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 | Poetry, Wing Chair Musings featured
When I was a little girl,
my mother would take me
to the library every week.
We lived in a tiny town,
with little else to do.
These days were my favorites.
I’d run my hand along
the old book spines,
taking my time choosing
the ones that I would
carry home with me,
the ones that would
carry me away for hours.
I would gather as many
as I could manage
in my spindly arms,
and my mother, knowing that
I would read them all in
the course of a week,
would check out every one of them
and then leave me
to my words.
The library was a place
where the world expanded,
where I learned that it was possible
to be more than just
a poor girl from a poor family
who would never amount
to anything spectacular or significant.
The library brought every possibility
to my fingertips and said
it could happen for me.
The library gave me knowledge
and perspective and a way forward
through every circumstance
that found me.
And so the library
was essential to becoming,
to understanding,
to enduring.
This is an excerpt from Textbook of an Ordinary Life: poems. For more of Rachel’s poems, visit her Reader Library page, where you can get a few volumes for free.
(Photo by Helen Montoya Photography.)
by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings, Wing Chair Musings featured
We all gathered on the same two acres where my sister and brother and I grew up, though the house we lived in for seven years no longer sits on the land. Another marks its place instead: wider, longer, newer.
Fajita meat smoked on the island in the middle of the kitchen. A bowl of my mom’s potato salad hugged the edge of the counter, a metal spoon jutting out of it. A cake, frosted in white, covered in candy mustaches, bleeding red along the sides, waited to be cut.
It said, “Happy Father’s Day.”
I’m not a cake person, but my eyes would catch on those words every time I passed by the island. Happy Father’s Day, it said. Happy Father’s Day.
All day long I felt something pinching at the corners of my existence. All day long I shoved it back down where it belonged, hidden and safe in a heart that had come to terms with this, truly. All day long I tried to forget about my rocky relationship with the word “father.”
But it’s not something a fatherless child can so easily forget.
///
My memories of my father, especially the first ones, are vague and hazy and uneven. I remember looking up to him and marveling at how tall he was, like a giant. I remember watching everything he did with awe and adoration, like he was the very definition of a hero. I remember how he smiled, his eyes crinkling up in a way that made you want to do whatever you could do to elicit another, because they were so few and far between.
I remember hands that would hold me when crossing a road, so I would be safe, and hands that would redden my skin in successive smacks for crying harder when he threatened to give me something to cry about. I remember tall glasses of milk with butter biscuits and the mess of a kitchen my mom would have to clean up after my father decided to cook. I remember a bright yellow truck and swimming in a murky lake and words that could sting worse than his hands.
I remember standing beneath a cover of trees, the wind pulling at my dress, whipping it against my knees and calves, while he climbed on the back of his motorcycle. I asked him when he would be back. He said nothing, only smiled, blew me a kiss, and drove away. I watched him until I could not see that motorcycle anymore, until I could not see him anymore.
And then I remember gone.
///
At my mom’s house, the fathers stood around outside, talking over a barbecue pit. They chased little ones inside, saving them from plummeting off a couch. They bent over a game of croquet and taught boys how to putt.
Midway through the day, I ambled outside and saw my brother-in-law, leaning into a tire swing, helping my niece onto it. He pushed her in gentle circles, and she giggled. She asked him to push her again, and he did, this time higher. Her face changed, and her hands wrapped tighter around the rope. She made a little noise, startled by the feel of flying higher.
He heard the noise and stopped her, reassuring her she was safe. She climbed down and ran off across the wide yard. His eyes followed her, and, when her face grew too red and sweaty, he carried her inside for a drink of cold water.
I watched, and I wondered.
I wondered what it would have been like to have a dad who noticed. A dad who noticed that your face changed almost imperceptibly, because you were trying hard to be brave, but the truth was you were scared. I wondered what it would have been like to have a dad tell you it was okay to be afraid, that he still loved you even though. I wondered what it would have been like to have a dad who saw your thirst and met it.
My dad noticed the shortcomings and the mistakes and the journal he once took it upon himself to read. He told us all the ways he would have raised us differently if he’d been the one to keep us, instead of our mom, who, he said, coddled us too much. He saw our thirst and called it complaining. Neediness. Weakness.
