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.
by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
It’s the familiar smell of his skin, the way it stretches across his back, just waiting for my touch; and it’s his arms wrapping all the way around me, even when I’ve been a little crazy and weepy and anxious; and it’s his voice, filling the house with music always.
It’s the way he keeps hope when I can’t seem to find mine, the way he believes in the me I was created to be when I’m acting like a not-so-nice version of the whole, the way he trusts me with something as fragile as his heart.
He’s there beside me, watching “The Walking Dead” when I go to sleep in the evening, and he’s there, breathing his own dreams, when I open my eyes.
This man with curly black hair and six days’ chin-and-cheek stubble and pure and devoted love is mine, a gift of the greatest significance.
I call him husband. Lover. Friend.
///
Eleven years ago we stood in an old historical church, beneath that dim lighting that turned eyes to diamonds, and we said those vows we wrote each other, and we meant them with every in-love breath we took before speaking.
I looked like Cinderella, in white with a crown, and we talked about dreams coming true and love that could light a whole world and happily ever after.
And then we danced and visited and he ate and I talked, and the time came to drive to that hotel where we shook our way into the married life.
Dawn broke and he could not find the wallet he needed to board the plane for our honeymoon trip, and a groomsman waited for a ride to the airport with us, the newlywed, and this just wasn’t at all what I’d expected 12 hours married.
It was the first time I realized that marriage did not start on a mountaintop like I’d thought. It started there at the bottom of a peak, and it was an uphill climb to make those two lives full of 21 years of beliefs and ways of living and separate ideas fit cleanly together.
It was going to take some work.
///
There are days we love well, and there are days we just don’t.
Because even after 11 years, we are still learning pieces of each other we didn’t know before, like how sometimes all he needs is one encouraging word to believe he can conquer the whole world in a day, like how his heart does not beat so much as sing for all that music bound up in every inch of his body, like how he prefers his frozen yogurt with hot fudge and peanut butter cups and butterfinger crumbs and Reese’s pieces poured liberally on top.
Like how he can capture the attention of boys for hours at a time with old when-Daddy-was-a-little-boy stories and how sometimes he puts plates with food scraps in the sink side instead of the disposal side and how he tries hard to hide his anxiety but it’s still there, even though he never showed he worried at all.
There are days we are each other’s best friend, but there are also days we are each other’s worst enemy.
And maybe we don’t always like each other (because what friends always do?) and maybe sometimes what we do annoys the other, and maybe sometimes we wonder what we could possibly have been thinking all those years ago, but there is something that threads through all those bad days and good days alike.
It is love and it is forgiveness and it is belonging.
It is forever.
No matter how many days we have logged forgetting what we knew surely 11 years ago, no matter how many weeks scream exactly the opposite, no matter how many months we ask the hard questions in the hidden parts of our minds, there is a truth we know: we were made for each other.
His positivity made for my negativity. His acceptance made for my perfectionism. His dreaming made for my realism.
His eyes made for my body. My words made for his heart. His soul made for mine.
Even on the worst of days, this truth lights the dark.
///
It didn’t take us long to find our first fight.
He worked as a youth and music minister at a church on weekends and a personal banker on weekdays while I spent my days writing stories at the city’s largest newspaper.
There came a day when we planned to take care of some errands, because the church had handed him his monthly check that morning and we needed to deposit it so we could pay some bills.
Except when he opened the planner where he thought he’d put it, that check wasn’t there.
Rent was due in two days, and we didn’t have the money in our account to pay it, without that check.
And my mind ran fast from no money to no home to trying to keep a marriage together on the streets.
I sprawled on that shared bed like the whole world was ending and he searched the entire house and still didn’t find it, and he didn’t know all the words that swam through my head that day.
He can’t keep track of a check. He can’t take care of us. How will I live with this?
For richer or poorer, is this what those vows meant? Because I didn’t know if I could do it.
///
Those thoughts can feel like a fire, burning love on its altar, because there are expectations we hold like they are life and death.
Of course this shared life will never be perfectly wonderful, because we are two different people with two different backgrounds and two different personalities, and who can ever be fully themselves all the time, every day?
Of course they will not be able to measure up to who we thought they’d be. Neither do we.
