Forged In Fire: A Woman of Unbreakable Strength

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about strength, what it means, and why we put such an emphasis on being strong.  Strong basically means having the power to meet physically demanding tasks and the ability to withstand immense pressure, to not bend under the physical or emotional weight that we are attempting to carry.  Strength is the capacity or degree of the tasks or emotional pressure that we are facing.  As a society, we place our emphasis on that strength instead of any perceived weakness, and we do it in every aspect of our lives.

Ad campaigns use models who are not only aesthetically pleasing to look at, but who display toned muscles, and this applies to both male and female models.  Having toned muscles implies that a person is able to carry more weight and physically strong.  That’s a visible strength.  But what about those strengths we don’t see?  What makes someone emotionally strong? 

Is an emotionally strong person someone who keeps a stiff upper lip in the face of great pain or pressure, or is it the one who breaks down and says, “I need help”?  Is there a middle ground?  Why is it okay for women to be seen as the “weaker gender”?  What are we teaching our kids when we tell them to stop crying or to “suck it up”? 

I see a lot of posts on my Facebook from other widows and widowers saying that they are trying to be strong for their kids, and I think back to that awful day and the days and weeks that followed.  Was I strong for Abby?  Hell no!  I was a blubbering mess, and I couldn’t help it.  As a matter of fact, I didn’t even think about it.   I cried all the time, every day.  It was as if all of my military and police training went out the window and I felt everything.  I couldn’t just “suck it up” and roll on.  I remember feeling guilty the first day I didn’t cry.  I wonder…  should I have tried to be strong for her?  And what would I have taught her if I had kept a stiff upper lip and not let her see the pain I was in?

In many ways, Abby is an enigma – she is wise beyond her years and smart as a whip, and at the same time she is still very much a child in many ways.  I look back to that day and I remember the look on her face – it was fear.  I looked through my own tears at a child who was afraid, but not at a child who had just lost her second biological parent.  I never saw her cry.  A few days after Grubby died, some of the deputies came by the house while I was out at an AA meeting and Steve was here with Abby.  When they asked Abby how she was doing, she said, “Better than Jeanne!”  She should not have had to be strong for me.  She should have been able to cry, and it worries me that she still hasn’t cried.  She has come close, but she hasn’t allowed herself to feel it fully.  Maybe she is scared of her feelings. 

She’s told me that in her life before moving up here to live with us, no one ever asked her how she felt about anything – they didn’t really even talk to her, just handed her a device and ignored her.  She once told me that she didn’t feel like she had a lack of love because she “didn’t know what love was.”  She went on to tell me that she learned something about what love was from a cousin, but mostly when she moved up here with us.  When her mother died, she even told Grubby that she needed to stay there and take care of her grandmother. She was 12!

I didn’t have the easiest time growing up.  Like many mothers and daughters, Mom and I were at odds through most of my adolescence, and even before that, Dad was the one I sought comfort from when I skinned my knee falling off a bicycle.  That said, at no time when I was growing up did I ever not know what love was.  I just learned at a young age that people have different styles of love. 

Abby didn’t have that.  She wasn’t taught that it is okay to feel whatever she was feeling.  She learned very early on how to stay in the background and be silent, and replace her feelings with technology.  Is this what we as a society are teaching our kids?  That it’s not okay to feel sadness, to show emotion, or to be “weak”? 

Several months after Grubby died, Abby was at school, and I was not doing well at all.  I called my dear friend Nicole, who told me that she was in awe of how strong I was.  I told her that I didn’t feel strong, and she asked me to step outside of myself and look at my life as though I were looking through a window.  Then, she asked me what I saw.  I saw a woman who had just been through the worst thing a person can go through, not just the loss of my husband, but the trauma that surrounded that loss.  I saw a woman who continued to get out of bed every day, even if I just ended up right back on the couch.  I saw a woman who still paid the bills and still took care of the “have tos”.  I saw a woman who tucked a child that she had not given birth to into bed every night, and who woke her up every morning.  I saw a woman who had lost friends – people I thought would be there through all of it, people who said they would be there after everyone else was gone – and still managed to develop new friends.  I saw a woman who asked for help when she needed it.  I saw a woman who was carrying so much grief and yet still managing to meet her responsibilities head on, one who didn’t snap under pressure. When I looked at my life from the outside, I had to admit that I saw an incredibly strong woman… a strong woman who cried real tears, felt real anger, and was terrified of what the future might hold. 

I hope that someday people realize that by trying to be strong for others is weakness at its worst.  Until people start giving themselves the grace they need to feel what they need to feel, I wonder if they stay mired deep in the grief, unable to move out of fear.  I still have more days than not that I am consumed with the depth of my loss.  I still talk to Grubby every day and every night.  I still relive that awful day, as well as every other awful day I’d had before, more often than not.  I still feel the sadness, still cry, and yet, I still keep moving forward because I know that someday, I might see more joy than sadness.  What really makes a person strong?  I think we are like steel, and those of us who allow ourselves to be forged in fire eventually become stronger than those who run from the heat.