by Rachel Toalson | Messy Mondays
My younger sister is about to have her birthday, so lately I’ve been thinking about all the things I love about her. I know not everyone has a good relationship with their sisters, but I consider my sister a best friend. She knows everything about me. She can tell what I’m thinking before I say a word. The day she left me alone with my firstborn son, she knew how terrified I was just by looking into my thought-I-was-hiding-it-well face, and I’ll never forget her hug and that gentle, “You’re gonna be alright” for all the days of my life, because in one moment, she gave me the courage to be a mom.
My sister is kind and loving and faithful and never forgets to call on one of my kids’ birthdays even though I forget to call on hers. She loves her family, loves her nephews, understands that we are never going to be perfect at this family thing or this parenting thing or this growing up thing. She gets me. And I’m pretty sure she appreciates me almost as much as I appreciate her.
Now. That’s all well and good. I get along with my own blood-related sister.
The question is, how well do I get along with all my not-blood-related sisters?
I get so tired of the fights, honestly. It’s wearying like nothing else. I don’t feel half as tired from wrestling my six boys through a day as I do from all the parenting wars that pit sister against sister and hand out wounded hearts like they make not a difference in the world.
They do make a difference.
We are all sisters, from the very beginning. And then we have children, and our sisterhood becomes something greater (or it should). Sure, we do our parenting in different ways. My sister breastfeeds. I don’t, because I never could get enough milk out to keep my babies out of the emergency room. She’s never used cloth diapers. I used them for half my children before twins burned us out.
Some of us let our kids sleep with us. Some of us never let our babies sleep with us, unless they wake at 4 in the morning and we need another hour of sleep. Some of us hover on playgrounds, and some of us keep to the peripheries, with eyes on our children but hands off. Some of us have perfectly compliant children, and some of us have fighters who will fight about every little thing, at least until they learn that it’s possible—and more effective—to choose their battles.
Some of us have one kid, some of us have six, some of us believe that spanking is the best way, some of us don’t, some of us let our kids help make decisions, some of us would never let a kid make a decision, some of us make our kids do chores, some of us don’t, some of us let our kids watch television and play on screens, some of us don’t.
Some of us have three kids smashed into one room, some of us believe every kid needs his own room, some of us are saving for college, some of us haven’t even thought about it, some of us let our kids cuss, some of us wouldn’t think of allowing it, some of us take our kids to counseling, some of us want to make sure we can handle this on our own, some of us send our kids to daycare, some of us stay home, some of us enroll our kids in public school, some of us run the homeschool operation, some of us pick our kids up every time they cry, some of us let them cry it out sometimes, some of us would give anything in the world to be home with our kids, some of us find great fulfillment in our work (and mother hood didn’t change that).
The list goes on and on and on. The point is, we’re all different. That doesn’t mean we’re wrong.
See, here’s the mysterious thing about a sisterhood: We are as different as our faces and our bodies and the shape that our lives have taken around children. We’ll never be the same. And yet we are the same.
It sounds like a paradox, but it’s not really. We all come in different shapes and sizes and colors, and we all come from different backgrounds and beliefs and socioeconomic situations, which means that our philosophies and our choices and the lenses we use to look at life will never be the same. But our underneaths are the same. We’re all mothers trying to do the best we can for these little irrational human beings who know how to push our buttons, who cling to us some days like our childhood nickname and other days can’t stand the sight of us, who wake up different people every day so we have to constantly be on our toes.
We’re all just doing the best we can.
But what I’m not saying by doing something differently than you are is that you’re wrong. That’s because I understand that your kid is not my kid and my kid is not your kid, and people who don’t spend 24 hours seven days a week with my kid don’t understand that when you have two 3-year-old twins who like to roam at night while everyone else is sleeping so they can ingest a whole tube of toothpaste or a whole bottle of vitamins they somehow pried open, even though I break a nail every time I try, you have to turn a doorknob around so it locks from the outside, or else you might wake up to the whole house burning down around you. People who don’t spend 24 hours seven days a week with my kid don’t understand that working through a tantrum with the boy prone to anxiety and depression is, in the long run, way better than punishing him for something he’s done. People who don’t spend 24 hours seven days a week with my kid don’t understand that technology turns the 5-year-old into the Whine Monster, so it’s banished from our house, for now.
You don’t know my kid. I don’t know yours. I can’t parent yours. You can’t parent mine.
So maybe we should stop trying.
Our differences are what make us beautiful. And what makes us a sisterhood is accepting each other, as is, and putting aside all the differences to acknowledge that this raising a kid thing? It’s not easy. We need each other to do it.
