by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
We’re sitting around the table, talking about our days like we always do, when my husband says, “We got some negative podcast feedback today.”
“Oh, yeah?” I say.
He tells me about this product manager with Facebook, who wrote in to say that as much as he wants to recommend the show to his friends, he just can’t do it because of my husband’s involvement. My husband, according to this man, hasn’t had the kind of success people would expect from a business owner giving business advice.
This exchange comes at the beginning of our meal, just before we get to our thankfuls, and it thoroughly and completely derails me. So it gets to my turn, and I can barely think of anything that deserves my thanks, my whole mood shot through with rips and holes and great big tears. I think about my lost job and our money worries and what might or might not come next in the lineup of success, and my stomach twists, way deep down.
My husband knows, of course, because he’s that kind of man. He smiles and says, “It doesn’t really matter. I know I’m successful.” And I know he’s right and I know he knows, but something about it just won’t let me go.
That word, success, is a dirty one, snaking all through my past.
A man’s hasty criticism sends it striking again.
///
I spent my four years of high school constantly stressed about grades—because, you see, I wanted to go to college, and I knew my mom and stepdad could not afford it. I needed to graduate valedictorian, because it was the only way I would make it to college, since valedictorians in Texas are given free tuition at their college of choice for at least the first year of attendance. So I watched those class rankings, every six weeks, like they were life and death.
I came out on top, and my classmates held an election right before graduation for all the yearly yearbook awards: Most Beautiful, Most Talented, Most Athletic, Most Popular. They voted me Most Likely to Succeed.
“Because you’re smart,” they said. “Because you know so much. Because you always find a way.”
They could never have known the pressure that award carried in its flimsy paper particles and its forever photo buried in a maroon yearbook.
I went off to college, one hundred twenty-six miles from home. I had never been away from home longer than three weeks at a time, and by month two, I wanted so very badly to go home I cried myself to sleep every night. I missed my mom. I missed my whole family. I missed all the familiar. But I could not go back, because that is not something a person who was Most Likely to Succeed would do.
So, on the worst nights, I pulled out the coloring page my fifteen-year-old sister had sent me, the one with Garfield and Odie colored in muted oranges and yellows, the one that said, “Wish you were here” in a little cloud bubble beside Garfield’s scowling face. And I whispered what I could never, ever admit to anyone.
I do, too.
///
Success comes breathing down our necks, and its breath is foul and suffocating and inescapable—because it is everywhere in the world. In magazines profiling the “most successful” people in the world, according to how much they’re worth in a year’s salary. On billboards where famous personalities tell us to watch their shows. In books and on screens and next door to us, where the Joneses live.
Success looks like how big a business you build in the least amount of time or how much money you have in your bank account. It looks like big houses and luxury cars and a name that means something when spoken.
Success, the way the world defines it, carries pressure in its scales. It can hypnotize us into believing its shallow lies. It will tell us what to do and how to live and who we should be.
I can see its venom weaving in and out of all my younger years. I took jobs and turned others away because of it. I bought a two-door silver five-speed car because of it (two doors looks more successful than four, silver is sleeker than blue, five-speed is faster than automatic). I wanted a bigger ring because of it (because the bigger the diamond, the greater the catch, right?). I fell hard into its nest.
And then something happened.
///
As college graduation approached, I did not worry like all my friends. I already had a job at the Houston Chronicle. I had a brand new car and thousands in the bank. I had an engagement ring on my finger.
I was going to be prolific.
For a time, that Most Likely to Succeed award felt just right. I was proving it true.
Money? Check.
Prestigious job? Check.
Husband? Check.
By the end of that year, I would add several writing awards to the list, and later we would start a band and play around town and then the state and then all the way up through the Midwest.
On the road home from a gig in New Mexico, my cell phone rang. It was my mother. My grandmother, she said, was dead.
My grandmother, the one I’d lived with for a year during my childhood, when my parents were divorcing. My grandmother, who had offered her house for six months during that Houston Chronicle job and cried the day I left for San Antonio’s newspaper. My grandmother, beside whom I was too busy to sit those nights she watched the news—instead holing away in a room planning my elaborate Cinderella wedding.