Of course there are days we’ll think it’s just easier to throw in the towel, because we are human and we don’t always love like we should.
If all we ever do is see the ways he does not measure up to our expectations, how this marriage does not measure up to our idea of happy, how these days spent together are not anything like we’d imagined them to be, we will never make it.
Maybe it will take a year or five or 15, but that crumbling will catch up, and we will be burned in the fire of discontent.
The truth of marriage is that not every day is beautiful and smooth and light-filled. Some days are ugly and thorny and full of a dark where thoughts and attitudes and beliefs will trip us up, and we will wonder if this one is really The One.
But there is a part of love that doesn’t make the least bit of sense, and sometimes we just have to keep climbing, arm locked in arm, up that so-hard hill to forever, because the top of the world is still waiting, and it is still for us.
We can’t look down or back. We only look at each other, and when we see those eyes that still, even today, shine like diamonds, we know.
We know that sometimes love is not a victory march or a kiss that takes away the pain of a lifetime or 30 years of adoration and trust and beauty. Sometimes love looks like showing up on a day we don’t really want to, sticking around when it feels too hard, lifting that cold and broken hallelujah for the years logged behind and the ones left ahead.
This is pressing on toward real love.
///
One day he and all the other band mates quit their full-time jobs.
Because we were going to travel, we were going to see the world, we were going to share our music with all who would listen.
Except there was a baby already and another on the way.
So I held on to that steady income, because we needed something, some way to pay bills, and my job was flexible and allowed travel, so it made sense that I’d be the one to stay.
Year after year after year I spent working a job and caring for a baby and then two and three and five, traveling with our music in all the margins, and that dream to write sat stiffening under the weight of impossibility.
There was no time to pursue my dream, because we were pursuing his, and someone needed to collect a steady income.
And then one day I sat exploding in a prayer session, because that dream had stayed in its place, under all that weight, for too too long, and I felt the cold bitterness that came with knowing it might not ever be my time.
The strength of my resentment surprised me.
If this was for better or for worse, what would I choose from here?
///
It was a whole week of arguing, what felt like one big fight that was really lots of little ones, and we were drowning under the overwhelm of brand new twins added to three other littles, and we walked through the house out of sync and exhausted and wound up too tight.
And then came the night it was all just too much, and I slammed the bedroom door and he walked out the front and I heard the car rev and those tires squeal, and I thought it was the last we’d see of him.
Because it was a night like that when it was the last we saw of my dad.
We come from a long line of divorce, generations of people giving up on each other, people walking out on each other, people choosing others over their beloved, and what makes us any different?
Those anniversaries visit me in subtle ways I can hardly name, like shadows I can’t shake, 14 years for my parents, fewer for his.
What makes us any different?
I cried into my pillow that too-much-fighting night, and it felt like hours but was really only minutes before he came back and wrapped me in those arms and said the words it always comes back to. I love you.
I sat up in our bed and I faced him and my fears, and I told him what I think about when those years of our parents come and go, and he looked at me and pressed my hand and said, We are not them. Their story is not our story.
We come from these backgrounds, and we carry around these cracked hearts, and we feel those pasts like they somehow tell our futures, but the truth is we make our own stories.
We are not what has come before. We are not even what comes after, at least not right now. We are who we are in this moment right here, this moment where we choose love and forgiveness and reconciliation or we choose to turn our backs and let marriage fold in on itself.
We are our own story, and just because our parents only made it 14 years doesn’t mean our love has the same expiration date or that it holds an ending at all.
Our love story is full of its own twists and turns and whole years of unexpected, but it is ours to make and choose.
And so today, five days from marking 11 years of love, I remember that I would choose it all over again, this love that is hard and wild and strong and brave, this love that burns away all the pieces of two lives that don’t belong to the one, this love that walks us steady toward the top of forever.
I choose him still. Now. Always.
by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
It’s the familiar smell of his skin, the way it stretches across his back, just waiting for my touch; and it’s his arms wrapping all the way around me, even when I’ve been a little crazy and weepy and anxious; and it’s his voice, filling the house with music always.
It’s the way he keeps hope when I can’t seem to find mine, the way he believes in the me I was created to be when I’m acting like a not-so-nice version of the whole, the way he trusts me with something as fragile as his heart.
