter every night so we could spend two hours with the tiny babies who needed us in that short window of time and still be home for the three older boys who needed us in the larger chunks of a day.
And then those twins came home, and we don’t even remember that whole first year because twins were so hard and we had no help and there was a mama and a daddy, nearly going crazy for all the needs and chaos in a home.
In the middle of that year he started school, this brand new environment not so different from home in terms of chaos and noise and bodies, except there were 24 other students a boy could get lost behind, and the only thing he knew to do to get noticed was to act out.
His actions said what he could not say: Help me. Help me process what I’m feeling. Help me feel understood. Help me know what to do with these overwhelming emotions.
And no one in those classes would listen, because they were there to learn, not to heal, and a boy, 5 years old, built up that armor so thick nothing could penetrate it.
It has brought us here, where it’s starting to crack and a boy doesn’t know how to deal with those pieces he’s hidden for so long that are leaking out faster than he can patch the hole.
This is the reality that isn’t shown on a conduct violation sheet.
When I started my parenting journey, I never thought I would be the parent of a child who had trouble in school, a child who is brilliant beyond his age and getting all the right grades, a child who is a minefield of emotions.
I probably should have.
Because I was a kid who preferred a room of five or six to a room of 24. I was a teenager who preferred staying home to read Wuthering Heights and Pride and Prejudice and Dr. Zhivago out back in the hammock to going out with friends. I am still the woman who waits in the school pickup line with my heart pounding, hoping no one will look me in the eye, because then I might have to talk, and I hate small talk.
I often wonder how I, a big emotion, highly sensitive introvert, would have fared in today’s classroom of pods and constant required group activity and no real space of my own.
It’s no wonder my boy, walking around with a fever of frustration, wondering where he really belongs, over-stimulated on an hourly basis, is crying so loudly for help.
And when a child cries for help, we must listen first and “fix” after.
Sometimes there are ways to bully a boy that have nothing to do with fists and words and threats that scare him into cooperation. Sometimes there are lonely lunch tables and sitting out the 15 minutes of recess he needs and isolating him in an office for three days.
Sometimes bullying can look like kids tattling five times a day on the one boy they’ve learned will always get in trouble, the one teachers will always believe did something wrong.
Sometimes bullying can look like writing up a boy 16 times, making him feel like maybe he might have been born a bad kid.
No kid is born a bad kid.
And if all we’re doing is writing up a kid for a behavior violation, and we’re not doing the work to find out why it happened, we all lose.
///
Just last night my boy sat in his bed while his daddy and I tucked him in. It was there we told him he’d be changing classrooms.
His first words were, What if I’m sent to the office again?
And then he cried and begged not to go to school anymore, and he is 7 years old, for God’s sake.
He is 7 years old, and in his mind, everything he does anymore means he’ll get told on by another student. Every action he chooses is the wrong one. Everything about him is a problem.
And how does a parent speak truth into a heart that believes he’s a problem, an inconvenience, a “bad kid” who will never learn to control his impulses, because this is what all those discipline write-ups in a 20 day history tell him, and this is what a teacher not wanting him anymore tells him, and this is what an in-school suspension sentence tells him.
How do you convince a child he is loved, that he is good, that he is more than his 7-year-old mistakes, when those conduct violation sheets tell him a different story?
The question follows me into sleep.
And there is a dream, like there has often been on nights I needed to know something—when my brother would be in a car accident and I saw that overturned vehicle in a dream before it happened, when he might have gone on a deep-sea fishing boat but I dreamed of waves too high and dangerous and begged him not to go, when I saw our third son lying in a baby swing with his head wrapped in a bandage weeks before that head injury happened in a church nursery.
This one is no less clear.
In it, we were walking down his school hallway, and suddenly, I somehow had his new baby brother, Asher, in my arms. He was minutes old. I sat down with my oldest at the door of his classroom, and my boy was very gentle and sweet. He leaned down to kiss Asher and said his brother’s name once.