Her death devastated me. I counted back all those married months, forty of them, and I had only seen her three times—once after we returned from our honeymoon and she picked us up from the airport and begged us to stay the night, because it was too late to drive from Houston back to San Antonio and she knew we were tired from the flight, and we said no, because we wanted to get home and get on with our married lives; once for our year anniversary trip to Disney World, when we needed her to drop us by the airport; once when she came down for my firstborn’s baby dedication, the day I watched her hold him from the stage while I cried through singing the lullaby I’d written for him.
How had this happened?
My grandmother was a school accountant of some kind for all her working life. She never made much money, never kept any money in savings because she was too busy buying her grandkids gas so they’d drive to see her or treating her kids to dinner or writing a check for a granddaughter’s wedding dress. She stayed put in a no-promotions job because she enjoyed the summers off and the way she could keep her grandkids for whole weeks at a time.
I learned something the day we all gathered to celebrate her life. I learned, or maybe I always knew, that she was the very definition of success.
///
Success lives in who we are, not what we have.
Success is found in the way we look at our spouse in the middle of an argument. It’s found in the way we talk to our children when they’ve done something wrong. It’s found in the relationships we keep with family and friends and neighbors and strangers. It’s found in the deepest spaces of a heart. The world, the ignorant words of others, the critical eyes of people, can make us forget this.
Sometimes people will look at our choices—having and raising six children, turning down a promotion because it would take too much time away from those children, remaining a one-car family because we don’t want the debt—and stamp us unsuccessful because we don’t look like the ideal. But success can never be measured on the outside. It is held within.
I wish I had realized that sooner in my life. I will never get back the time I spent pursuing a twisted version of success.
But I can redeem it now.
So tonight, in front of my boys who will one day be men with a whole world and its people trying to tell them what success means, I look my husband in the eye and say, “You are successful in all the ways that matter.”
And then I tick them off, all those successful attributes so much a part of who he is.
We may not have a bank full of money we couldn’t spend in a lifetime or two luxury cars sitting out front or a vacation home in that place we always wanted to live. But what we do have, this life full of laughter and presence and joy, is so much better than all that.
The world can take its success definition and cash it in for an empty life.
I’ll take my full one any day.
This is an excerpt from We Count it All Joy, a book of essays. For more of Rachel’s writings, visit her Reader Library page, where you can get a couple of books for free.
(Photo by Jungwoo Hong on Unsplash)
by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
I recently had the privilege and pleasure of returning to the library I visited every Saturday as a kid. My mom is the library director there, and she asked me to do an author event. I readily agreed. With a crowd of old school friends, old teachers, and strangers, I talked about my journey from small-town girl to published author.
I came from humble beginnings, but I always knew I wanted to be an author. I soon learned that people like me—the poor—weren’t supposed to be authors; we were supposed to be workers, not creators. We were supposed to try harder to pull ourselves from the cycle of poverty, and creative work wasn’t real work. We were supposed to accept our lot in life and go about our business if not happily, then at least diligently.
Though she didn’t divorce my father until I was eleven, my mother spent most of my childhood as a single mom, while my dad was away working a job that didn’t provide her any money. Money was tight. She was creative and stretched it as far as she could. She worked two jobs to do it. But she always seemed able to provide me with an endless supply of stapled-together white paper and sharpened pencils. I ran through these blank “books” rapidly, writing and illustrating stories very similar to Little House on the Prairie, (though the drawings were nowhere near the quality of Garth Williams’s illustrations).
In middle school my English and Reading teachers recognized something me. They told me I was good at writing, and that made me think maybe I could do it. In high school my teachers affirmed that gift, inviting me to enter writing competitions, publish in small magazines, and develop my skill in big and small ways. I got a full scholarship to college on the strength of my entrance essay, which my high school counselor encouraged me to write.
I speak out often on behalf of the poor—about their need for support, the complicated circumstances that keep them stranded in lack, the way we are all different even while we share the same seams of a story. And any time I speak about it, old high school friends come out to say, “Yes, but you made it out. Why can’t they?”
I made it out; why can’t they?