He’s there beside me, watching “The Walking Dead” when I go to sleep in the evening, and he’s there, breathing his own dreams, when I open my eyes.
This man with curly black hair and six days’ chin-and-cheek stubble and pure and devoted love is mine, a gift of the greatest significance.
I call him husband. Lover. Friend.
///
Eleven years ago we stood in an old historical church, beneath that dim lighting that turned eyes to diamonds, and we said those vows we wrote each other, and we meant them with every in-love breath we took before speaking.
I looked like Cinderella, in white with a crown, and we talked about dreams coming true and love that could light a whole world and happily ever after.
And then we danced and visited and he ate and I talked, and the time came to drive to that hotel where we shook our way into the married life.
Dawn broke and he could not find the wallet he needed to board the plane for our honeymoon trip, and a groomsman waited for a ride to the airport with us, the newlywed, and this just wasn’t at all what I’d expected 12 hours married.
It was the first time I realized that marriage did not start on a mountaintop like I’d thought. It started there at the bottom of a peak, and it was an uphill climb to make those two lives full of 21 years of beliefs and ways of living and separate ideas fit cleanly together.
It was going to take some work.
///
There are days we love well, and there are days we just don’t.
Because even after 11 years, we are still learning pieces of each other we didn’t know before, like how sometimes all he needs is one encouraging word to believe he can conquer the whole world in a day, like how his heart does not beat so much as sing for all that music bound up in every inch of his body, like how he prefers his frozen yogurt with hot fudge and peanut butter cups and butterfinger crumbs and Reese’s pieces poured liberally on top.
Like how he can capture the attention of boys for hours at a time with old when-Daddy-was-a-little-boy stories and how sometimes he puts plates with food scraps in the sink side instead of the disposal side and how he tries hard to hide his anxiety but it’s still there, even though he never showed he worried at all.
There are days we are each other’s best friend, but there are also days we are each other’s worst enemy.
And maybe we don’t always like each other (because what friends always do?) and maybe sometimes what we do annoys the other, and maybe sometimes we wonder what we could possibly have been thinking all those years ago, but there is something that threads through all those bad days and good days alike.
It is love and it is forgiveness and it is belonging.
It is forever.
No matter how many days we have logged forgetting what we knew surely 11 years ago, no matter how many weeks scream exactly the opposite, no matter how many months we ask the hard questions in the hidden parts of our minds, there is a truth we know: we were made for each other.
His positivity made for my negativity. His acceptance made for my perfectionism. His dreaming made for my realism.
His eyes made for my body. My words made for his heart. His soul made for mine.
Even on the worst of days, this truth lights the dark.
///
It didn’t take us long to find our first fight.
He worked as a youth and music minister at a church on weekends and a personal banker on weekdays while I spent my days writing stories at the city’s largest newspaper.
There came a day when we planned to take care of some errands, because the church had handed him his monthly check that morning and we needed to deposit it so we could pay some bills.
Except when he opened the planner where he thought he’d put it, that check wasn’t there.
Rent was due in two days, and we didn’t have the money in our account to pay it, without that check.
And my mind ran fast from no money to no home to trying to keep a marriage together on the streets.
I sprawled on that shared bed like the whole world was ending and he searched the entire house and still didn’t find it, and he didn’t know all the words that swam through my head that day.
He can’t keep track of a check. He can’t take care of us. How will I live with this?
For richer or poorer, is this what those vows meant? Because I didn’t know if I could do it.
///
Those thoughts can feel like a fire, burning love on its altar, because there are expectations we hold like they are life and death.
Of course this shared life will never be perfectly wonderful, because we are two different people with two different backgrounds and two different personalities, and who can ever be fully themselves all the time, every day?
Of course they will not be able to measure up to who we thought they’d be. Neither do we.
Of course there are days we’ll think it’s just easier to throw in the towel, because we are human and we don’t always love like we should.
If all we ever do is see the ways he does not measure up to our expectations, how this marriage does not measure up to our idea of happy, how these days spent together are not anything like we’d imagined them to be, we will never make it.
Maybe it will take a year or five or 15, but that crumbling will catch up, and we will be burned in the fire of discontent.
