by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
I was an avid reader as a child. My mother would take us to our county library that was a fifteen-minute drive down two highways, and I’d stack the books as high as I could carry and take them all home and read them in less than a week. I read every Ramona book, Anne of Green Gables book, Pippi Longstocking book, every book by Madeleine L’Engle and Scott O’Dell. I was an obsessive reader; when I discovered an author I loved, I read every single book they wrote, told everybody about the author, passed books along to friends, hoping they would enjoy them as much as I did.
So many books—or authors, rather—shaped me in my formative years.
Madeleine L’Engle: I loved the science in her books, seeing a strong female character take center stage, reading the compassion and love and truth that flowed through her stories. Later, in my adult years, I would finish everything she wrote, including her adult novels and her memoir series, The Crosswicks Journals.
Scott O’Dell: The history in his books captured me, along with so many of his strong female characters (in Sing Down the Moon, Island of the Blue Dolphins, and Streams to the River, River to the Sea, among so many others). I loved reading about the culture of Native Americans, lives that were far removed from my own (though my great-great-great grandmother was Choctaw—and one day I will write about her).
The Brontës: How I loved Emily and Charlotte Brontë, the dark Gothic world of Wuthering Heights, the tragic world of the governess. Looking back on these books, the women protagonists weren’t necessarily strong, but they did everything they could in their limited circumstances during a time when women were not allowed much freedom.
Jane Austin & Virginia Woolf: I loved how they defied convention directly (Woolf) and indirectly through humor and satire (Austen). Their books still hold an important place in my heart today.
L.M. Montgomery: I loved the spirit of Anne, the way she approached life with joy and gratitude, her quirkiness, and how she defied convention in a charming, innocent way. She was brave and wild and free. I read every one of her books, with a relish I still remember.
Lois Lowry: I loved her fantastical worlds, the characters who broke free from oppressive societies, the way they found their place through struggle and their own resilience. Their journey was like a metaphor for my own life, and their victories made my own seem possible.
Toni Morrison: I still, today, read and re-read Toni Morrison, but I first discovered her in high school and read her obsessively in college. I read her for her expert use of beautiful language, the literary quality of her books, the strange threads she wove together, what she could teach me about not only the black experience or the poor experience (this latter of which I was familiar), but also the human experience.
Books told me who I could be, showed me my potential, and taught me how to write. They certainly became part of my multitude. It’s a privilege to think that maybe I can be a small part of someone else’s multitude.
What are the books that shaped you?
(Photo by Ed Robertson on Unsplash)
by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
It’s time to go!
We were on our way out the door, running late as usual, because two of them couldn’t find their shoes. One of my least favorite activities, when we’re running late anywhere, is spending time on the Shoe Search—mostly because I can’t get deeply enough into my sons’ minds to imagine where they might have left their shoes. Where would I leave my shoes if I were, say, the four-year-old? No idea (They were under a towel in his older brother’s room, along with the swim trunks we couldn’t find last night).
We finally had everyone clothed and shoed and were now ushering them out to the car. We have only recently arrived at the stage where every kid can buckle himself and my husband and I can simply slide into our seats and go, provided everyone does buckle.
But my four-year-old was taking an unusually long time to actually get into the car. He is one of the most compliant children in the bunch, doesn’t fight us on most instructions, so I reminded him it was time to get in the car, come on, we were late.
“But look, Mama.” He pointed up to the sky, and I saw it: a rainbow. Two of them, really, one arcing over the other.
Maybe I would have seen it, eventually, once we got on our way. Maybe we would have driven right into it, maybe it would have been just as bright and magnificent, maybe we would have all shared that moment with a breath and an exclamation of awe. But who is to say? Maybe I would have, instead, been staring at the clock, lamenting about how we should have left half an hour ago, I hate being late, we better not miss anything important. It’s impossible to say which track my mind would have taken.
But what really mattered, in that moment, was to stop and stare and marvel—which I’m happy to say I did.
The bottom rainbow was glowing—you could see every color as though shaded with a marker. The top one was opaque but still colorful. The air smelled musty, like rain, and I felt a drop on my hand. But it didn’t matter—I remained, staring at beauty.
So much of my life is rushing between one thing and the next—finish the laundry before heading up to work in my bedroom, washing up the dishes before beginning story time, racing out to the car to beat the clock so we can make it on time to wherever we’re going.
How much do I miss in this constantly rushing state?
Fortunately, my children move at one speed: slow. That means they often require me to move slowly as well. And rather than be annoyed by that, I want to be glad.
So I picked up my four-year-old (he won’t be picked up for much longer), and we named the colors we could see: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, pink. He laughed about how this is the same way he draws rainbows. I laughed about how he was right.
Everything else, for that moment in time, could wait.
(Photo by James Wainscoat on Unsplash)
by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
I’ve started running again.