It’s a difficult question to answer, and, of course, there are never simple answers to any questions. I made it out because I hailed from different circumstances—I had a mother who believed in me and told me every chance she got. I made it out because I had the right personality; I’ve always been tenacious, even while carrying a good measure of self-doubt, and that helped me climb from the pit (not without a few falls, but I’ve never been one to stay down for long). I made it out because all along my way I had someone calling me higher—people who loved me and wanted the best for me and believed I could actually accomplish it.
My making it out was a group effort; I am not who I am—did not become who I am—alone. I am who I am because of the people in my life.
Every situation is different, which means I can’t say for certain why someone can’t climb out of their own poverty pit. Poverty is a cycle for a reason; many don’t have the support or fortune to pull themselves up by the bootstraps, as the saying goes. Many don’t have bootstraps at all; they fell off a long time ago.
I often tell people that I feel as though I was swept along in a tide that I could not control and could not stop, as if there was something invisible carrying me to where I am now. For me, that tide is God; for others it is, perhaps, a coincidence. A lucky streak. A fortunate turn of events. I am not here to argue; I only know that I have become because of a long line of people believing in, supporting, and encouraging me to become.
And today, as any other day, I feel incredibly grateful that I never walked alone. And I think, as I so often do, about those who are alone. I hope we can find them and give them what my helpers gave me: hope, identity, and a way out.
This is an excerpt from We Count it All Joy, a book of essays. For more of Rachel’s writings, visit her Reader Library page, where you can get a couple of books for free.
(Photo by Matt Howard on Unsplash)
by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
In a few days some of my favorite people will gather around my living room table, and we will talk over turkey and heap a plate with mashed potatoes and gravy and pretend we’re trying to decide between apple or chocolate pie when we know we’ve already planned to take a slice of both. Some of us will be missing this year because of in-law dinners and lives too many states away, but a small group will sit and celebrate the sacred family tradition that is Thanksgiving.
We will start that meal with a prayer, like we always do, and the four-year-old will grin into my face, because he’s so excited his Nonny and Poppy are here; and the five-year-old will try hard to close his eyes but won’t be able to help that roving gaze, because he’s always loved a food spread like this; and the eight-year-old will shift from foot to foot, because his daddy sometimes prays a little too long.
And we will give thanks in our hearts for all we have seen and done in the year stretching between this moment and the last time we all met around a table and a turkey and two pans of green bean casserole.
Love and hope and awe and wonder meet us here.
///
It’s hard to know when those first memories of Thanksgiving began. There are flashes of days down through the years, one at a great-uncle’s house with woods looming behind it and a long wooden swing hanging from the trees that shadowed his yard and pine needles thick like a spiky carpet on the ground.
There is a great-great grandmother’s house, all of us squeezed in the tiny square footage her husband built, where legend had it she slept with a gun under her pillow because she lived alone and the neighborhood had turned a little dangerous for an old woman and she wasn’t the least afraid to use it, and I remember the way the kids would sit out on her cement porch and swing or drop pieces of paper or leaves through the little mail slot so it would fall in the middle of her living room, reminding the adults we were still waiting on that food-call.
There is a great-grandmother’s house, after the great-great and the great-uncle were gone, and this gathering looked and felt smaller because so many of the older ones had died, and others had drifted away with the dying, and it was only a handful of kids who went out front to play kickball while the adults and my Nana watched a game on her living room television. All the kids missed the false teeth flying out when a referee made a bad call and Nana screeched at the screen, but we heard the laughter of all the adults who witnessed it.
These early memories are raucous and full of children running in and out of houses, trying not to stick fingers in the pies, and I can still smell that turkey and the fresh bread and those vegetables we didn’t even know the names of.
I couldn’t explain it then, not in words, but I could feel the thanks that burst from the first bite of food, all the way to the last bite of pie, when we all felt like we might pop and surely wouldn’t eat again after this.
There was something simple and special and sacred about those shared days. They courted joy.
///
Thanksgiving Day has lost some of its magic now.
Maybe it’s because a job demands work until the very day of thanks. Maybe it’s because kids go to school and homework still comes home and schedules still remain the same until Thursday rolls around. Maybe it’s because of all who are missing now.
When all those greats were alive we had so many families gathering around so many tables, and now, this year, we have two. There are no more greats around for the little children. Those children’s parents are the ones hosting dinners now. There aren’t even always aunts and uncles who join in the festivities anymore, because we all have our own lives and our own plans and our own families.