The truth of marriage is that not every day is beautiful and smooth and light-filled. Some days are ugly and thorny and full of a dark where thoughts and attitudes and beliefs will trip us up, and we will wonder if this one is really The One.
But there is a part of love that doesn’t make the least bit of sense, and sometimes we just have to keep climbing, arm locked in arm, up that so-hard hill to forever, because the top of the world is still waiting, and it is still for us.
We can’t look down or back. We only look at each other, and when we see those eyes that still, even today, shine like diamonds, we know.
We know that sometimes love is not a victory march or a kiss that takes away the pain of a lifetime or 30 years of adoration and trust and beauty. Sometimes love looks like showing up on a day we don’t really want to, sticking around when it feels too hard, lifting that cold and broken hallelujah for the years logged behind and the ones left ahead.
This is pressing on toward real love.
///
One day he and all the other band mates quit their full-time jobs.
Because we were going to travel, we were going to see the world, we were going to share our music with all who would listen.
Except there was a baby already and another on the way.
So I held on to that steady income, because we needed something, some way to pay bills, and my job was flexible and allowed travel, so it made sense that I’d be the one to stay.
Year after year after year I spent working a job and caring for a baby and then two and three and five, traveling with our music in all the margins, and that dream to write sat stiffening under the weight of impossibility.
There was no time to pursue my dream, because we were pursuing his, and someone needed to collect a steady income.
And then one day I sat exploding in a prayer session, because that dream had stayed in its place, under all that weight, for too too long, and I felt the cold bitterness that came with knowing it might not ever be my time.
The strength of my resentment surprised me.
If this was for better or for worse, what would I choose from here?
///
It was a whole week of arguing, what felt like one big fight that was really lots of little ones, and we were drowning under the overwhelm of brand new twins added to three other littles, and we walked through the house out of sync and exhausted and wound up too tight.
And then came the night it was all just too much, and I slammed the bedroom door and he walked out the front and I heard the car rev and those tires squeal, and I thought it was the last we’d see of him.
Because it was a night like that when it was the last we saw of my dad.
We come from a long line of divorce, generations of people giving up on each other, people walking out on each other, people choosing others over their beloved, and what makes us any different?
Those anniversaries visit me in subtle ways I can hardly name, like shadows I can’t shake, 14 years for my parents, fewer for his.
What makes us any different?
I cried into my pillow that too-much-fighting night, and it felt like hours but was really only minutes before he came back and wrapped me in those arms and said the words it always comes back to. I love you.
I sat up in our bed and I faced him and my fears, and I told him what I think about when those years of our parents come and go, and he looked at me and pressed my hand and said, We are not them. Their story is not our story.
We come from these backgrounds, and we carry around these cracked hearts, and we feel those pasts like they somehow tell our futures, but the truth is we make our own stories.
We are not what has come before. We are not even what comes after, at least not right now. We are who we are in this moment right here, this moment where we choose love and forgiveness and reconciliation or we choose to turn our backs and let marriage fold in on itself.
We are our own story, and just because our parents only made it 14 years doesn’t mean our love has the same expiration date or that it holds an ending at all.
Our love story is full of its own twists and turns and whole years of unexpected, but it is ours to make and choose.
And so today, five days from marking 11 years of love, I remember that I would choose it all over again, this love that is hard and wild and strong and brave, this love that burns away all the pieces of two lives that don’t belong to the one, this love that walks us steady toward the top of forever.
I choose him still. Now. Always.
by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
I walk into the dim-lit room, my hopes opening the door for me.
This whole experience has been different, the sickness, the carrying, the exhaustion, the weight gain, almost none at all, and I caught myself thinking in these days before knowing, It’s a girl. Surely it’s a girl.
And now comes this day my suspicions will be confirmed, and I wait in the light of a screen to hear, my hopes sitting softly on my chest, because even though we say it out loud that gender doesn’t matter, this one does.
This one, the last one, matters.
This baby, of course, would be our girl. We knew it, so we tried again.
And then the doctor checks that heartbeat and all those other pieces and asks, You sure you want to know?
And yes, of course I do, because I plan to shop on the way home for her first dress and a headband to match.
Boy, she says, and my heart drops all the way to my toes.
