Resilience

One of my ultra-marathon buddies said: “I’ve always believed that I can win any race if the event is long enough. I’m never going to be the fastest and I’m never going to be the strongest, but I believe I can keep putting one foot in front of the other longer than anyone else.”

Where does resilience of this depth come from?

I’ll give an example from a well-known novella. For those of you who were not ninth graders in my English class when I started teaching in 1978, here is a synopsis of The Old Man and the Sea: Santiago, an elderly and desperately poor fisherman, has not caught a fish in three months. Hungry and alone he sails hours and hours off the coast of his small village in Cuba, believing that his luck will change with increased risk. Indeed after hours alone drifting in the gulf stream, he hooks the fish of a lifetime-an enormous, magnificent marlin. If he can land this fish, he will not only have enough money for food, he will also be known as the bravest and toughest-true encomiums in Hemingway’s masculine world.

An epic encounter ensues, man against nature. Santiago battles the marlin, holding on to ropes until his hands bleed. Hours turn into days as the glorious animal fights for his life. Fatigued, at the end of his strength, and dehydrated to the point of delirium, Santiago triumphs. The fish is his. Santiago lashes the fish to the side of his small skiff and begins the journey back to the island.

Which is where the real trouble begins.

Because in the night, his prize marlin is attached by sharks.

With only a knife attached to an oar, Santiago kills shark after ravenous shark. When the knife breaks, Santiago protects his fish by beating sharks to death with the damaged oar. Even when the oar is lost, Santiago continues to fight the sharks.

But the sharks are too many and too relentless. In the fullness of time, the sharks have eaten every ounce of flesh from what was once the most extraordinary fish ever caught in the Caribbean. Santiago returns to his village half dead from hunger and fatigue. Carrying the mast of his boat up the beach to his shack, he has to stop five times. Bloodied but unbroken, he sleeps.

From the last page of the novel:

That afternoon there was a party of tourists at the Terrace and looking down in the water among the empty beer cans and dead barracudas a woman saw a great long white spine with a huge tail at the end that lifted and swung with the tide while the east wind blew a heavy steady sea outside the entrance to the harbour.

“What’s that?” she asked a waiter and pointed to the long backbone of the great fish that was now just garbage waiting to go out with the tide.

“Tiburon,” the waiter said. “Shark.” He was meaning to explain what had happened.

“I didn’t know sharks had such handsome, beautifully formed tails.”

“I didn’t either,” her male companion said.

In other words, they don’t get it.

The tourists don’t understand. They don’t understand the nature of Santiago’s epic struggle; they don’t understand the dignity of hard work; they don’t understand that even in abject defeat, Santiago is not defined by his hunger nor by his poverty. They don’t understand that his triumph is magnificent and real, even if no one witnessed it or knows about it.

Which brings me–“finally” you could well say–to my thoughts about parenting for this week: it’s okay if no one understands how you’re raising your kids. It’s okay if nobody else gets it.

If you’re trying to raise resilient kids, you may have to go against the popular culture that encourages you to buy meaningless baubles for your children. If you’re trying to raise kids who don’t give up, you may have to go strike out against your neighbors who succumb to their children’s every whine.

If all the other parents say “okay” to an invitation to take second graders to a birthday party at Dandy Bear in a limousine, you can say, “no, thank you.” If all the other parents are watching reality shows with their kids, you can say, “We don’t watch that.” And if all the other parents allow their children to play video games, you can stand up and say, “In our home, we have a no-screen policy.”

There may be rumbles and grumbles at first. There may even be that kid down the block who doesn’t want to come over to your house if he can’t play video games. (It might be argued that this would not be an insurmountable loss.)

You don’t need anyone else’s understanding or permission regarding how to bring up your kids. And doesn’t that sound like the first step in raising resilient children who can stand up for themselves?