Brave, Broken, Strong: Says Who?
Through the broken glass.
People say I’m Brave. I don’t think it’s brave so much as refusing to be afraid. Or maybe that I don’t give a damn. Either way, I know it comes from my mother.
My mother — now there’s someone who was broken in the stronger places. She spent a lifetime having to be stronger. Mom’s story that she shared with me was being sexually assaulted from the ages of 9–15. She had no one to go to, no one to take care of her or protect her. She just had to try to learn to move on and past it, as if there is any such thing when your childhood is stolen from you by men who are the worst kind of thieving predators.
She shared her darkest truths with me, and I listened. It gave me insight. I sat in my newly found bravery, telling myself that if Mom could endure those things, I could bear witness and listen with no evident shock or tears. This creed carried me through my career as I listened over and over again, thousands of times.
I’m not going to say that what happened to my mom or those thousands of other women made them stronger, because I think that’s fucked up. Let’s all stop asserting that “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” Can we all please agree to stop putting that on victims and survivors?
It broke my mom. It broke her and sent her out into a screwed-up world that had no interest in protecting women and girls. Then she trusted a man who broke her heart and his promises with his lies and deceit. And when she got a divorce in the 70s, out she went again into a world that was designed to keep women down, second to men: chattel. The break got deeper and wider and she put layers of lacquer and gold on all those broken places while she kept doing what she had to do to raise her children and get through life.
Discrimination at work, more lacquer. Abusive men, more gold. Poverty you cannot rise above, another layer of lacquer. Small-town gossip and hate, more precious metals on top of the lacquer please.
Rinse and repeat.
She did what I call standing and spinning so she could get through life, raise her children, and march forward. When life and the shit it delivered pressed down on her, she fought her way to a standing position and spun, pushing off the oppressiveness, staving off the attacks.
Irene Estabrooks took on that strong persona because she had no choice. Was she brave? I think she was. She was strong enough to be brave because that was necessary to get through life as a single, uneducated mother of seven children. She was braver than she thought. I think she was braver than we realized, and I saw glimpses of those moments in my own adulthood.
Mom was brave and independent, doing things on her own, and I think I learned a lot of that from her. I know I did. After all, she was my biggest role model as a child. From her I learned how to be independent, gather your fortitude, and stand and spin when life was so fucked up that the injustice was blinding. I learned how to carry on and keep going, to follow her lead and put lacquer and gold and other precious metals over the broken places, so all others saw was the shine of the metal, showing strength even if I didn’t feel it. These lessons I learned like a precious family heirloom, passed down from mother to child.
I saw my mom’s bravery not just in how she adjusted to what came at her in life, but in daily ways. I did not recognize it as a child, but in adulthood I look back and think “oh yeah, there it was.”
It was there, in the NYC subway when she came to my graduation, sitting in quiet fearlessness while being confronted with an angry man enveloped in a mental health crisis while the rest of us handled it with much less confidence and calm. She was so fearless everywhere we went; tricks she learned while working in the mental health ward at the Veterans Affairs hospital, she said. I saw her not worry about the subway, crowds, and the nightlife — virtually everything in NY that we thought she would be afraid of. I don’t know if that’s brave, but it was surprising to us as her adult children. Is this our mother, this undaunted woman strolling through Times Square and owning her space on the subway late at night among throngs of people?
As a child I saw her travel alone or by herself with us and not worry about it. She drove her car where she needed to go because that was what she had to do. Is that bravery or is that just doing what is necessary? I saw a man take his hat off to her one snowy day in Colorado when we arrived at the first gas station in town, pulling a U-Haul with a car full of kids. “Ma’am, did you just come over the pass in this?” She simply answered, “Yes,” as if it were the most natural thing possible. He literally took off his hat and told her he was taking off his hat to her because it took a brave person to do what she had just done. For Mom, she was just going where she needed to go to get where she wanted to get.
That’s part of the brave I learned from watching my mother: you don’t wait for someone to help, to drive you there, to cheer you on. You just do it.
She never thought she was a good mother though. I think that’s where her bravery failed her.
My mother was not an icon of motherhood, but we learned the lessons we needed to learn. I know I did, but likely some siblings would disagree. I know that I learned from her both passively and actively some of the most important lessons I carried into adulthood. I learned how to be outspoken, how to work hard for what I wanted, that I didn’t need a man to get what I needed. I learned how to push for what I wanted and to be fearless. I learned the theoretical art of Kintzugi from my mother and I learned to stand and spin and keep going until my stronger places were so broken, I couldn’t breathe.
But I also learned to stop before my broken places destroyed me completely. Barely.
I know I am my mother’s daughter. Like Mom, what framed the essence of my stronger places was to wrap them in gold, to keep going and caring and doing for others; to get in my car and drive, metaphorically and literally. I spent a career sitting and listening to the worst things man has to offer and going to the places where questionable people in suits and uniforms do shady, unethical, immoral shit, and I dealt with them and their bad behavior. And when, after years of doing this, my stronger places shattered, and I told the people in the suits to go to hell, walking away before my work destroyed me.
People tell me that these actions are brave — from the work I did to traveling alone in my van — but I don’t know. I just know that inside my van, driving where I want to go with only my trusted Shih Tzu companion beside me, I no longer need worry about stronger places, lacquer, or gold.
I simply must keep moving so I can avoid the moments that broke me.