Because this isn’t something we considered, because who in the world ends their family line with six boys and no daughters stretching behind?
The doctor, who has delivered all my boys, turns back to her computer screen, chuckling about this revelation, and I’m glad she’s not looking at me because I’m wiping away tears I can barely feel, and the whole room spins hazy and blurry and suffocating in a way I don’t understand, because this is a baby, for God’s sake, my baby, and why can’t I just be happy about a baby?
Why does finding out the gender of this sixth and last feel like a dream slamming in pieces on the ground, when I know how delightful and charming boys can be and how much they love their mamas and how we already have all the clothes and gear and bedding we could possibly need, if a little worn and ragged after the use of those five who came before?
I say the only words I can find. Wow. Poor Ben. He’s going to be so disappointed.
And what I really mean is Poor Rachel. She’s so disappointed.
I walk out that door with my hopes dragging the floor behind me.
///
It’s something little girls like me dreamed about growing up, without even knowing we dreamed about it. I saw glimpses of it when I brushed the hair of my dolls or braided it down their backs or cut my sister’s hair in a layered bob.
Someday I would do this for my daughter, that was the unspoken knowing. I would brush her hair and braid it down her back and trim what needed trimming.
That desire for a one-day daughter showed up early in my little girl life. Maybe it’s because I had an amazing mother. Maybe it’s because she had an amazing mother, too, a mother she called every few days about something her kids did or some advice she needed or just because she needed to talk to someone who understood her. Maybe it’s because of that old picture, five generations of women lined up like stair-steps, me at the tallest top.
I wanted a daughter to put in that picture. I wanted a daughter to sit in my lap and play dolls with, if that’s what she wanted. I wanted a daughter who would call me on the phone every few days to tell me about something her kids had done.
I’ve wanted a daughter since before I could even voice that want.
So I took that pregnancy test for baby #2, and it turned positive, and I shopped for girl clothes.
Because, of course it made sense, one boy and one girl. And then that sonogram told me differently, so I packed away all those girl clothes and tucked away the name, because I knew there would be more.
And there were, number three and number four and five together, but they were all boys and those clothes sat still waiting for a daughter who did not come.
///
It’s only a quick trip to the store, because we already have all these clothes, but I need some candy as a consolation prize, since I know how at least two of my boys will react to the news of another brother, and all that way home I don’t turn on the radio and I don’t talk to anyone on the phone and I don’t talk to anyone at all.
I just sit and think, trying to reconcile what I’ve learned today with my expectations.
And then I walk in the door at home, and all those boys are waiting to hear, and I stand behind a camera to film the reveal with their daddy and my mom and only three of the five, because the other two are napping and wouldn’t really know what they’re seeing anyway.
They dig in the brown bag and pull out the wrapping and their daddy tears it apart, and there it is.
World’s number one brother, it says.
The oldest starts crying, because he’s been waiting for a sister through five of them, and I cry right along with him, behind a camera, pretending I’m really just laughing at that expected reaction.
A brother will be fun, his Nonny says.
No he won’t, he says. I’ve had lots of experience.
Experience that sits a megaphone on the kitchen counters so we can dole out instructions above the constant noise, experience that rips holes in every wall of our home, experience that brings anxiety to the back of a throat when I open the refrigerator that’s empty even though we just got groceries three days ago.
I have lots of experience, too. I know what to expect, and it is not what I wanted this time.
///
There was a daughter who died.
We didn’t get to meet her, but the day of her dying is forever etched in my mind. A doctor’s office. A machine that showed no movement of life where there had been before. A hospital that took her from the parts of me that could not let her go.
I always thought there would be another.
I dream of her sometimes—this daughter we named Amarise because it means given by God, because we didn’t want to use the name that waited and still waits for a daughter who lived.
Every now and then she comes to me when I sleep, and she touches my face with one little hand and stares at me with those summer sky eyes, and then she races away, her brown-red curls flying.
I wish we had given her that name we’d saved through all those boys before her.
///
It’s in those moments when a friend posts a beautiful picture of her baby girl and those times parents talk about last year’s daddy daughter dance and when moms share about their girls’ weekends with their daughters that I feel it the most.
