RESILIENCE IS AT the forefront of my daily thoughts. I remember with stunning clarity the conversations my father had with me when I was younger than my sons are now. He talked about the thick skin I'd have to develop when people judged me for the color of it. That was a lot for a little kid with big feelings to digest.
As a mixed-race Black father, I know now, and maybe sensed then, that my father had big feelings, too— "sensed" because they were hidden behind that gritty facade, a stoic exterior nacre-hardened by surviving a world that tried to kill him. The way he showed his big feelings was to pass as many pearls of wisdom as possible to his son. And he did what he set out to do. He protected me from the harms he feared, at least as best he could. But I'll admit that some of that protection came at the cost of closing my big feelings up in a shell, shielding me from some of the things those feelings might have let me enjoy.
My sons have big feelings, too, and come by them honestly, perhaps an unwanted gift from their old man. Sadly, I see flickers of the fear those feelings generated in me as a boy their age (and if I'm honest, as an adult)the worries, the anxieties, the voices stoking stress and doubt. In spite of myself, at least in the early goings of fatherhood, I leaned on grit, on stoicism, on manning up, on being hard, on protecting the soft center from those who might make it past that shell. I watched their faces as they looked at me with confusion, smarter than me in the ways our children always are, wondering why I encouraged them not to feel their feelings.
And then I thought of oysters. When a foreign body makes its way through an oyster's shield-like valves, the irritant lodges itself within the soft body. This sand, this plastic, this grit is an injury, and the formation of a pearl around this harm is its healing. It is beautiful, precious scar tissue. It is a symbol of survival.
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