We’re all just doing the best we can. And that is always, always enough.
by Rachel Toalson | Messy Mondays
My kids are out of their minds about this leap year thing. A day that only comes around once a year?
Yeah.
What would you do if you had a birthday today?
Uncle Jarrod almost did.
He would only be a kid still?
No, the years still pass. Just because his birthday rolled around every four years doesn’t mean he’d stay frozen in time and quit growing.
They seemed relieved to hear that, even though they still didn’t quite get it. In their minds, a person with a birthday on Feb. 29 would stay forever young. So I showed them a picture of Dee Brown (the novelist, not the basketball player), who definitely grew older and died at the ripe old age of 94 and only technically passed one-fourth of those birthdays. All I know is that if being born on Leap Day really meant you only aged a year for every four, I’d volunteer for that.
Well, maybe not. I’d only be 8. I was pretty annoying at 8, and that was also the year I got the most embarrassing purple glasses you’ve ever seen—they took up half my face because it was the ‘80s and people didn’t feel the need to make their 8-year-old kid who needs glasses still look cool.
Anyway. I didn’t come here to talk about that. What I came here to talk about is leaping past a whole day in your life. You know, with years that are not Leap years, February has the privilege of leaping over its last day like it doesn’t even count.
What did 29 do to you, February? Also: where do I apply to leap over a whole stretch of time? Because I’d like to sign up for leaping over my kids’ Year 3.
I don’t know about you, but my kids were perfect angels at 2. They were snuggly, they were respectful, they were adorable, they were brilliant, they were compliant. And the minute they turned 3, angel became devil.
This year I’ve had the pleasure of raising two 3-year-olds. That’s been wonderful, let me tell you. You know how 3-year-olds ask a billion questions a day? Try having two of them. I’m so questioned out I could live the next 30 years without hearing another one, which won’t happen. I’ll hear another billion by the time I finish this sentence, because guess what? They’re still 3!
Also, the number of times I’ve turned into a 3-year-old is quite astounding. You’d think that after all these years—after, in fact, having survived three other 3-year-olds—I would know better. But I’m still a sucker for getting into an argument with a threenager, mostly because they think they know EVERYTHING, and you know what? I’m the one who knows everything.
I can get myself into a lot of trouble if I say something like,
“Here’s your vitamin.”
“You mean my melatonin,” one of the 3-year-olds will say.
I don’t like misinformation, because I spent a decade as a reporter, so, of course I’m quick to correct them.
“No, it’s not melatonin. It’s called Focus Factor.”
“No. It’s melatonin.”
Which quickly disintegrates into a clipped, matter-of-fact answer by yours truly:
“I can read. You can’t.”
“Mama, you’re doing your workout wrong,” they say when I’m actually busting my rear end to get ahead of the interval training video because I’m a beast.
No, I’m sorry, I know exactly what I’m doing and you should just shut your mouth if you don’t want an uppercut right to your jaw. (Not because I’d beat a kid who tells me I’m slacking while my heart rate is camped at 130. Because I’m doing uppercuts in my workout, and they’re leaning in too close to tell me I’m doing it wrong.)
“I didn’t have milk today,” is another one of my twins’ favorite things to say, even though the cup they’re staring at right this very minute still has three drops of milk in it because they just finished their glass.
Um, yes you did, blindy. (To be clear, these are only the things I think in my head.)
“I’ll put my jacket on,” they say on mornings when we’re already five minutes late for leaving, and, hey, who am I to argue, because I’m all for autonomy. Except one of them likes to turn his jackets inside out before putting it on, which I’m pretty sure defeats the purpose.
That’s not right. Yes it is. No it’s not. YES IT IS. Okay, then, wear it like that, genius.
They talk back about everything, they have their own ideas about the way things should be (I want the BLUE plate. There is no blue plate. I want the BLUE plate. You can have the yellow plate or the orange plate. I want the BLUE plate. Okay, you get nothing), they make ridiculous threats (I not eating ever again, because you said it’s still time to stay in our beds and I don’t want to nap. Okay, more for me.), they fight about everything (This is Lightning McQueen. No, THIS is Lightning McQueen. It’s the same car, guys.), they know everything, they break everything, they mess with everything, they can do everything themselves even if it means going the whole day with their shoes on the wrong feet.
So, if I had to choose a stretch of time in my parenting that I could leap over, it would be year 3. Potty training comes at a distant second.
We’re looking forward to Year 4, with high hopes that 3 will be long gone and we will have our sweet little twins back.