It’s when I watch my friends with their daughters, the way their mama eyes light up when their daughter walks into a room, the way those little girls hold a piece of their mamas in their eyes and smile and walk.
Because everywhere I look in my boys, I see their daddy.
And this isn’t a bad thing, not at all, because he’s a good man and a loving daddy and a doting husband, and if they can be anything like him when they grow up, the world will look much different than it does today.
But I don’t get to see a piece of me walking around, not really, because they walk like him and talk like him and think like him and play like him and jump like him and fly like him, and I don’t always understand their ways or their feelings or their anger like I imagine I would understand the ways of a daughter.
All these days after learning gender, disappointment punches a hole in my heart that bleeds a little every time this new baby boy moves and every time I see that swelling in the mirror and every time I think about another bundle of pure energy racing in a game of indoor tag with his brothers, even though it’s against the rules.
In my most unguarded moments, I think about how my husband has all these sons to pass along his name and his legacy and that picture of how to be a man, and I will not have this gift, because there is no daughter who needs a name or a legacy or a picture of how to be a woman.
There will never be that daughter.
///
Maybe we shouldn’t have done it. Maybe we should have been happy with the five. Maybe we should have just adopted.
Because they all think we’re crazy anyway, in this society where two is the national norm, and what in the world were we thinking?
These thoughts shake me weeks after learning the gender of our last one, because there is another that attaches to them: After all, what was the point?
Guilt chases that one hard.
The day before Father’s Day this year, two people I love watched their twin boys slip into the world too early. They watched those boys fight and claw to find air in lungs that had not yet formed, and then, an hour later, they watched them slip into the next world.
We have a picture of them, blue babies wrapped in the same blankets all my babies were wrapped in. They couldn’t even open their eyes to see their parents before they died.
And then, just a month later, one of those I loved helped her sister-in-law deliver a baby boy born without a brain, his face collapsed almost into his neck. She watched her nephew fight for a life that could not be, just like she watched her babies.
I don’t forget all of this in my disappointment. I couldn’t. I see it when I close my eyes, because I know this is a baby and it doesn’t matter boy or girl. It matters healthy and strong and alive.
We are a few months from welcoming the next boy to our pack, and still the disappointment lingers at the edges. Maybe it always will.
But excitement has begun peering in, like a friend, just waiting to be welcomed, because we know the truth of this boy.
We know he was given by a God who sees the end instead of just the beginning, by a God who believes another Toalson boy is what the world needs, by a God who stretches a mama heart wide and long and deep so it can enfold all those little boys destroying her home.
Destroying her life.
Because they are the ones who rearrange my world in just the ways I need, and this one will be no different.
It is my boys who strip me of control and throw around that chaos like it’s a plaything and turn a whole life inside out, and it is my boys who are tearing me into pieces and putting me back together right and whole and more beautiful than I was before.
They teach me how to be a woman. How to be a mother. How to be me.
Now one more will join their ranks. One more will love like a hurricane, uprooting and stripping clean and remaking. One more will turn me toward who I was always meant to be.
This baby, this one who was not what we expected, he will join his brothers in a wild, courageous, strong tribe of boys, and he will be wanted. Welcomed. Needed.
We wait eagerly for him, this number six, this number last, this boy named Asher Ruben.
by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
It’s just a tiny thing, oval and white and smaller than the vitamins I swallow every single day, but I leave it on my desk and stare at it.
It’s not the enemy. The panic-lump in my throat is the enemy, and this could help. I know this.
But still I can’t bring myself to touch it.
More than a week ago, my doctor called in a prescription for some of the symptoms I rattled off with an apologetic laugh—lump in my throat, difficulty breathing through some of my thoughts, constant worry—and assured me I was not alone, not even close, because so many people have to take these medications at one time or another.
Yes, but this is me, I thought.
This is me, and I don’t take medication to make myself feel better, because I have faith and prayer and meditation and mindfulness and hope and joy and gratitude and love and family and Jesus.
So I let it sit on the pharmacy pick-up shelf long enough for them to restock it, like it didn’t belong to anybody in particular, and then I went to pick it up and they said they could have it ready in another 24 hours because they would need to fill the prescription all over again.