Ridiculous. Inconvenient. Too much.
The words needled into my skin, becoming three completely new ones: Not. Good. Enough.
///
It took him a long time to come back, but he did. He came back and then he went away again, and then he came back and went away again. After a year of his being gone, my mom told us we were moving.
To Ohio, she said.
To be together, she said.
Like a real family, she said.
We cried and protested, and when the crying and protesting didn’t work, we despaired and hated. We didn’t want to leave our friends, our home, our security. We’d never even been out of the state of Texas, but we went in the end. We had no other choice. Being a real family was too alluring.
My mom settled us into the largest house we’d had, or at least that’s how my memory tells it, even though I can’t remember the rooms all that clearly, because a veil dropped over my memory that year, as if my life had been a candlelit movie set until a move to Ohio turned it into a darkened theater, with only flashes of clarity.
But what didn’t happen in the Promised Land was my father coming home. We weren’t a family. Nothing changed.
My father’s absence in that year carved a jagged hole in my heart. I tried to be the best I could be, so he would come home. I tried to make the best grades, tried to have all the right friends, tried to be perfect, tried to be less of an inconvenience, tried to prove I was worthy of love. But nothing I did could bring him home.
We left Ohio with failure whipping across our backs, and I would work harder in the years that came after, always trying to prove I was somebody. Somebody great, somebody noteworthy, somebody who deserved a loving father who stuck around.
The harder I worked, the larger the hole grew and the larger the hole grew, the harder I worked. It was a cycle that could not be tamed.
I fell fast and furious into it.
///
I was a seventh grader when my stepdad showed up at the front door with two large pizzas and met us for the first time. He was a young blue-eyed buzz-cut-haired man who treated my mom like she was something special, and as much as we loved that about him, we could not forgive him, at the time, for taking my father’s place. And we made it hard on him.
We shouted our disrespect, and we fought with our hands and our hearts and our words, and we told him we didn’t want him to live with us, never ever ever. We did everything we could think to do to make sure that our father’s space was untouched. Saved, if you will. Because our father might one day return.
It’s hard for a kid to let go of that dream. It’s hard for a kid to let another man step into the place of one who should have loved them unconditionally, recklessly, forever and always just because they shared his blood and genes and the long legs and thin lips and straight hair.
But my stepdad stuck around. He fought for our hearts. He picked up all the pieces my father left and said we could be his. We could be loved. We could be good enough.
My stepdad walked me down the aisle, and he sat in the waiting room the day all my sons were born, and he calls my sons his grandsons, even though they share none of his blood. He has shown me what it means to be a father. It does not mean abandonment and forgetting birthdays and wishing out loud in the hearing of a kid, that the kid could be different.
It means putting a heart back together with Duct tape and calling it spectacular anyway.
///
My husband is one of the most hands-on fathers I know. He cares for our children for half a day every day while I hole up and write. He plays with them, he raises them, he speaks life into them. I watch him sometimes with a mixture of love and awe, because I never knew that a father could be like that. So present. So forgiving. So involved and heroic and wonderful.
I never knew a father’s love could be so spectacularly life-changing—not just for the ones who are the recipients of it, but for the ones who are watching it unfold around them.
A father, in my world, had only ever picked up and left, moving on to another family—one that was better, easier, more worth the work of sticking around. But healing crept into my heart, watching my husband. Not just because he was a phenomenal father but also because he messed up.
He messed up. My father messed up. We all mess up.
A father has a tough job, this being a hero to the ones who look to him for truth and love and identity. Some fathers aren’t up for the task. Some are. Some try. Some don’t so much. Some step into the role and play it for all it’s worth. Some are too afraid to even toe it.
And some? They just don’t even know where to start.
///
Father’s Day. It’s not an easy day for me. I always feel a bit guilty that I only really call my father once a year, on Father’s Day. Sometimes I don’t even do that. Sometimes it’s just a text. Sometimes the whole day goes by and I’m so busy with my husband and boys that I forget to even text.
Part of the problem, see, is that my father is not the first person I think of on father’s day. I think of the man who stuck around when the going got hard and I turned into a contrary teenager. I think of the man who stood there, stoic, when I called him an idiot because he wouldn’t let me go see my boyfriend. I think of the man who spun me around the dance floor during the father-daughter dance the day I got married.