Gone are the days of great aunts and uncles all under the same roof for the same day breaking bread and eating their fill and trying not to notice how everyone looks older this year.
I feel a little sad about this. We used to pack a house on this traditional holiday, and now that holiday demands work and dangles big sales and asks families to cut short the one day a year when they might fall asleep on a couch after eating too much turkey and no one would mind their snoring.
I miss that magic.
///
There is a Thanksgiving that stands out as scary and new and somewhat disappointing. I was nine years old, and we had just moved to Ohio because it was the only way my mom thought we would ever be a family again, since my dad worked in Ohio and our home state of Texas was a long way off. She told us the news a month before summer ended and listened to us cry about leaving our friends, and then she packed us up and we moved into a two-story house in Mansfield, six or so rundown blocks from an elementary school.
We didn’t have the money that year to go back home (Texas would always be home) and spend the holiday with my mom’s family, who held all my memories of Thanksgiving to date. So we spent the day with my dad’s family instead.
My paternal grandmother was a saintly woman. It wasn’t her fault that she and my grandfather were the only two I really knew in that group of thirty or so. It wasn’t her fault that I had never felt more like an outsider than I did that year. That day.
Cousins who had grown up together, whose names we didn’t even know and I can’t recall today, played hide and seek in Grandma’s travel trailer, and my brother and sister and I stayed out under the trees, raking leaves, because we didn’t know them and they didn’t know us, and raking leaves at least gave us something to do. So we raked and waited for that screen door to open and let us know it was time to eat and we could finally blame our silence on food.
When they called, we all trampled inside a house that smelled like cabbage.
It was the first time I ever threw up after a Thanksgiving meal.
///
I wonder what my boys will remember of Thanksgiving, this holiday that is not so wild and noisy and crowded as it was in my girlhood because there is only them and a grandma and grandpa and, every other year, an aunt and uncle or two who bring a handful of cousins.
Will they remember these Thanksgiving days as thrilling, with a haze of laughter blurring them into gold? Will they remember adults playing board games and talking until the sun goes down and the whole sky turns dark? Will they remember how eagerly they waited to sit at the “adult” table, wondering every year if this one might be the year they move up past all the babies?
The spread at our Thanksgiving is nothing like it was for me as a kid, with rows and rows of homemade pies and sweet tea like syrup and a whole table full of steaming food in too-hot-to-touch bowls, but does it still look magical to my sons? Do they feel the people who are missing, all those family members who have come and long gone, or do they see a room-for-more house as full?
Do they notice the lost pieces like I do?
///
Then there was the first Thanksgiving without my maternal grandmother.
She had been there for all of the holidays I could remember but one, short and regal with black and white curls, always quiet in a corner chair so she could observe her family, because she was content simply to be in the same room with all of them.
She died in early February the year I only had one baby, and no one was thinking of Thanksgiving the day we gathered inside a church and mourned our great loss in gushing sobs until we had headaches and swollen eyes and a whole pile of crumpled tissues stuffed in the bottom of our purses.
No one thought of Thanksgiving when it came around, either. It came and went, without my aunts and uncles or any of the people left who might have carried on this sacred tradition of Thanksgiving Dinner. We didn’t carry on.
That year I hosted a small family gathering at my house, where my brother and sister and mom and stepdad and husband and only one baby boy sat down at a table set for six, with a highchair hanging on the end. It was the smallest family gathering we’d ever seen for Thanksgiving, because the one who held all the rest of us together was gone.
I didn’t know then that it would become the new standard for a family with a missing piece.
///
How much do we lose in this place of smaller family gatherings? I don’t really know.
As much as I grieve my family’s loss of larger gatherings, I cannot separate myself from something else I have learned in my adult years, something I never had to know as a child. In our world, there exist those with no family left and those who can’t physically travel to their family and those who have long been rejected by their family, and what about these on a day like this?
There are those who don’t eat half as well as we do on Thanksgiving, or any other day, and what about them? How do we even celebrate family around the abundant spread of a table when there are those who are lost and hungry and alone?
