There is a time-stopping ethereal beauty to some January days in the mountains. You wake to peaks covered in untracked snow and bedazzled by crystalized aspen trees, their branches sparkling in the sunlight. If you could inhale all the beauty around you, it feels like human flight might just be possible.
And then there are the other days—impossibly short, gray and cold with bitter breezes that usher in only darkness and despair. Today is the third such dismal day in a row, setting the tone to grouchy as my 15-year-old, who is dipping her toes in the waters of the unskilled workforce, reports that she hates her new job.
She texts me not two hours into the beginning of her first shift: “I’m quitting. One of my co-workers is vaping in the bathroom every 10 minutes, and I’m pretty sure another one is drunk. Her eyes are red and blurry and she is literally slurring her words. Mom, it is 8:45 in the morning.”
Though I have never tried to shelter my kids, I knew that when they joined the adult world there would be some reality checks. But still. I text her a shock-eyes emoji with a supportive “hang in there” because I really hope that she does. Resilience is important in life, and I am uncertain how much she has. Her first job did not go well and ended after a few short months. She is often not one to persevere on her own, and lately I have started to wonder if sticking with things is something I failed to help her develop. In the car later on, we talk about her work and she shares the horrors of her new job.
“Well there isn’t anything for me to do at work because I really don’t know how to do anything,” she says.
“This is only your third day. It takes a while to learn a job,” I counter.
“And the other people there don’t like me.”
“How do you know?” I push back.
“I heard them talking. They say I ask too many questions.”
While I struggle to process the drunk stoner mafia situation at her work, I also realize this is probably something many teens encounter at their first jobs. Nobody pressured her to drink or vape. Nobody yelled at her. Her boss is wonderful by her own admission. So I wonder why she is so ready to walk away. Is she utterly unprepared for a minimum wage job? Or is she seeing monsters where there are only magpies? As she goes on about the nonproblems in her new job, I grow ever more frustrated until I finally explode.
“You know, all the things you are talking about as problems, they might be, but they aren’t your problems. It just isn’t that hard to function as an adult. You get a job, you show up sober and on time, you do the tasks they ask you to do the best you can, you are nice to customers and pleasant to your coworkers and then you get paid. When you go home, you do what you want. What is so hard about any of that?”
She and I both are a bit shocked by my truth bomb. There are tears, and then there is reconciliation and admission that she is having a hard time. There is also acknowledgement that sometimes the mind can turn preschool into post-graduate work, and that may be the case here.
At a dinner with my friends later that week, we share old pictures of us and our parents. One friend, who comes from a family of 12, shows us her parents’ wedding picture. Married at 16, her mom was a lovely young lady who, in the photo, is dwarfed by her new husband, a giant of a man with enormous hands.
“He was huge,” she says. “Good thing, too, because he might not have been able to save my mother otherwise.”
We slow blink, waiting for her to continue.
“My mother’s father beat her. I mean her back was broken and they never fixed it, never took her to the doctor. It was still broken when my dad came and got her. She had trouble with her back her whole life.”
I have just two kids, so I can only imagine the physical toll on the body from giving birth to 12 children and the work needed to raise them and operate a farm—all while enduring chronic back pain and carrying the emotional trauma of being beaten by the person who was supposed to protect and care for you. I think of my own mother who was raised by her grandparents until she was 12. Even as a child I wondered about that one.
“It was the Depression, honey,” my mom explained. “You took work where you could get it. Mother [which is what she called her mom] had a teaching job a few hours away, and that was where the money came from.”
In the family of every friend at the dinner table there are stories of struggle, overcoming abuse or poverty or neglect. And in each case, there is resilience, a leaping back from being pushed down by people or circumstances. For our parents, growing up seemed to be defined by overcoming difficulties and nobody expected it to be different. They were tough. They endured the Depression. They worked long hours or two jobs. They persevered through pain and being pushed around. They didn’t complain.
Listening to my child, it seems like she has so little fight in her. I find myself wondering where resilience comes from. Is it a skill you have to learn, like being polite, or is it more like a sleeping dragon that lies in wait for the day that life pushes you down one too many times and you have to decide if you are going to stay there or get up and fight back. When animals are attacked in the wild, they do not need to be taught to fight or flee–it just happens. But there is also the freeze response, when one succumbs to an overpowering force. I worry that my daughter might be frozen.
After the stormy gray days, I am walking to get my mail, when I see an Engelmann spruce tree that has been felled by an intense burst of wind, its heady pine scent so perfectly winterish. It must be at least 200 years old, but could be much older as these trees can live up to 500 years. Over centuries, how many winds has that tree pushed back against? Hundreds? Thousands? Then, tired of fighting or unable to resist any more, its trunk snapped in surrender and brought all those years of battle to an end. Could it be the wind that made the tree so strong?
I remember reading about trees in the Biosphere 2 experiment. They grew quickly under the protective dome, but before they matured they all fell over. The scientists discovered the biosphere trees had no “stress wood,” dense, strong and flexible fibers that trees grow in response to wind, so they were too weak to support their own weight. Are we the same? If there is no strong wind to battle–does the fight in us fail to develop or do we turn it on others or even on ourselves?
My strong wind seems to have roused some resistance in my daughter because the next time she works she doesn’t text me that she is quitting. In fact, when we take a walk later on that day, she thanks me for my brutal honesty about her life not being that difficult.
“You know, you are right,” she says.”It really isn’t that hard. I just showed up, did what they wanted me to do and that was it. I was making it hard.”
I nod and voice my thoughts, “Maybe people have a need for struggle, a need to push against something to keep the fight alive in them.”
“Oh they definitely do,” she replies, waxing philosophical. “If we don’t have real struggles we will make our little ones bigger because I do think we need that. We need to fight.”
I think about what she says, how she so easily embraces the difference between challenges made and those encountered. I am amazed at how she–and all of us really–can be so easily upset and then calmed simply by shifting our own thoughts. I can produce some storms in my family–a thunderclap of disapproval quickly followed by a tempest of complaints about dishes that don’t get put in a dishwasher, clothes left on the floor, or bathrooms that go uncleaned. After my outbursts that can send happy, carefree girls running for cover, I usually feel guilty and wonder, why didn’t I handle that better? Why can’t I be a soft breeze that delivers life lessons in welcoming wafts of lilac. Today I see that maybe there is a place for a stronger force. Saplings do need shelter, but they also need to face storms that bend their branches and strengthen their trunks, because the world is not just made of gentle gusts. There are tornadoes out there, too.
