The Endurance Inheritance

I won’t be handing this down

To Endure:

“To suffer (something painful or difficult) quietly.”

“To tolerate.”

“To swallow.”

“To withstand.”

A Farm Girl

I inherited my brunette hair from my dad. My blue eyes are definitely those of my maternal grandfather. My love of reading and math was my paternal grandfather’s love, and I assume my interest in afternoon teatime was handed down from my paternal English grandmother.

But I inherited my endurance from my mother.

My mom grew up on a farm in eastern North Dakota with four siblings. Every morning of every day, whether a school day or a weekend day, began with chores: feed the chickens, gather up the eggs, milk the cows. There was no time to shower up before school — so after a quick change of clothes and a handwashing, she and her siblings ran to catch the bus.

After school and another change of clothes, it was back to the barn for more chores. Homework did not get started until after chores were completed, nor were meals taken. Sleep, illness, aches, and pains were never prioritized over chores.

My mom inherited her enduring nature from her own mother. Over the years, I watched my grandmother’s hands — the same hands that washed dishes with water so hot we cousins often dared each other to stick our hands in it — curve inward, each finger twisted painfully with rheumatoid arthritis. I never once heard her express the agony she must have been in. Instead, every night, she quietly washed the dishes while fully-capable men shuffled into the living room to watch television.

A Way of Life

Growing up, I rarely heard my mom complain, worry aloud, or express raw emotion. If something had to get done, if something was bound to happen, there was no point in complaining or worrying about it. Her motto: “Do what you have to do now, you can panic later,” about sums it up. However, I never saw her “later.” I never saw a time where she broke down and admitted how scared she’d been, for instance, in the life-threatening summer storm we drove through and in which I, a young girl, was certain that death was imminent. She never admitted any exhaustion, sadness, or even joy. She never asked for help, advice, or sympathy. She never turned herself inside out or let us see what lay buried in her heart.

I admit: growing up with a mom who, day after day, quietly endured whatever was thrown at her had its benefits. Whether jumping up from the kitchen table to save my brother from choking on a chicken bone, or spending hours mopping up our basement after a flood, my mom was always on. She worked tirelessly and steadily. If she came home from work and needed a quick nap, we weren’t worried about whether she would get up in time to start dinner, and she never failed to do so. We kids rarely had to take time out from our daily lives to care for her needs. We rarely had to think of her as a human being who might occasionally need a night off, or might not be in the mood to drive us around.

I’m not saying we were purposefully insensitive or uncaring. We loved and appreciated her, but we didn’t understand the lengths she went to — and all that she hid — to make life look and feel seamless. So, we grew up believing that life had a certain permanence. None of us expected our lives to change. We certainly weren’t prepared for when it did.

Admissions

As my mom entered middle age, physical symptoms like fatigue and shortness of breath, long kept under wraps, attributed perhaps to growing older, became impossible for her to ignore. She was admitted to the hospital where she learned she needed a kidney transplant. She had developed a disease called glomerulonephritis. Without the transplant, she would be subjected to a life on dialysis.

When I received this news, I lived half a country away from home. I hadn’t even known my mom was sick, so my emotional reaction mixed fear, sadness, surprise, and anger: Why didn’t she go in earlier? How long has this been going on? But mostly: How could she not have told me, her only daughter, how she was feeling?

But of course, I was my mother’s daughter. I swallowed my tears and expressed my concern and my well-wishes.

Her transplant surgery was successful. Both she and her donor/sister recovered well. That was now a little over 25 years ago. My aunt’s kidney still lives within, and keeps alive, my mother.

A Societal Myth from Patriarchy

“The mythology of your culture hums in your ears so constantly that no one pays the slightest bit of attention to it.” Ishmael, Daniel Quinn

For many years, I believed what I was taught — that a woman who endured her pain was a strong woman. I emulated my mom’s way of life. I believed women who complained (whined) or made requests (demanded) or in any other way expressed their emotions (hysterical, whiny) were weak. I believed that hiding my pain and my emotions from the people I loved was for their benefit. That putting other people’s needs before my own made me a good person.

This trait certainly didn’t run in my family alone. For many generations, North Dakotan women relied on their ability to hunker down and survive by denying internal needs or pains for the good of the whole. But this belief is not limited to even familial or geographical compartments. This belief runs in all women’s blood. This is a societal belief, one perpetuated by patriarchy.