Father’s Day isn’t always a simple day in the lives of the fatherless ones. Some of us have blood fathers who gave up and called it quits, and that damaged something deep inside, told us we weren’t worthy of the effort it takes to be a dad. Some of us have fathers who left in other ways, like death or suicide or an accident that rendered him inaccessible to us. Some of us never even knew our dads.
We were hurt by our dads. We still carry the scars. Maybe we haven’t quite forgiven them.
And so when it comes time to celebrate dads, we say, oh, well, it’s just another day in my life, because I never really had a dad anyway.
But there is something I have learned in the years between that vulnerable eleven-year-old and this woman I am today, and it is this: Dads come in many different shapes and sizes, and the ones we think of on Father’s Day aren’t always the ones who scientifically contributed one half of who we are.
The fathers of our heart look like teachers and coaches and friends’ dads and stepdads and fathers-in-law and mentors. They look like the ones who step into our lives when others step out. They shape us the same as any dad should, even though they didn’t have to. They fill us. They rebuild us. They are dads.
And so, for Father’s Day, I choose to thank all those men who step into the lives of the fatherless ones and teach little boys how to be men and little girls how to be loved. Thank you for your presence. Thank you for your generosity. Thank you for your love.
Happy Father’s Day to all the fathers of my heart.
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 This is Now Photography.)
by Rachel Toalson | Crash Test Parents, Wing Chair Musings featured
I don’t know if I’ve ever faced a harder challenge in my parenting years than raising twins.
Maybe it’s because our twins came near the end of the line of boys and they see all their older brothers do, and they expect that life will be exactly like that for them.
Except there are two of them.
Oh, you want to drink out of a big-boy cup because your older brother did it when he was 2? I’m sorry. There are two of you. You want to sit free at the table instead of strapped into your chairs because all your brothers did it when they were almost 3? I’m sorry. There are two of you. What? You want me to leave the baby gate on your door open because you haven’t yet figured out how to climb over it (it’s coming)? I’m sorry. In case you haven’t noticed, THERE ARE TWO OF YOU.
Our twins are identical, two sides of the same egg. Nature’s gift, doctors say. One is left-handed, one is right-handed. They complete each other.
That’s part of the problem. What one doesn’t think of, the other does. What one is afraid to do, the other will try. It’s like having four toddler wrecking balls walking around the house, scheming about what they can destroy next. I imagine their conversations go a little something like this:
Twin 1: Hey. Hey, brother. Mama’s not watching. Remember how she told us not to touch this computer? She’ll never know if we do. Where is she?
Twin 2: She’s in the bathroom. Remember what we did last time she was in the bathroom?
Twin 1: Oh, man. That was fun. But back to this computer. She’ll never know. I just can’t figure out how to open it.
Twin 2: Like this. But how do you turn it on?
Twin 1: Easy. I’ve seen Daddy press this button right here.
Twin 2: There it is.
[Mama comes back into the room with the baby she just changed.]
Twin 1: Close it, close it, close it!
Twin 2: Walk away. Not too fast, not too slow. Just enough to look like we weren’t doing anything. And make sure you wear the wide eyes. She thinks they’re cute.
I love my twins. Of course I do. It’s just that they were completely unexpected.
If I could have read a primer two years ago, this is what it might have said: Every parent of twins needs…
1. An extra dose of patience.
You will need this for many things. You will need it for the stranger at the store who asks to see your amazing bundles of joy and, after looking at their angelic sleeping faces, declares she “always wanted twins” and you want to say, “Oh, really? Then take mine,” because one was up screaming at 3 a.m. and as soon as you got him calmed down two hours later the other one woke up screaming, and as soon as you got that one calmed down an hour later all the other boys were up asking for breakfast. Which woke up the twins, who were also hungry. Again.
You will need this extra dose of patience for when they learn to talk and there are so.many.words and so.many.whys and so many demands for everything under the sun. You will need it for the potty training and the big-boy-bed transitions and the constant fighting from dawn until dusk.