Then he sat back against the brick wall, and his face got red, and his eyes filled with pain and tears, and he said his newest brother’s name again. “Asher,” he said, except this time his voice held sadness and all the despair of his world. I knew what to do in my dream. I put Asher down in the middle of the hallway, and I took my biggest one in my arms instead. I held him for as long as he sobbed, which was a long, long time.
I woke to an answer that felt clear and awful, all at the same time.
My son has lost his significance in his family at home and his “family” at school, and he is asking for help the only way he knows how.
The last three years of his life he has only ever known one brother after another encroaching on his world, and now there will be another.
Who is he in the six of them? Who is he in the 24 others at school? When will someone listen to hear him? When will someone care enough about his emotional state to help?
Behind all those discipline write-ups, beneath all those words scrawled on a behavior violation page, this is the story told.
This is the armor that has begun to crack, because a 7-year-old can only self-repair for so long.
So we are peeling the rest of that armor away. We are rolling away the stone from this grave that sits in the corner of a little boy’s heart. We are fighting, in all the ways we can, for a child who is significant and beautiful and precious, no matter the mistakes he has made in the last 20 days.
We are unwrapping the grave clothes. We are whispering truth. We are writing his name on the tablet of his heart: Gift.
Because this is who he is, even if a school system has flagged him as something else entirely. Still we hold him as a gift.
And there is Another who holds him and fights for him, too. There is Another who will speak his true name and burn up that false one stamped on his back by a world that doesn’t understand.
There is Another who promised victory.
And so we wait and hope and love in all the spaces we can.
by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
I retype his words for a story I’m working on, a story I don’t even want to finish in these days after learning my job, these eight years of security, will be swallowed whole by a black hole in less than three months.
Most of us don’t know what it’s like to be hungry, he said.
And maybe it’s true for most. But not for me.
I know what it’s like to be hungry.
And that’s why today, when I mark the ending that stands six weeks before my sixth baby is due, those memories sit like jagged glass shards in the back of my throat.
I know what it’s like to be hungry, and I don’t want to ever know again.
///
When I was just a girl, 11 years old, I shook out the breaded fish sticks and frozen fries and stuck them in the oven so my mom didn’t have to do it when she got home from the evening job she worked after finishing her day as a school librarian.
It was the same kind of meal every night, something easy, something we could all make for ourselves, something meticulously divided into the fifteen days that stretched between each paycheck.
We split it any way we could, and we knew we could not ask for more, even if our bellies didn’t sit full. More cost money, and we didn’t have more money.
There was no food pantry or 4 Million Meals charity event or food assistance program, because my brave mother wanted to do it on her own.
We were three kids, climbing into bed with our stomachs rumbling in ways we learned to ignore.
///
My mother hated being in that hunger place. She hated dividing a paycheck with not enough food. She hated knowing her babies could not remember the last time they had full bellies.
This is not what I want for my own children. This is not what I want for myself.
So panic follows me in and out of rooms, the room two share and the one twins share and the one the first boy has claimed as his sleeping-room because it’s a library and he loves falling asleep surrounded by books.
They are sleeping, no fear or worry or hunger anywhere near those soft, other-worldly faces.
But they are too near mine.
What will I do if I can’t take care of them?
What will I do if I lose this house that keeps them safe and warm and dry?
What will I do if there is not enough food?
These are questions I cannot answer today.
///
I stopped eating lunch and breakfast when I was 12 years old.
It wasn’t only because I wanted to watch my weight, like I said all those years later. That was just part of it.
I made my excuses, it was too early in the morning to eat before school, athletics class was right after lunch, and if we had to run the 1.8 again I was sure to hurl it all up anyway. But there was another reason I could never say.
What sat at the bottom of that decision, right beside the need to look thin and sculpted and beautiful, was saving my mom the anxiety of opening a refrigerator and seeing it empty again, no oranges, no carrots, no fish sticks or French fries or leftover Hamburger Helper tucked away in its drawers and on its shelves.