Patriarchy is a system of tiered power. It establishes beliefs about the skills, capabilities, tendencies, and qualities of men and women and assigns roles to them based on these qualities. It establishes rules, norms, and structures we are to fit inside. It is for our own good, we are told, as well as the good of everyone around us.

Patriarchy has been ruling human thought and behavior since at least the hunter-gatherer times. Though it is often depicted by a white, middle-to-late-aged, heterosexual male exhibiting traits of ambition, aggression, and dominance, patriarchy is much more than a stereotype.

Patriarchy is a consciousness that thrives on parsing, dividing, and organizing all the things of the world — including its people — into their “ideal” place in society.

Patriarchy applauds the picture of a family with a hardworking father, a stay-at-home mother, two beautiful children, a dog, and a minivan. Patriarchy shudders at deviations. Patriarchy ensures that the rules are handed down generation after generation — not only through our family lineage but through our cultural lineage. In movies, television, music, and books, we see the enduring woman as the glue that binds things together. We observe the character of the calmly abiding “strong” woman. We are led to believe that keeping one’s pain quiet is a virtue.

The man in the patriarchal picture is a Charles Ingalls or Ward Cleaver type — strong, wise, and all-knowing. He is never soft. Never weak. His wife sometimes displays moments of weakness, his children sometimes err, but he corrects their mistakes; he sets them right. He is the master of his domain and of all he owns. As long as everyone follows the rules, this man is confident, pleasant, and often charismatic. When everyone does as they should, he is pleased. He sits back, smokes his cigar, and surveys his domain with pride.

It is he, the patriarchal man, who benefits most in a society where women never complain, never point out inequity—women who see their pain as something private and unworthy of voicing or burdening anyone else with.

Today, I hold a different set of beliefs. I believe that “endurance is strength” is nothing more than a myth. I believe that the habit of regularly enduring pain — emotional or physical — leads only to a lonely, painful, and ultimately quality-reduced life. I believe that sharing our worries, limits, and fears is not a burden to others but a great gift of shared humanity. I believe that emotions, longings, desires, and heartfelt, vulnerable words should not be swallowed but should be expressly delivered. I believe that a woman’s truth is not a disruption in the world. It is a contribution to it.

Societal beliefs can be like addictions and are as hard to break. On some unconscious level, we believe that enduring women are necessary to keep society running. Tucked in the backs of our brains lives a belief that if it weren’t for women’s endurance and their ability to tolerate things that should likely not be tolerated, society would fall apart. Families would be thrown into chaos, marriages would break up, and women would walk off jobs in droves, exhausted and having had it up to here. This would bring ruin to the patriarchal picture of the idealized American family.

But societies are nothing if not pliant and flexible. We can adapt. We can evolve and morph into a society where women speak up for their own needs and vocalize their thoughts without apology. In so doing, we can teach everyone around us, especially our watchful children, to do the same.

Hand-me-downs

My mom’s kidney transplant saved her life. But the immune suppressants she’s been on ever since cause side-effects ranging from mild to life-threatening. She has been admitted to the hospital more times than any of us can count. My dad, my brothers, and I have walked this journey with her. It has demanded that each of us grow in our ability to speak our valuable emotional truths. It has insisted we pay closer attention to each other’s physical and emotional needs. It has taught us that neither she nor anyone else is immune to the stresses of life. One way or another, unaddressed stress will get the last word.

During a recent dangerous bout of illness, when my mom was diagnosed with sepsis, I went home to Fargo to be with her in the hospital. I was only scheduled to stay a couple of nights, though I told her I could stay longer if she wanted. In keeping with all that we’ve both learned, I kept my schedule open but left the asking up to her.

The morning she said, “I’d really like it if you could stay one more day,” I wanted to cry with joy — for her, for me, for our relationship and how far we’ve both come. As far as I could remember, my mom had never asked me for anything in her life. It was a great display of strength on her part to ask this of me. And it gave me the great honor of caring for her a little longer (even spoiling her with a little snuck-in chocolate).

Today, as a mother of girls myself, I consider my inheritance. If it is possible to choose whether or not to send this blind and often fierce endurance down the line, I choose not to. Instead, I choose to hand down wiser gifts, such as discernment, or the courage to say no, or the right to let go of a dream, of a person, of a belief. If I have any influence on the matter, the virtue of suffering in silence, encased in the endurance inheritance, ceases with me.