Maybe the answer to those spaces left in our home by the ones who are gone waits right outside our doors, at the house beside ours or the one behind the park or the street corner down the way, where the man selling newspapers works just another day of his life. Maybe we become family for those who have none.
My table will be full for Thanksgiving this year, but there is room still for more. I want to find them. I want to know them. I want to bring them home, into the fold of light and love and laughter like I have known.
It’s Thanksgiving, and we will eat and we will reminisce and we will give thanks for all we have and the people we love and the whole last year’s beauty. But that is not The End of Thanksgiving. Because true Thanksgiving becomes thanks-living, and thanks-living means thanks-giving to the world, to all those who need what we have, be it food or presence or simply an invitation.
So this Thanksgiving, I see the hollows and the spaces, and I thank God for them, because, even now, they are waiting to be filled.
Someone is waiting to be filled.
This is an excerpt from We Count it All Joy, a book of essays. For more of Rachel’s writings, visit her Reader Library page, where you can get a couple of books for free.
(Photo by Hannah Busing on Unsplash)
by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
I watch my boy from where I sit, his back curved a bit while his head hangs over the Star Wars book he’s reading, and I marvel at how his brow is missing the soft spot between eye and forehead, how his face has thinned out of the baby cheeks and chin, how his mouth moves in silent speaking while he is so lost in the world of a book. My boy is no more a baby, but he will always be my baby.
In two days he will celebrate eight years since his birth day, that day when my body bore down and his body tore through, a day when boy became first son and girl-woman became Mama.
“I know how I was made, Mama,” he said last year on his day, when I set a birthday brownie-cupcake in front of him. “God took a piece of your heart and made me.”
He has a gift with words and truth and insight. He saw it exactly right. All my children are a piece of my heart walking and jumping and racing around outside my body, and it’s scary and risky and agonizing to let loose those heart strings so they can learn to walk on their own, but this is how we learn to really live.
The love between a mama and her boy is wide and deep and strong enough to knock us all flat.
What I have learned of love, what I have learned of grace and forgiveness and joy, what I have learned of life, I could not have foretold that chilly night in November, four days before Thanksgiving that year.
I have never been the same.
///
He slid into the world late, when the sky was pitch black, and it was a mostly perfect, by-the-books birth, with a perfect, rosy-cheeked baby and a perfect love all the way from the beginning. And then they released him to two young parents who didn’t know what to do with a seven-pound, fifteen-ounce baby except let him steal our hearts.
We laid him in a Peter Rabbit bassinet that first night, after reading him a bedtime story, and then his daddy and I found sleep to the sound of a new being breathing just beside our bed.
I woke before he did for that early, early morning feeding, and he was still sleeping soundly, but the darkness, all above his bassinet, was moving, swirling, like something lived in the dark, something sinister and sharp and full of a death that did not steal breath but something greater—life.
I picked up my baby boy and held him in my arms, and I prayed while he fed, and when he was done I held him and prayed some more, and when my arms got too tired to hold him anymore, I laid him in the bassinet, but I didn’t stop praying until the first shards of light reached right through my window, until that twirling dark lifted from the corners of the room, until the fingers that fought to reach an innocent baby’s form had completely disappeared.
It was my first all-night vigil for this boy whose name means Jehovah has heard.
It would not be my last.
///
Just a few weeks ago, I tossed and turned and prayed and listened and tried hard to find my way out of a confusion too dark to see through.
My boy had spent three days in school suspension for choosing to act outside of who he is, and I was sick to my stomach and sick at heart, trying desperately to crawl my way toward understanding. I tried to find the words that came so easily all those years ago, at my first all-night vigil, but the only words that would come sounded more like: Help. Please. Over and over and over again.
He is too big now to hold in my arms all night, but I held him in my heart.
It was all mere weeks after announcing we were expecting boy number six, when all those people filled a comment box with words: I guess you’re just really good at raising boys. But here was my firstborn, the boy who first stole my heart, proving them all wrong.
There was more he had to teach me here, this child who has always been strong-willed and incredibly creative and a wild hurricane of love.
Sometimes our parenting journey takes us right up against the places where it feels like we don’t know what we’re doing and it feels like we are not enough or we were never enough or we will never be enough and it feels like we are flailing in a midnight where all the stars have gone out. Sometimes we need to stall here and stay a while.