I waited another three days and then sent my husband to pick it up, because I could not face the eyes that would see this woman who needed a pill to feel normal.
Two days it sat on the dresser in my bedroom, waiting, and then, today, when that lump made it hard to breathe, I took one pill out and turned it over in my hands and then let it clink back down to the bottom of an orange bottle.
I just can’t do it. I just can’t swallow this pill, because I can find my way out of this. I can. Because there is nothing wrong with me.
And if there were, what would they all think?
///
When I was eight years old, my teacher noticed I was squinting to read the words on the overhead projector, and then I was squinting at my neighbor’s page to copy their notes instead of bothering with the screen at all, and then I was holding multiplication flashcards and books and worksheets too close to my face for comfort.
She told my mom, who talked to the school nurse, who talked to my teacher and arranged an appointment to check my eyes.
It was a tumultuous time in my life then, because I hadn’t seen my dad for a year, and those absences explained by an out-of-state job that paid more money than he could possibly make in our little town stretched longer and longer every time he came home and left again.
And somehow, in my little-girl mind, my dad’s absences had become tangled around my perfection or imperfection. Somehow it all depended on me.
Somehow I had to be perfect, and that would bring him home and keep him there for good.
But something was wrong with my eyes, I knew it before they told me, and I didn’t want anyone else to know.
I cried all the way to the nurse’s office, because I knew what this appointment would show. I cried standing there, with a little plastic spatula over my left eye, not even able to read the one big lone letter at the top.
I cried all the way back out, because my eyes had failed me.
I would never be perfect, and maybe that meant my dad would never come home.
///
I looked for all the reasons not to take that pill. I called my doctor to ask if it was really safe, because I’m a natural person, and I’ve never had this problem before and I don’t like medication and there has to be another way, and why isn’t this anxiety going away on its own when I’m praying and meditating and working out my salvation and doing everything I’m supposed to do?
What is the source of your anxiety? she says.
So much sits like five-ton weights on my neck and chest and head and feet that drag slow steps and hands that hold too tight to control.
I name all the things I know. Work. Kids. Home. Chores. Life.
That’s as far as I get, even though I could name money and bills and one car and appearance and boys and sleep and marriage, too. She interrupts my list and says, Sometimes we just need help.
Just before we hang up, she says, Take care of yourself.
OK, I say, even though what I really mean is, I’ll try, because I don’t know if taking care of myself is popping a pill or letting it sit with the other 59 of them in a bottle that tells me to swallow one twice a day.
It’s another mark of imperfection, this failure of my mind and emotions.
And I don’t want anyone to know.
///
My junior high school was nine miles from the house I grew up in, so I had to ride a bus for an hour every day to get there and back.
In seventh grade I played volleyball and basketball and ran track and sat first-chair clarinet, and every afternoon one or all of these had practices I attended, and at the end of them, all of us who lived too far away to walk a highway home packed up into a bus and rode it to a dropoff spot where parents waited.
There was a day when I stepped off the bus at 6:30 p.m., just like I did every other weeknight, and I did not see my mom’s gray Ford Escort.
The dropoff point was an old post office, where, years before, when we’d lived in another house just down the way, we’d been walking our dog to check the mail and a car going too fast hit him so hard he spun circles in the middle of the road that ran between our house and the post office that closed every day at 4.
I sat staring at that same highway, thinking of all the things that could have happened to my mom.
What if she had an accident coming here to pick me up? What if she was dead? What if it was my fault? Who would the three of us, my brother and sister and me, live with, since we hadn’t heard from or seen our dad in five years?
Just when I finally decided I’d walk the six miles home, she pulled into the drive, fifteen-minutes-that-felt-like-fifteen-hours late.
I stared out the window, all the way home, trying not to cry from my leftover fears tripping down the highway behind us.
///
I stare out the window now, trying not to cry, because I don’t want him or the littles to see just how fragile I feel.
We’re on our way to lead worship to a group of teenagers, and I feel like a fraud.
We will sing about not being afraid and walking on deep waters with faith ready to be stretched, and here I am sinking in the rip tide of anxiety and fear.
I try to work out some of my feelings with my husband on the way. He tells me to try to put our problems in perspective with others’ problems. At least we’re not homeless, he says. At least we have healthy food in our refrigerator. At least none of our children are terminally ill.