Wait. I can’t remember. Were they ever sweet in the first place? (My gray hairs say no.)
by Rachel Toalson | Messy Mondays
When I was pregnant with my first child, I worked full-time as the editor of a newspaper produced by The United Methodist Church. Every week I’d write all the articles (because the staff was…nonexistent) and I’d take all the pictures and then I’d edit what few articles came to me, and after all that, I’d design the entire newspaper single-handedly. I don’t say this for kudos. I know well enough that I did a great job with what I had. But there was a man at my workplace who expressed, quite bluntly, that once I had that baby in my belly, I was not going to be a very good worker. I would be less desirable as an employee, he said in so many words.
He made his point in many different ways. With commentary on how once a mother has a kid, she can’t really focus much on her work, because there’s the kid competing with her work for attention. With little asides about how much children change a mother’s life. With point-blank reasoning that he couldn’t be sure I’d even work once the baby came, even though they were paying me to produce a newspaper every month. (What exactly would I do? Sit in my office and daydream about sleeping? Well, yeah, that’s probably true.)
And then I had the baby, and guess what? I did the same exact job the same exact way, except I learned how to juggle more efficiently. I put systems in place. I didn’t get sucked into time vortexes, because there wasn’t time to get sucked into them. I did exactly what I was expected to do and then some. I found a way to be a good mother and a good employee, like many women before me have done.
So now I have six kids. And it’s still the same old story.
Husband and I, in a former life, were traveling musicians, and recently we were asked to share our music at a church venue. And then, at the last minute, we had to bail because the people asking us to lead—who also were not paying us for our time—could not take it upon themselves to provide childcare that would keep our kids safe while we led others into a worship experience.
Now. I know I have six kids. I know it’s my responsibility to take care of my kids. But when you ask me to do you a favor, the least you can do is make sure my six kids are cared for while I’m doing it. I’m happy to do favors. I’m not happy to let two 3-year-old twins run around a sanctuary and flip over pews and put their fingers in light sockets just to “see what happens.”
Sadly, this attitude—the one that says once you become a parent you’re no longer very useful to us—is not as rare as you might think. We see it in our churches that don’t provide the relief of childcare for young parents and in our workplaces that make us work grueling schedules instead of flexible ones and, also, in our very streets. When my family is out and about, people walk up to us at random, as if it’s any of their business, sharing delightful comments like, “These all yours? My God,” and then roll their eyes and walk away. (My favorite is, “Wow. What do you do? You must make a lot of money to support all these kids.” Nope. We just work hard and do our part, and money takes care of itself.) People regularly see us (because we’re quite a spectacle—two parents dragging six boys away from the curb so they don’t get run over by the cars speeding through town) and shake their heads and dismiss us as “those people.” They ask what we do and hear that I’m an author and they look at my kids and they can’t let themselves believe it (glazed eyes are the telltale sign), because no one could possibly get any work done with six kids at home. Husband tells them he’s a video marketing guy, and they dismiss him because he was that guy crazy enough to have six kids.
Well, you know what, world? Just because we have six kids doesn’t mean we’ve lost our value to the world.
I’m still the same person I was, give or take a few pounds. Actually, scratch that. I’m not the same person at all, because in their living, these children have scraped and shaped me into the person the world needed me to be, so that girl I used to be nine years ago? She’s not nearly as cool as this person I am today.
Not only that, but my children have value. They’re little people who care about bugs getting smushed and the trash people throw on the side of the road and the way their friend got really sad at recess today, and, if you’re the 3-year-olds, plunging the toilet before every flush. If the world is going to just dismiss us, it’s missing out on a helluva lot.
So next time you see me out and about with my entourage of children, don’t assume you know who I am or what my intelligence level is. Don’t assume you know anything about me at all. Don’t assume, most of all, that I have traded my value as an individual person for becoming just a family unit from here on out. Of course we’re a family unit. But we’re individuals, too.
Parents don’t lose their value just because they have kids. Please don’t treat them like they do.
by Rachel Toalson | Messy Mondays
Valentine’s Day for a married couple with young kids is just like an ordinary day.
Maybe you don’t think Valentine’s Day is that important anyway, so this doesn’t really bother you all that much. But me, well, I’ll take any holiday I can get to call a sitter and spend a night out with Husband so we don’t have to wrestle kids to bed. And, also, so we can enjoy a nice conversation without being interrupted every other second. But mostly so we don’t have to wrestle kids to bed.
