A few days before Christmas and our trip to La Push I battled a case of Norovirus so violent I spent most of the night unconscious on the bathroom floor. A few days later, when my friend suggested a rigorous hike from Third Beach, out on the Washington coast just south of La Push, to Taylor Point I was a little nervous I hadn't fully recovered. Turns out, I hadn't.
I think a lot about resilience, both with the students I work with every day and my own daughters.
I work in a setting that has seen far too much bloodshed - a school. I tried to get a total for school shootings since 1996 when I became a teacher but scrolling through the long, long list on Wikipedia was too painful. Try it. The names, the numbers, the reasons are too much to interpret. The overwhelming majority of the murderers are boys, boys so incapacitated by emotional pain they find a gun, carry it all the way to school, and murder. In our culture girls learn and are taught more coping strategies for dealing with emotional pain than boys. The image of a sobbing teenage girl and her cluster of friends asking for a bathroom pass may be a stereotype of teen angst, but it's also a how-to. Overwhelmed? Share the burden with your supporters. Gather them around you. Put things on hold. Cry. Talk. Unload. Feel their hands and hear their words and for awhile, let them carry your pain with you.
It wasn't very long into our hike that I started to question whether my body was going to make it. From Third Beach you climb a series of cliffs using rope and driftwood ladders. My legs would not lift my weight. I finally asked my friend Abi to push on my butt. I'm not kidding. And, like the champ she is, she did. She pushed and I pulled, and between the two of us I made it up the seven rope climbs to the top of the bluff. In this picture I am wondering if I can lift myself one more step. I'm also embarrassed. It's embarrassing to be weak. Look at that kid above me just flying up the cliff!
We stopped for a tea-break and snack and I did not feel good - faint and tissue paper weak. I knew I should sit on the trail and wait for the return of my friends and daughter but thought that would be scary, so I continued on, knowing full well it might be a huge struggle to return. Finally we reached Taylor Point, where I lay on the sun-warmed rocks, drank a Pedialyte my friend Priscilla put in my water bottle, and tried to regain my strength. I might have slept. Eventually I opened my eyes to see a Bald Eagle flying about thirty feet above us, gloriously huge and graceful, effortlessly in its element. Abi gave me some chocolate.
On the return, Abi took my backpack. Here she is, going down the same ladder I struggled to ascend.
I felt guilty, like you do when you pack a heavy camera you don't feel good enough to use and someone else has to carry if for you, but she persisted and I let her because I am smart, and I am female. At 13, Abi would have insisted on coming to the bathroom with me if I was crying and hurting. In our forties, she insisted on carrying my backpack. Women are taught to do this from a young age. Our daughters, Abi's and mine, witnessed this, saw me sick, flat on my back, saw Abi take my backpack, saw me surrender. Two minutes into our return trip my nine-year old daughter said, "I'm too tired!" as she stretched her little legs up big steps, so I pushed on her butt to help her up the hill. Here we are, resting on the way home. I'm resting on my back. Again.
I know men have this in them too, the ability to ask for help, but they need to be louder about it. Men need to teach boys how to share the burden. Mothers are going crazy teaching their sons to be as emotionally healthy as girls, but no amount of didactic conversation from mother to son gets as much done as boys seeing it happen between men. Google "what to do if your girlfriend dumps you" and then Google "what to do if your boyfriend dumps you," and see how men are encouraged to put up a front, gain revenge, and inflict pain. See how women are encouraged to remember their strengths and lean on friends for support. Men need to change the media messaging. Uncles, teachers, neighbors and the fathers of friends, you all need to start modeling surrender and support.
My daughters are being taught all the right lessons. If they don't get them from me they get them from movies, magazines, their friends and their culture. They learn the most important lesson of all - when and how to ask for help - from all the women they know. It's our boys I worry about. It's the boys who don't see men relinquish the backpack, the rejection, the insecurities, the pain to a friend. It's the boys who don't grow up seeing men rely on each other that I worry about. Boys are trained to offer help, but they're not shown how to ask for it.
We often ask fathers to do more, to give more, but maybe we should be asking them to be really loud about asking for help. We should be asking them to hand the backpack, or worry, or fear, or pain to someone else. We should ask men to start teaching boys how to ask for help, and how that surrender creates strength.
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