Our children will show us the way back out.
///
The day before Thanksgiving that birth year we raced him to a children’s ER, because he hadn’t produced a wet or dirty diaper in twelve hours. Your milk will come in, my mother had told me the day we brought him home and I could not even pump an ounce and could not say for sure that my baby was eating anything at all.
I sat in the emergency room, holding my four-day-old, watching the way he slept so peacefully even though my whole body shook with the knowing that he could have died from his dehydration.
They called us back and woke him with a needle, trying to find a tiny vein so they could hydrate him again. He cried and screamed and writhed on a table while they poked the bottom of his foot and then his arm and then another hand and then, after all the others slid out of their grasp, the largest vein in his forehead.
I watched my baby, hooked up to a hydration drip, and I noticed the way those glassy eyes stared at the nurse whose face hung over him, how he searched the room for his mama when he realized the face wasn’t the right one, and I cried and cried and could not stop crying. My body had failed him already, four days in. I had failed him already, four days in.
It would take all the days after for him to set me straight. I had not failed him, not really, because I was still his mama, and that was all he needed.
I loved him and he loved me and that was simple, but it was enough.
///
Love would always be enough.
Even on the days when strong will met frustration. Even on the days we yelled and said those words we didn’t mean. Even on the days we walked bruised and bloodied and broken for all the mistakes we made. Every mistake, every failure, every less-than-ideal moment was remaking me.
It was not just this boy who slid from a womb eight years ago. It was me, too.
A child, this child, and all his little brothers living inside my home, have led me deeper into the way. They have drawn me closer to the Way. So it is not just his birthday we will celebrate in two days. It is my birth-anew day, too.
As hard as this journey has been, the ways he has taken apart all our parenting philosophies and rearranged them completely, the times we have walked, shaking, off the ledge into a boy-world—I would not trade it for all the easy and predictable certainty in the world.
Sure, there have been days when he has raged and I have thrown my rage to meet his and we both bled through tears and words and wonderings, but I would not give away those days, those opportunities he has given me to practice asking forgiveness and limp toward a better vision for parenting, because they have taught me about humility and grace and freedom. Sure, I used to watch the two-year-old nursery where all those kids sat on their designated seats while my boy climbed onto the one he’d already chosen before the teachers pointed out a different one, and I would wonder how the other kids could be so obedient and well-behaved and calm, but I would not wish a perfectly obedient, minds-all-the-time child in his place, because he has taught me acceptance and joy and what it’s like to surrender to earth-shaking belly laughter. Sure, there would be days when he walked out the door and threw back those words, I’m going to run away, and I wanted to let him, but the truth is I would chase him down to the ends of the earth, because he has taught me how to love in all the hardest places, and I don’t want to stop learning. Ever.
The only time I ever considered my boy easy was when he was a baby, but I’m glad. What he has taught me in his challenge whispers truth about a mama’s strength, so much greater than she knows, and a mama’s hope, so much wider than she can see, and a mama’s great love, so much deeper than she could ever understand.
Thank God he is alive. Thank God he is mine.
This is an excerpt from We Count it All Joy, a book of essays. For more of Rachel’s writings, visit her Reader Library page, where you can get a couple of books for free.
(Photo by Helen Montoya Henrichs.)
by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings, Wing Chair Musings featured
He was playing a video game, for his designated technology time, but he was crying.
I gave him a few minutes, thought maybe it would die down and he would master the game and the whine-crying would cease. But it continued.
I was trying to read a book about the adolescent brain—which was difficult enough without the interruption of the upset of one of my children, which always signals to my brain, my heart, and my body, that I must turn my attention to the weeping one. This is, I suppose, the natural inclination of a mother: to heal the hurt of her children.
I put down my book and watched him. His face was already red. Tears dripped in a continuous trail down his sun-browned cheeks.
In my house, it’s perfectly fine to cry. Crying is helpful and healing and completely natural. However. I find it especially perturbing when a child is crying continuously about something that is supposed to be fun; the obvious thing to do was quit playing what was making him cry.