You will need it for the times you were helping one out of his pajamas and into his day clothes and you return back downstairs to find all the jackets removed from your poetry books and spread across the living room floor like a special carpet for toddler feet, for the six thousandth time (You should probably just put those books away, Mama. Far, far away.).
2. Good decision-making skills.
These will come into play those times they both wake up at 3 a.m. because they’re hungry. Which one do you feed first? (Answer: You’ll figure out a way to feed both.)
You’ll need these skills when one twin is in the downstairs bathroom playing with a plunger in a potty you specifically remember your older boy didn’t flush five minutes ago when he stunk it up and the other is in his bathroom upstairs finger painting the mirror with a whole tube of eco-friendly toothpaste. Which do you get first? (Answer: The toilet one. Toothpaste is much easier to clean than the mess an overzealous plunger in a pile of poo can make.)
You’ll need them when the one who’s known for wandering does exactly that, moves from his nap time place while you take a minute or five for a shower, because it’s been four days since the last one, and you walk out to find him playing with the computer he’s been told 50 billion times to leave alone and, in his panic to close it, he deletes the 1,500 words you wrote this morning before kids got up. What do you do? (Answer: Cry.)
3. A rigorous workout regimen.
When one is running down the street because someone forgot to lock the deadbolt he can’t reach and another is going out back without shoes in 26-degree rain, you’ll want to be in tip-top shape for that. I recommend interval training. That way when they stop and change directions, you’ll be ready. You’ve done this a thousand times. Ski jumps. Football runs. All-out sprints.
When they slip, unnoticed (because they’re like ninjas), into the playroom while you’re wiping down the table after a ridiculously messy lunch, and both of them come out with their scooters, you’ll want to be able to wrestle those “cooters” from screaming, flailing bodies without hurting anyone.
And when one collapses in the middle of the park because it’s time to go and he’s not ready yet and the other thinks that just might work, you’ll need strong arms to carry thirty-two pounds of kicking and screaming twins back to the car, one tucked under each armpit.
4. Containment measures.
This would be things like strollers until they’re 3 and booster seats until they’re 4 and a baby gate on their door until they’re…15. Well, maybe 13.
It also means leashes at the city zoo on a packed day, even though you said you’d never use them and you can feel the disapproval of other people and you want to say, “Come talk to me when you have 2-year-old twins. These things have saved their lives 17 billion times, and that was before we even got out of the parking lot.”
Containment saves lives. And sanity.
Twins are great. And hard. And maddening. And great. And so hard.
They can disassemble an 8-year-old’s room of LEGO Star Wars ships in 3.1 seconds. They can disassemble a heart with one identical smile and a valiant try at saying “Uptown funk you up” that sounds like it should have come with a bleep.
There’s just nothing like them in the world. You’ll be so glad you get to be their mama.
Especially after they fall asleep.
This is an excerpt from Parenthood: Has Anyone Seen My Sanity?, the first book in the Crash Test Parents humor series. To get access to some all-new, never-before-published humor essays in two hilarious Crash Test Parents guides, visit the Crash Test Parents Reader Library page.
(Photo by Helen Montoya Photography.)
by Rachel Toalson | Crash Test Parents, Wing Chair Musings featured
In a house like mine, there are many, many talkers—especially during the summer. I estimate that before the clock strikes 7 a.m., I’ve already heard an average of five trillion words, which typically run in one ear and out the other.
My boys have quite distinctive personalities when it comes to talk. We have Motor Mouth.
This is the kid who never stops talking. He will plant himself right next to your elbow and follow you around as you’re doing the dirty dishes and putting the clean ones away. You’ll have to reach over his head (if he’s not taller than you yet) to get a cup out for his brother, reach around him to throw something away, and reach under him to tie the shoe of his brother so you can get on the road to school, a walk that will contain a billion more words from Motor Mouth while he finishes what he was saying—which he never actually does.
I will regularly trip over this kid as he follows me around talking about his dreams, his plans for today’s stop motion movies, plus the next week’s stop motion movies, and, also, the stop motion movies he’ll make when he’s all the way grown.
He, unlike me, never misses a beat.
We also have The Sloth Speaker.