But it seems like every Valentine’s Day we have a hard time trying to find a sitter. I know it’s not because we have six kids and it’s definitely not because we wait until Feb. 14 at 3 p.m. to make the call because I never know what day it is (Hey. Parents can hardly keep track of their kids, let alone the day.).
Plus, by the time you pay a sitter for watching your kids, there’s no money left, so you’ll just be walking the neighborhood or reclining the van seats and taking a night nap.
On second thought, that doesn’t sound all that bad.
What marriage looks like with children is not anything like what I expected it would look like. I don’t really know what I expected, exactly. But it wasn’t this Punk’d version of life we find ourselves in today.
Husband and I are happily married, at least most of the time—because happy is a transient state. We always work hard on our marriage, and that’s really what counts.
Problem is, our kids always work hard on our marriage, too.
In case you don’t know (or maybe you’re wondering if you’re the only one), here’s what marriage looks like with children.
Date nights in bed.
Everyone’s too exhausted to go anywhere anymore, so you order in, turn on Netflix’s “The Making of a Murderer” and watch while you eat. It’s like a theater that serves restaurant food, except you can lie down if you want and, also, kids will burst into your room wondering what you’re watching and begging to try a fry and asking why do you get to eat that food when all they had was a sandwich and raw carrots for dinner, and, sometimes, telling you to please turn it down because it’s too loud (what are they, the parents of teenagers?). Or sometimes, instead of watching something, you read together, because it’s enough being in the same room, without saying a single word, enjoying the absolute quiet that comes in the last ten minutes before you fall asleep. Sometimes you just sleep, because when all the kids are finally, finally, finally asleep, who wants to stay up till midnight knowing they’ll be up at the butt crack of dawn to tell you they’re starving and they’re going to die if they don’t have anything to eat in the next split second?
In all honesty, I enjoy the date nights in our room. I’m pretty much the biggest homebody you could ever know (biggest, as in I’d stay home for years at a time if Husband didn’t drag me out, not biggest as in large. Although my kids might disagree.). Husband would go out every night of the week if he could take me with him, but I’m just not that much of a see-the-town kind of girl. I’ve seen it once already. He knew what he was getting into the night he proposed and I refused to go onstage at our local theatre after a beautiful production of “The Nutcracker” ballet and he had to drag me, seething, up the stairs just so he could get down on one knee. Didn’t back out then. Can’t back out now.
Conversation in spurts.
It’s very rare that when my husband and I sit down to have a conversation we actually get to finish it. Even if the kids are all locked outside, someone will come pounding on the door to say that they need to poop or they need us to kiss a bleeding scratch or you should have heard that fart—it vibrated the whole trampoline! So, when you’re married with children, you get really, really good at picking up conversations where they left off. When you’re a parent, one conversation with your spouse can last whole weeks, because sometimes you forget completely what you’re saying when one of the kids knocks your knees out from under you with a “What does it mean to sleep together?”
This is where date nights at home come in handy. When kids are tucked away in bed and dreaming their kid dreams, it’s the perfect time to talk to each other, because no one will come knock on your door. Problem, is, you have to stay awake until all the kids are asleep, and we rarely make it that late.
A fight could last forever.
Remember what I said about those conversations? Yeah, that makes fighting difficult, to say the least. We don’t have any concerns about disagreeing in front of our kids, because we think it’s good for them to have a healthy relationship with conflict (depending on the conflict, of course), and it’s beneficial for them to witness a healthy model of conflict resolution. We have rules about arguing (no name calling, no walking away, no swearing). But if kids aren’t paying the least bit of attention and they walk smack dab into the middle of a fight, asking for some milk because they’re “so thirsty their mouth is dying,” you’ll lose your train of thought before you can even tell them they’re interrupting something important. Which, in some cases, is a good thing, because most of the things we fight about are stupid anyway. Whose responsibility was it to turn on the dish washer? The kids were tardy again today because we slept an extra five minutes? Yes I did tell you this yesterday? Stupid.
Thanks, kids, for interrupting and jolting me back to reality.
Sex is…well.
Maybe you’re uncomfortable with the S word. So let’s just change it, for propriety’s sake. Let’s call it Playing Chess.
You have to know what kids will do to a Chess Game. It’s pretty much what they do to everything they can get their hands on: deconstruct it, little by little. Right in the middle of an epic Chess Game, they will knock on the door to ask what day tomorrow is because they need to know if it’s library day or not, since that changes everything for them tonight. Sometimes you’ll forget to lock the bedroom door, which is usually where you Play Chess, because everyone’s asleep anyway, and some straggler will come bursting in, and you better hope you have some covers to throw over that Chess Game, because they’re going to see some pieces they shouldn’t.ever.see.
