I know it sounds like the beginning of a preaching scripture, but I promise you it is not.
This is my personal story.
Most people are going through a hard time right now, or have been for a while. My network of friends and family is no exception. There are so much going on. The war, the economy, cost of living, global warming, the world is literally on fire as of July 2023… even the distant threat of artificial intelligence seems daunting. Perhaps the disconnection we felt during the pandemic actually causes the world to take longer to heal than before.
How do we stay strong for the people we love, even when we’re experiencing hardship ourselves? It’s been a question in my mind recently.
I found the answer in the only living example of strength I have ever known.
My mother.
While I have inherited the creativity and sensitivity of my father, I definitely got all my masculine traits from my mom. She is a strong woman. She was a military official, and the main provider for our family for many years. She had a successful career, but not without hardship.
Here are the stories that I remember about the strength of my mother.
When she was a child, her earliest memories of schooling are of bomb shelters and sounds of airplanes. She told me on the way walking to school, often she had to duck under cover holes alongside the roads to hide from bombing planes. It was during the Vietnam American war.
When she was about 10 years old, she had 3 younger brothers to take care of. She is one of 8 siblings. No one was rich back then, so it was all hands on deck. She still complains about the back pain she got now due to when she had to carry 3 younger brothers with her everywhere as a child.
When she turned 18, she enlisted in the military, and sat on a back of a truck for 10 days straight to migrate to the south of Vietnam, with nothing but the clothes on her back.
When she got married, she had to abort her first child because she was too poor. She didn’t even have enough to eat herself.
When she had my sister, she couldn’t produce milk because she was malnourished. All they had for their baby was were rice water and moldy cans of condensed milk. She often mentions the horrible scream my sister would cry out of hunger.
When my parents started their first business, they went bankrupt. And unexpectedly, they had a second child, that’s me.
My mom worked hard, studied all she could when she was a librarian, and became an embroiderer, a chicken farmer, an accountant, and eventually a military official and a business owner. When I turned 10 things started to pick up. She became very successful and provided a comfortable life and so many opportunities for me and my sister more than we can ever dream of. When she retired at 58, she received honorary appraisal by the President of Vietnam for her lifetime of contribution for the army and for the local economy.
Like so many people from my parents’ generation have experienced, hardship is not only familiar, it is persistent. And so, my mother is the most resilient person I know.
My mother is the embodiment of strength. She is determined, adaptive, savy, disciplined. I respect her in many ways. It was not easy leading the life she’s lived, and still, she overachieved. Unfortunately, I spent my childhood feeling disconnected from her, because as a child I needed maternal love. And she needed to be tough and hard working for our family.
When I’d grown up, I learn to empathize with her. Unconsciously, I inherited all these traits from her. Undoubtedly they take all the credits for all the successes that I had. In my many careers, I am strong willed, diplomatic, entrepreneurial, fearless and decisive.
What I learn from her about strength, is that we are not weak in face of difficult situations. We are weak when we face our greatest fears.
When something unexpected happens, usually it’s our fear that kicks in. We don’t fear the bombs falling from the sky, we fear someone we love may have gotten hurt. We don’t fear losing all our money, we fear losing the home we’d made. We don’t fear to be called poor by other people, we fear for the health of our children.
To identify our fears doesn’t make the threats go away, but it changes how we response to them. We can be a victim of the situation, or we can become a protector of what we love most in the face of adversity.
What we do then would come from a place of love and hope. It is an inner place that we can draw our energy from.
When other people around me are going through a hard time, sometimes it is really hard for me to navigate my own energy. There are sadness and despair that is not my own but still I have to process. In those moments, I remember my mother and how she always gave reassurance and immediately sprung into action. She helps where she can and never expects anything back. She always takes too much on herself, but somehow she is always reliable. To her business partners, to her friends, to her family, she is a rock.
When I need to find my own strength, I look inside for this fire that my mom gave to me. It is warm and it is fierce. There is so much of it to give because she spent her whole life showing and proving to me that there are so much of ourselves we can give to others. It is the greatest gift that I’ll always have from her.
We each individually have emotional baggage we need to deal with. The key of being supportive is to put your own needs away, in the moments when others’ needs are more urgent and intensive. There’s a term in psychology called “putting it on the shelf“, when in relationships you learn the skills to evaluate the needs of others versus ours, and put them on the shelf to resolve later when others are less overwhelmed and are more able to support us. This reduces a great deal of conflicts and significantly increases the ability of us to be more emotionally available for others.
But I also learned from my mother that its not always good to put all your needs away in favor of others’ all the time. In the case of my mother, I think she put too much of her own emotional pain on her shelf without ever taking them down and it gave her great suffering. The shelf would often break when it got too heavy at the most inconvenient time, the emotions would be too much to bear and there would be no real way for her to resolve them. All strength then would be lost in the moment.
So the short answer to the question is, to be strong for others we have to draw a connection with the source of our inner strength.
Ask yourself, what inspires you to be resilient? Was it a story or a person, like my mother? Was it a hobby that you can loose yourself to and draw your energy from, like how my painting is the most healing thing for me? Was it a book or a fantastical world that you can eacape to to heal with characters that inspire you? Or was it your own journey? How did you survive the worst in the past? Can you be strong again, knowing what you have overcome in the past?
When you have that inner connection, the next thing to do is to learn to “put things on the shelf”, and how to take it off too. Is it a good time to put your own needs away to support others’ emotions in the moment? Or do you have too much of your own that you need to release first? Can you communicate your needs and expectations in a clear and healthy way so others can jump in and support you instead?
Trust that you have that strength in you to be there for yourself and for the people you love. Sometimes, all we need to face our greatest fears, is a trusted voice to say that everything will be ok.
"Carnation"- Oil on round canvas 24x24cm
Carnation is my mother's favorite flower. So this piece is inspired by her and her radiating energy. May it help you find your source of strength and inspiration.
From my heart to yours,
Milie
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