It began with a handful of miles—three or four, then quickly escalated to the six I used to run in college, when I would get up every day at five a.m. and run six miles before classes. My body remembers the routine; it’s moved back into the ridges carved out over four years of my past.
The running gives me a sense of control. There’s so much in my life that feels somewhat out of control, and it’s comforting to have that segment of time—an hour, maybe more—when I have almost complete control—over my breath, the distance I run, the speed with which I run it. I belong to myself, and my mind stills and it is only the steps, the breath, the path before me.
Running connects me fully to a moment, but it’s not only that mysterious connection that calls to me on the days I don’t schedule a run. It is the past, too.
For twelve years I have been a mother. I have given myself fully to my children. I have coaxed them through tantrums, taught them about emotions and how to read, aligned myself to their desires and needs so I can nurture and mold them into independent human beings who think and feel and decide for themselves. There is still a way to go; my oldest son is twelve, my youngest is four. They still need me, but in not quite the same way.
Two years ago, five years ago, it would have felt inconceivable to me that I would wake at five a.m. and spend an hour running six miles or more. The time to myself was short and stunted. If I had an hour to myself, I would not spend it running.
But time has widened now. There are moments when I find myself alone in my home library, when my sons are playing happily in the backyard and I can open a book and read a page or two without interruption. There are moments I realize I’ve been staring into space, daydreaming for half an hour and no one needed me. There are moments I can bookmark to run.
Maybe all this means I am losing part of myself—the part that was an ever-present, always-on-duty mother. My sons seek their father’s advice for things now, not just mine. But maybe it also means that I am gaining a part of myself, returning to a past me, remembering who I am, who I was—this person who looked forward to running six or more miles a day for the peace and quiet—the freedom—it gave her.
by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
I’ve been feeling burned out lately. It’s a carryover from the end of the year, sliding into the new year, though I took two weeks off work to read and spend time with my kids and relax.
It’s not the work that has me so burned out; in fact, work, right now, feels like a necessary respite from the domestic world. It’s everything else—the lunches that need making, the house that needs tidying, the kids who need constant supervision.
I told my husband the other day that I almost feel like I can’t let our kids out of my sight, even though the oldest three are twelve, nine, and eight—ages at which I was already staying home alone. We live in a culture of fear—fear of what will happen to our kids if we take our eyes off them and fear of what will happen to us if other people see that we’ve taken our eyes off them. We’ve all heard the horror stories—parents (usually mothers) arrested for leaving their kid in the car for five minutes while they run into the store for some toilet paper or for letting their kid walk to or play in the park alone or for leaving them home alone while they run to the grocery store for an hour of blissful shopping. We are afraid, and so we protect from real (the repercussions of concerned citizens reporting on our perceived neglect) and imagined (child abduction, which is a percentage so low it would take leaving your kid alone for 750,000 years, according to some experts) dangers. At all hours. Every day.
Because of this, our kids don’t know how to be alone or how to care for themselves. My twelve-year-old didn’t even know how to make a pot of tea, and when, one day, he was feeling a little stuffy, he asked for some. I was busy getting breakfast on the table for his five brothers, so I told him to do it himself. He said, “But I don’t know how.”
Our kids, understandably, have trouble taking care of themselves in our overprotected world, so it’s no surprise that my most frequent burnout is parenting burnout. Mothering burnout. I feel exhausted often with what is required of me—keeping my sons out of trouble, monitoring technology time, encouraging creativity, teaching them to clean up after themselves. Making sure I don’t become a target for “concerned citizens” to call Child Protective Services.
The burnout isn’t completely caused by the protective requirement, of course. I do, after all, have six sons, and that means there are lots of needs around my house. But the break I might occasionally get from leaving my kids alone to go for a walk certainly contributes to my exhaustion.
So it was with this persistent and pervasive burnout that I began this year picking up the book, Wave, by Sonali Deraniyagala.
In this book, Deraniyagala loses her two sons—her husband and parents, too—in a tsunami while on vacation. The same things that, upon waking up, pull tight that slip of annoyance—shoes left in the middle of the floor, drawings littering the furniture in never-ending piles of paper, pleas for breakfast and complaints once it’s delivered—were things she would never experience again. She would not watch her sons navigate the explosive time of puberty, would not ever remind them to do their homework, would not break up another argument about something ridiculous.
When I finished the book, on a five-mile run on the treadmill in my garage, which doubles as my sons’ LEGO playroom, I stood there for a minute, my heart rate slowing, my breath evening, my eyes caught on the mess. What would I miss about my sons if the unthinkable happened? Everything.
I moved back into the kitchen, where my sons sat sipping smoothies, the noise at the table almost at an intolerable level. I kissed them each in turn as they swatted me away (“You’re so sweaty, Mama!) and smiled to myself, words thrumming through my head: I’m so glad they’re here.