Good luck trying to figure out what kind of move you were going to make when they’ve finally gone back to bed.
So, yeah, kids change a lot of things. But you know what they also do? They introduce us to a depth of love and selflessness we may never have known otherwise. Husband and I have grown to love each other more truly and deeply in these years we’ve been sharing the raising of our children. I understand him differently today than I understood him before kids. He understands me differently than he did before kids.
And if all this weirdness is the price we have to pay for a more passionate love all these years later, we’ll surely take it.
Just remember to lock the door before you get out the Chess Board, m’kay?
by Rachel Toalson | Messy Mondays
This week kicks off Library Lovers’ Month, and if you know me and my family at all, you know that one thing we love to do is read together. We read before nap time, when one of the 3-year-old twins will pick out two picture books and I’ll read a few chapters from the middle grade novel we’re wading through (current pick is Echo, by Pam Munoz Ryan). We read audio books while doing chores, when we don’t feel like listening to the kids complain about our ‘90s Pandora station and how it is “really hurting our ears because this is the worst music ever. Seriously. Minecraft music is much better.”
We read during bath time and laugh about Shel Silverstein’s bizarre poetry. We read before bed.
This kids and I head out to the library at least once a week, because libraries are magical places for children. Some of my fondest memories as a kid were the ones where my mother set us loose in the local library and told us to pick out enough books to last us a week, and, of course, I’d pick more. I love libraries so much that, early on, I set one up in my own house. Boys share three to a bedroom, but we have a library, because we have our priorities straight.
With all those trips to the library come, inevitably, lost books.
There are so many things that never happened before I had kids. Overdrawing my account (I can’t even add correctly anymore). Leaving something important at a store (I’ll leave the box of diapers, but at least I have all my kids). Accruing a regular library fine.
I’m convinced we’re some of the biggest supporters of our local library, which is all well and good, except that when I pay for a book, I like to keep it. Instead, library books that are fortunate enough to come home with my kids fall into a giant black hole that is my boys’ bedroom.
Ha. Who am I kidding? The whole house is a black hole.
I’ve found library books in some pretty weird (or maybe just annoying) places. Like
In the car.
I know. That’s not so very hard to believe. We do, after all, drive to the library, and boy are always reading on the way back home, because once they get home they’ll find better things to do, like dump out all the LEGOs and come in and out the front door ten thousand times and decide they want wear the Spider-Man costume, no they want to wear Iron man, no they think they’d rather go as a SWAT team member with red silk gloves and a Robin Hood hat, and they forget all about reading the books or, more importantly, where they last saw them. My boys are the worst at leaving books in the car, which are sure to get trampled by a billion feet next time we load up, but, hey, at least they’ll have a book for the five-minute trip to the store. Win.
In the laundry hamper.
Maybe they were reading the book in the bathroom when they took their clothes off, and, because they were finished with it, they weren’t all that bothered when the book got caught in their sleeves, and then they didn’t notice the hard corners sticking out when they actually put their clothes in the hamper. It’s not all that far-fetched. I mean, the only thing they really pay attention to is the answer to “What time is dinner” or its twin, “What are we having for dinner?” But, hey, boys? A laundry hamper is most definitely not the place for books. I feel compelled to replace these Pokemon Ruby and Sapphire books for the simple fact that they smell like wet dog and rotten Fritos.
In the trash can.
This is most likely the work of the 3-year-old twins. They are, you see, some of the biggest instigators in my house. If a brother says he really likes the song playing through the speakers, the 3-year-old will sneak up to the iPhone and “accidentally” turn it off. If a brother says “Please stop copying me” a 3-year-old will do exactly the opposite for hours on end. If a brother says he really likes this book he’s reading and then he happens to leave that very book unattended for half a second, well, there it goes in a stainless steel container with last night’s chicken bones, somebody’s old toast covered in jam and their baby brother’s most recent fully loaded diaper.
In the refrigerator.
Book preservation? A book and a snack? Someone mistook bookshelf for fridge shelf? It’s anyone’s guess.
I know what you’re thinking. Hey, at least your kids love reading. (Or maybe you’re thinking, hey, you need to get a handle on your kids, in which case I’m not really interested in anything you have to say.) Exactly. At least they love reading.
I suppose if library fines are the price I have to pay for kids who will read to stave off boredom, then I’ll take it.
But if you can’t get your book back on the designated library shelf, I swear…
