I have been ruminating on something for a while now. While I am wholeheartedly in the camp that resilience is an essential human trait, often well and painfully earned and one we need to support in our children, my relationship with that idea was challenged during Covid. I have enough self awareness to recognize that my tendency as a mom can be to sometimes smooth the trail too much, even when I know I probably shouldn’t. This last year challenged many of us in more ways than we have shared openly, and that has included the emotional suffering of many of our kids, as well as the compensation many of us parents engaged in to attempt to make the pandemic less painful.
When your relationships are your lifeline and they are suddenly and necessarily removed for the greater good of tackling a pandemic, the toll can be heavy and the effects perhaps more long lasting than we know. Heavier for some than others. Long lasting for some but not all.
My older daughter's school suffered a terrible tragedy in recent weeks. Let me rephrase. A child at my older daughter’s school made a last resort decision that she can’t take back, and in that decision’s wake, left a community to reckon with its impact, and I would hope, its cause. This didn’t happen in a vacuum. It happened at the culmination of so many months of a community doing its best, but nonetheless falling short (was it even possible not to in some ways?) to adapt to a pandemic time of higher learning at an independent boarding school. In addition to the stressors of Covid, compliance with the sometimes baffling social distance rules despite frequent testing, a reckoning regarding systemic misogyny and racism on campus, a faculty predator who finally, but way too late, was terminated, this community was in crisis.
Throughout this time of Covid we’ve heard the word resilience thrown around more times than we can count. And while I would never want to discount that, yes, we humans can indeed be resilient, something about the word and the frequency with which I was hearing it was rubbing me the wrong way.
It felt too tidy, too dismissive, too rushed.
I am truly so happy for the kids who have thrived during Covid, who made lemonade out of lemons, pleasing proud adults and parents alike. My heart absolutely sings for the introverts who loved the quiet and solitude of the months, the chance to slow down, spend more time with household loved ones and family. The silver linings, for some, were many in the midst of the suffering. As days turned into weeks into months and months of lockdown, some kids thrived. Mine did in certain ways, but most definitely not in others. One was on a strict zero contact (I mean, ZERO, no family, no friends, no contact) lockdown in her boarding school room for many weeks. The other, highly social, stuck at home with mom and dad - physically safe, still surrounded by beloved pets and parents, but isolated nonetheless. My kids, like most humans, need and require connection, love and emotional intimacy.
In the case of my older daughter’s school, how could we have imposed rules on developing human beings to never be held or hugged or comforted for such long stretches of time? Every fiber in my being knew that it was wrong. When I brought my concerns to the school that I believed her mental health, as anyone’s would be, was suffering as a result of physical social distancing rules that prevented her going home and seeing family or even leaving campus, rules that made hugging a friend an offense for which you could be written up and given detention, it felt as though I was basically being shown the door. Mind you, a door to a place I had grown up, lived, gone to school myself, and had supported my whole life. I felt sucker punched.
When a community lauds and sings the praises of resilience, what is it telling those who are having a very real and appropriate emotional response to loneliness and isolation? An utterly human response? That they are lacking? Broken? Failing.
When one side of the mouth says we acknowledge and love the whole child but the other side preaches and praises resilience ad nauseum, what messages are we sending?
Has the word “resilience” become the 2021 code in some circles for pulling yourself up from the bootstraps?
I was recently sitting in a parent zoom meeting in response to this tragedy (not my place or story to tell), and I found myself getting angrier and angrier by the moment. I must have heard the word resilient more than 20 times in the course of that meeting, and someone had quite literally just lost her life.
It is reminiscent of the old school parenting strategy of declaring to your child when they fall down “You’re ok! You’re ok!” before even allowing the child to take a beat and determine whether or not that is indeed true. Again, the insistence that we are all “okay” when we may in fact not be is another form of denial.
Please understand, I am not saying we need to coddle and overindulge our kids at every bump. Like so many parents I embrace the “blessings of the skinned knee.” We definitely need to encourage and empower them to discern between moments to brush off and ones to pause and reflect upon.
In the incessant praising of resilience what are we conveying to those who are silently suffering and need our help? Like the kids in their dorm rooms contending with anxiety, eating disorders, depression, not to even broach the topic of the emotional and social warfare that can, and did, play out in social media.
Yes, we are resilient, and as adults we have the benefit of a fully formed prefrontal cortex, life experience and hindsight. The path towards resilience looks different for everyone. Many times the path there includes a whole gamut of emotions and the time table is different for all of us. Some of us are deeply feeling creatures whose absolutely appropriate response to trauma or pain is to feel it. To fully feel it and experience it. Otherwise, as we well know, buried pain or trauma at some point or another will resurface and, at a minimum, cause us suffering, even if we aren’t aware of why.
Resilience defined is to recover quickly from difficulties; toughness. But don’t we want our kids to be tough and soft. Brave and vulnerable? And why on earth are we in such a rush to “quickly” recover? Some things, yes. But do we hurry the mourning of a death of a loved one? Do we try to simply be “tough” and stand on a broken leg? Isn’t there great merit in unpacking and wondering and investigating the whys and hows so that we may learn and move forward and potentially prevent future and long term sustained suffering? To claim resilience may encourage denial and lack emotional intelligence.
Resilience is for sure a quality we want to teach and instill in our children and ourselves, but not to the point of bypassing the very necessary work and stages of grief and recovery from pain and trauma.
This, I realize, is what was bothering me so much. There was such an urgency to, what felt like, hurry up and heal towards resilience that it was reminiscent of the spiritual bypass crew in the wellness world. It felt like the buzzword of resilience had lost its true meaning and was another means to gaslight those of us who believed there was ongoing injury that had to be stopped.
As Dylan walked the path towards her high school diploma this past weekend, she absolutely brought with her more true resilience than I certainly ever had to have at her age. That walk was powerful, bittersweet, and beautiful. It was all those things because she was fully embodied, utterly honest about the time during Covid and all that entailed, as well as possessed with an air of confidence. It is a huge moment as a parent to watch your child step out of one phase and into another and know full well the grace and humanity that brought her to that point. Bravo, Dylan.
Merely my musings. I am sure there are all sorts of differing points of view.