Even the shoe I tripped over on my way upstairs couldn’t dampen the force of my gratitude and love.
by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
My grandmother used to save newspaper articles and clippings from Reader’s Digest (the large-print edition in later years) for the different people in her life. She’d hand me manila envelopes with cutouts paper-clipped together—about the lives of writers, the state of journalism, fitness for runners. She’d see something and investigate, or perhaps it was in the middle of reading that a family face would pop into her mind. Once she finished the piece, she would take the scissors and cut it out and store it away, until the next time she saw the person whose name she wrote on the tab in all capital letters.
I didn’t much understand this urge of hers when I was younger. The articles she passed along to me in clasped envelopes or manila folders seemed like random bits and nothing more. Sometimes they came, unexpectedly, in the mail. Sometimes she underlined things, highlighted sentences, wrote something in the margins. Most of the time she left it alone, and I had to decode what she was trying to say.
The other day I was reading a short article in National Geographic (National Geographic is to me what Reader’s Digest was to my grandmother) about a man who climbed a mountain without a rope. Free climbing is what they call it. While that part was interesting enough, it wasn’t what made me think of my husband. What made me think of my husband was the fact that someone filmed a documentary about this man’s climb.
My husband is a documentary filmmaker. The article included information about the equipment used for the filming (which my husband will often talk about, though I can’t usually follow), how he safely filmed the climb, and the number of hours required for preparation alone.
I dog-eared the page, thinking my husband would enjoy the article.
Later that night, when all the kids were finally in bed, I mentioned the article to my husband. He seemed lukewarm about it, much like I was back when my grandmother would hand me articles she’d saved for me. I handed it to him anyway, said, “I really think you’d enjoy it.” He set the magazine on his bedside table. It’ll take him months to read it—or maybe he’ll read it tomorrow.
Either way, I could imagine my grandmother, who’s been dead ten years, smiling, saying, “You see?”
And I do.
by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
The other day my husband and I were finishing dinner for our sons, and I, having come off a high from my current work in progress, which finally hit its sweet spot after two weeks of struggling, said, “I don’t know if I’ve said this recently, but I really, really love what I do.
My husband hears this often; I can’t help but express gratitude for the gift of doing what I love—creating what was not there before. I love the entire process—research, brainstorm, drafting, revising, editing. It feels like a sacred process to me, where truth is mixed purposefully with fiction, reality merges with story, hopes and dreams and affirmations of identity crawl into carefully chosen words. It is, I believe, a great privilege to remind people who they are, to reassure them they are loved, to tell them they are not alone, we belong to each other, we can do hard things, there is hope.
I find exquisite joy and wonder and satisfaction in this act of creation. But that joy and wonder and satisfaction gets challenged when I accidentally consider one tiny little piece of the process: numbers and reviews.
At times in my writer journey, I have created something and put it out there for the world to see, and the numbers have disappointed—there aren’t enough likes, shares, hearts, comments, sales, whatever. Social media and the easy access of Internet often make it difficult for a writer to create without looking at the numbers, and those numbers, at least for me, are like misty clouds fogging up my joy.
Reviews are another beast entirely. My agent, who also wrote and published a book last year, recently shared a twitter thread about how one reviewer of her book kept persistently tagging her in a negative review of the book. The reviewer tagged her multiple times, almost as though she wanted to make sure my agent saw just how much her book was hated.
That’s enough to sometimes make a writer hold all her words close and forget about sharing them with the world. I often wonder if reviewers forget that a writer is a real person, a person who puts pieces of herself into her work, a person who works for months—sometimes years—to finish a project, a person who is full of insecurities and doubts and their own Voices of Doom that stem from their past and trauma and even, perhaps, already-noted reviews.
At the beginning of January, when I returned to work after two weeks of holiday with my family, I picked up a brand new project and I slogged through the writing of it that whole first and second week. Plaguing me was a review I’d read of my first traditionally published book, The Colors of the Rain. It circled through my head and sat near the back of my eyes so every time I closed them, which I do to visualize scenes, those negative words flashed neon bright. The reviewer, an adult, had called my book unbelievable, had said she couldn’t finish it. It didn’t matter that the same day she posted this review a fifteen-year-old boy had thanked me for writing the book because it looked so much like his life and he felt seen and understood and like his experiences mattered. My book validated his life, reminded him that he was worth something greater than what he’d been through.
So after the first two weeks of slogging, I sat down and had a talk with myself. I said, Remember your true audience. They need your book.
And then I got to work.
Not everyone will love what I create. That’s okay. The important thing is that I remember for whom I’m creating, and why, and I leave the rest behind.
Lives can’t be changed by contributions that don’t exist.
(Photo by Emma Matthews on Unsplash)