The rock of anxiety shifts and grows and hardens. No, I say, because this doesn’t work for me. I feel more anxious, because what if?
He tells me to try to spin things in a positive light, try to nip my negative thoughts in the bud, but, no, this doesn’t work for me either.
Every try and fail just makes me feel like more of a failure, because I can’t do it on my own, and God why can’t I?
What kind of person can’t choose joy and positivity and perspective on their own?
How do you talk yourself out of a feeling when it’s a feeling you’ve walked with your whole life? Because I know I said I’ve never experienced this anxiety before, but it was a lie, just another attempt to prove there is nothing wrong with me.
What is it, then? he says. What specifically is it?
This is the question I can’t answer, so I just start crying instead. I can’t talk about this right now, I say, because we’ve pulled into the parking lot and it’s time to unload the kids and go plug in and do a sound check and then sing like the words wipe away all our troubles.
And because it’s everything.
It’s everything, all piled and tangled and curled into those weights with barbs and spikes that puncture every time something else goes wrong or could go wrong or might possibly go wrong in 20 years.
And sure, we can tick off those gratitude lists and we can try to take every thought captive and we can post those 100 happy days pictures, but what happens when it doesn’t work, when our choosing doesn’t save a mind or a heart?
Sometimes we have walked so far down the road we need help crawling back up.
///
I grew up in two Southern Baptist churches.
They were full of grace and hope and people who knew how to love a fatherless kid, or three of them.
Southern Baptist, though, is a religion full of rules.
I’d set rules all my life for myself, and here were more that held a greater purpose, and, yes, of course, please sign me up, because keeping all these rules would finally, finally, finally make me perfect in one domain, even though my eyes were bad and I’d busted up my knee in high school volleyball and I’d broken a pinkie finger in softball that never healed straight.
I could be spiritually perfect, and that would have to do.
I constructed my perfect little life, keeping all those potential friends in my youth group at arms’ length, because if they came too close they would see all those hidden holes in my perfection, and I could not let them see.
And then I graduated at the top of my class and rode a full scholarship to university, where, even though all those religion rules had begun weighing me down years ago, I signed up to continue in the Southern Baptist tradition on my own.
I led worship at the Baptist Student Ministry and attended the Baptist church they told me to attend so I could be a leader, and I sat under all those male preachers who said God was always enough and we had a Healer for all our sickness and that when we know Love we will not know fear.
And I tried to make it true for me.
No one ever told me in those churches that there might be a chance my Healer wouldn’t heal the kind of sickness that stuck in the back of a throat and the corner of a mind.
They only told me to have faith enough to move mountains, and this mountain wouldn’t move.
I was a failure here, too, even in my faith.
///
We are back home and the kids are in bed, and still I’m sitting here staring at a pill they said I shouldn’t need if I believed enough, staring at a piece of science they said proves my faith needs improving, staring at a tiny little thing they said tells a definitive story of my spirituality.
I have learned much in the years that roll between then and now.
I have learned that there is a fear that can be known in Love, and it is called anxiety.
I have learned that we don’t get to choose our disorders, and no amount of faith or joy lists or gratitude tries can change the hold our disorders keep on us.
I have learned that seeking help of any kind does not mean our faith or our God or our own hearts and minds have failed us.
I have learned that courage doesn’t always look like jumping out of a war-plane into enemy territory or rushing into a burning house or opening a heart to fix a vessel block. Sometimes it looks like facing one day and then another, because this is jumping from a war-plane into enemy territory. Sometimes it looks like braving the truth of our disorder and all the opinions and condemnation and misunderstandings that come with it, because this is rushing into a burning house and living to tell about it. Sometimes it looks like popping a pill and letting it work its magic in our mind, because this is our open-heart surgery.
I have learned that there is no shame in inviting medication into our journey toward healing.
The world can make us feel like there is, but the world is not telling the truth. There is no shame here. There is only courage.
The Healer sends healing, and sometimes it looks like a miraculous mind makeover, but sometimes it looks like a no-less-miraculous tiny white oval.
So I swallow the pill, and I close my eyes, and I thank God for the help finding my way back to an even road, maybe for the first time in my life.