My son had done this very same thing a couple of days ago—cried during the whole half hour of tech time he spent on the Nintendo Switch, after which he had a headache and had to lie down.
I said, “Maybe you should put it away.”
He ignored me and continued trying. I watched him for a moment, torn by my desire for him to keep trying and the way his cry was snipping at my nerves. I said, “Put it away, baby. It’s silly to cry about a game that’s supposed to be fun. Remember what happened last time?”
He reluctantly put it away.
After a few minutes, he said, “When you said it was silly to cry about something that was supposed to be fun, were you saying I’m silly?”
I put my book down again. I explained to him that calling what he does silly does not mean he is silly.
“But it’s something I do,” he said.
“But what you do doesn’t make who you are,” I said. We’ve told our sons this over and over and over again, but it’s a difficult concept to grasp. I said, “If I yell, does that make me a yeller?”
“No.”
“If I lie, does that make me a liar?”
“Well if you do it often enough.”
I held up a finger and shook my head. “It might make me seem like a person who lies,” I said. “But it doesn’t make me a liar.”
It’s a subtle difference, with a nuance that is often lost on young children, but he is growing older, and he has heard this before, and hearing it another time will solidify it in his mind and heart and, more importantly, his identity. So I continued. I said, “‘Liar’ is a negative label. We don’t use negative labels for people, only for actions. So you’re not silly. Some things you do might be silly, but that does not make you silly.”
He looked at me for a minute, grinned, and stood up, heading toward the playroom, where LEGOs waited for building. On his way, he pretended to walk into an invisible door.
A perfect finale for such a serious talk.
(Photo by This Is Now Photography.)
by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings
My love month is October.
This is the month when I celebrate walking down the aisle in an old historical church situated inside a lovely wood near a lake, at the end of which was the man I loved. The evening of October 11, 2003, was the night when my husband and I looked at one another and promised forever—promised, essentially, that we would break the generations of divorce that marked our family lines. It was the night we walked down an enchanted path lined with deer (just like the princesses had in the fairy tales I’d loved as a child). It was the night we held hands across a stick shift, on our way to a magical Disney World honeymoon.
This year we celebrate fifteen years married.
We try, every year, to remind our sons about the birthday of our marriage. We tell stories of falling in love, laughing with our sons about the miscommunication mishaps, bungled dates, and the fumbling of our feet along the path to forever. Sometimes we take out the old albums and relive the days when we were young and practically carefree, basking in the memories of a time we can hardly recall. Sometimes we dance in our kitchen while our sons do chores around us and pretend not to like our show of affection.
I’ve been wrestling, as I always seem to do, with this idea of love for the last several weeks. I have always been a person given to romance—but romantic love is not the only love I think about. In fact, most of the time the kind of love I think about is the one that extends to all humanity—the one that connects us to each other. The one that often feels difficult to choose. The one that does not always come easily or naturally.
My second son asked me the other day why some people are so difficult to love. He had been bickering all day with his next-in-line brother, who is only fourteen months younger than he is. They currently wear the same size clothes—yet another opportunity for contention in their relationship: whose shirt is whose?
I did not answer his question, because there was a larger question on the table, a larger teaching to be made. A teaching about the nature of love—one so important I could not let it go.
When we are in the presence of someone we consider difficult (which is, of course, always subjective), love can feel nearly impossible. But love is not always something that wells up in us and overflows onto all those around us; it is, most frequently, something we must purposefully put on.
We put on our love. We gird ourselves with love. We clothe ourselves with love, arm ourselves with love, fortify ourselves with love. We focus our eyes on love. We train ourselves to become love.
When we move out into the world—into our schools, our neighborhoods, our workplaces, our social media spaces—we must first put on our love. When we engage in conversation (particularly the heated ones), we must put on our love. When we move about in our homes, we must put on our love.
When our emotions overwhelm us, we must stop, breathe, and reach for love—so that we can put it on.
Love is how we see each other clearly. It is how we learn from one another. It is how we grow ourselves.
Mary Renault famously said: “In hatred as in love, we grow like the thing we brood upon. What we loathe, we graft into our very soul.”
What we love—who we love—we graft into our very soul. The more we think about, embrace, put on love, the more we become it.
I hope we can always be love.