This is the kid who takes incredibly long to tell a story. He has so many words and stories inside his head that he will often forget what he’s saying in the middle of saying it and either start something new or just look blankly at the wall for a while until he says, “I forgot what I was saying.” He will also interject “um” quite often and will unabashedly prove that he didn’t really consider what he wanted to say before he opened his mouth.
A sentence like, “We did jump ropes in P.E. today” will take him at least five minutes to get out—not only because he will use all kinds of extraneous words but also because of all the excruciating pauses where he has to gather what he wants to say. There are just too many words flitting about in this boy’s brain.
Then there’s The Broken Record.
You can probably imagine that there are many interruptions in our house. The Broken Record is the kid who will start over completely when he’s interrupted—even if he was almost finished with his original story. We live in fear that someone will interrupt him when he’s 12,000 words in and he’ll start over from scratch.
Next we have Mr. Know-It-All.
This honor belongs to one of my 4-year-olds, because of course he’s been around long enough to know everything about the world, and then some. He will speak matter-of-factly on every subject imaginable, even if it’s to say something like this: “One of these days I’ll be older than you.” That’s not possible, son. But I can’t tell him this. He knows everything, and no one can convince him otherwise, even if they’ve been around longer and have done more research on whatever he’s claiming to know about.
Then there’s the delightful Random Man.
Random Man is the other 4-year-old in my house. He offers all sorts of random information in random places. If one were to say that it’s time to clean up, he would say that did you know his brother went over to Logan’s house yesterday? If you tell him we’re going to read a story, he will tell you that he’s not wearing any underwear today. If you tell him thank you for the flower he just gave you, he will tell you that he threw up last night (it was actually three weeks ago, concerned kindergarten teacher.)
His teacher is going to have so much fun next year with Random Man in her class.
The last boy in my house is affectionally called The Sage.
This is the kid who often seems random but is, instead, profound. Sometimes what he says is so profound that we can’t even understand him. It could be because he’s only 2, but I like to think it’s because he has a lot of wise words to say. Everyone gets quiet when he speaks, too—they all know he has something significant to say.
The other day I was cooking dinner, and Motor Mouth came up to tell me about the stop motion video he’d recorded. Sloth Speaker tapped me on the shoulder, and, while Motor Mouth was still in the middle of his never-ending story, said, “I…uh…I…I uh…I was…uh…running around outside and I…uh…fell down and I uh….scraped…I uh….scraped…” He looked lost for a minute and then said, “I scraped my elbow” and held up a bleeding elbow.
“Oh my gosh,” I said. “Let’s get that taken care of.”
I tripped over Motor Mouth on my way to the bathroom, where Broken Record came in and said, “I saw…I saw the…I saw the whole…I saw the whole thing…I saw the whole thing and…I saw the whole thing and it…I saw the whole thing and it looked…I saw the whole thing and it looked like it hurt.”
Know-It-All came in and said, “He’s going to bleed to death. That’s too much blood.” Sloth Speaker started freaking out, so I took matters into my own hands.
“You’re 4,” I said. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I’m wearing three pairs of underwear and four socks on each foot,” said Random Man.
“You’re wearing twenty socks?” said Know-It-All.
“Spider!” said The Sage. He pointed. The room stilled and then exploded. We did what we always do when we see spiders—we ran away screaming.
Well, most of us ran away screaming—all except for Motor Mouth, who ran away still talking.
by Rachel Toalson | Poetry, Wing Chair Musings featured
How to Be a Woman
don’t speak too loudly
don’t disturb
don’t argue
don’t assert yourself
let them do
what they will do
shake it off
let it be
pretend it
doesn’t matter
play the part
make the grade
dress for success
by which we mean
show us your skin
and make sure
you’re perfect
always perfect
forever perfect
this is how
to be a woman
How to Be a Real Woman
take off your makeup
let down your hair
take a good look
at your naked face
in the mirror
and smile
stand tall without
the whole world
on your shoulders
believe in beauty
and know
you are
beautiful
say what you mean
in your own voice
in your own language
don’t let them tell you
who to be
or what to look like
or how to live
choose for yourself
and then stand strong
proud
true
this is how
to be a real woman.
This is an excerpt from This is How You Know: a book of poetry. For more poetry, visit my starter library, where you can get some for free.