Lunch came and went at school, and day after day after day I walked into that cafeteria with my stomach screaming and then I walked right out to that old oak tree where my friends and I would hang out after they were done eating and I was done pretending. I never stayed in that torture room as long as it took my friends to eat, because I couldn’t stand to smell all the food we couldn’t afford.
Someday I would have enough to eat.
///
Except it wasn’t so simple, that having enough to eat.
Maybe we took it for granted all these years we had steady jobs and extra income and the refrigerator stayed full of good and healthy food, but now, in these days after getting that pink slip about a job ending with the year’s ending, in these days of counting 77 days of a job remaining and 122 days until we meet our sixth child, in these days where hunger memories haunt, I feel the panic every time I open the refrigerator.
It turns a world sideways and leaves a mama breathless, and then all those boys come bounding in the room again, looking for something else to eat.
And there is food enough today, but what about tomorrow? What about in 77 days, when that job walks away? What about six weeks after that?
My husband follows me around the house, watching me from the corners, trying to convince himself I’m OK, and then, seven days after learning about an ending I don’t really want to consider, he throws out his theory about this anxiety I feel and how we attack it by following it to its source.
So what is the source of your anxiety? he says.
I know, but I can’t say, not yet, not out loud. I can’t say it’s losing a home. I can’t say it’s losing food and health and security. I can’t say it’s losing kids who need shelter and food and clothes, right along with a parent’s love.
I can’t say that at the heart of it all is this: Even though she is a hero in my eyes, I am afraid of being my mother.
I can’t say all of this yet.
///
It was early on a Christmas morning. There was hardly anything waiting under the tree that year, even though she’d pawned her old wedding ring for a little Christmas cash. She wanted to do more, but what can a mom do without money?
We were too old to believe in Santa by then. But we heard the bells, and we heard the boots, and we ran to the door to see who might have landed on our old rotted porch with the holes punched all through it.
No one was there. But a box was.
Inside that box were a ham and a turkey and cans of cranberry sauce and green beans and potatoes and already-made pies.
Someone had left a feast on our front porch and then left faster than we could make it to the door. My mom didn’t have to look into the eyes of charity, and she couldn’t return what she’d been given.
We ate better that day than we had in a long, long time, and for the first time in years I went to bed with a stomach that did not toss and turn and rumble.
That meal lasted us days and days and days, and even today, even after all these grown-up years, I still wish I could thank the kind soul who bandaged a mom’s heart for Christmas.
///
So what can I do?
Fourteen days after tearing that pink slip to pieces in a fit of despair, it is still a question I’m trying to answer, and I just can’t.
There is a reason for this.
I can try and try and try to figure this all out, and I can try and try and try to secure some kind of hope and future for my family on my own, and I can try and try and try to take control and make a plan and search all those job sites and apply for every one of them, but the truth is my future is not up to me.
Keeping a house, filling a refrigerator, building a career is not up to me, not really.
It’s up to a God who planned my every day before I was even born.
That doesn’t mean I don’t do my part, of course it doesn’t, but it does mean that when the whole world feels like it’s turning upside down, when I lose my footing because of an envelope and an unexpected letter, when it feels like I can’t find my feet and maybe won’t ever again, even then I can rest on One who is more capable than I am.
Security is not an easy thing to surrender, at least not for me. I want to do something. I want to figure it out. I want to try to make it all OK.
But if this experience, this losing a job I thought was secure, has taught me anything at all, it’s that the whole world is shaking, and I need a rescue, and I cannot save myself.
But my God is a rock of peace, and that means I can and will stand again.
It means that even if my kids are hungry, even if we lose the only house we’ve ever lived in together, even if we’re out on the streets sleeping on the blankets I made for each boy’s second birthday, we are held. Safe. Still loved.
Maybe it’s harder to see it from here, in this dark of groping for a handhold or just a foothold where the next step might be hiding, but I know it to be true still.
So we go. We follow him into the dark. We brave the weight of all that anxiety, knowing that once our eyes adjust we will see the way forward and through and out again.
We will still stand, there at the end of the world.
