Girl Power
Eleanor Roosevelt once said,
“A woman is like a tea bag.
You never know how strong she is
until she gets into hot water.”
When I was in high school, my Grams wanted to move a refrigerator out of her country kitchen and on to the back porch to make room for a new one. “Just hold on and let me send Tommy over,” Mom told her on the telephone. “He can move it for you. You’re going to hurt yourself if you try to do it.” It was about an hour’s drive down tree-lined roads overhung with Spanish moss, but Mom sent Tommy on his way immediately. She knew my grandmother.
By the time Tommy pulled down the long driveway, parked the car in the “u” in front of the house, and opened the screened door to go inside, my grandmother had already moved the refrigerator. By herself. She stood wiping sweat from her forehead and asked him if he’d like to sit down for a glass of iced tea and maybe a bit of leftover potato salad.
I used to think it was Smith women in particular who possessed this well-we’ll-just-see-if-I-can’t strength that smolders in the eyes like embers just waiting to be stoked. While not every single one of us was blessed with the same soulful brown eyes God gave my grandmother, my mother, her sisters, and almost all my Smith cousins, there’s not a woman on the Smith side of my family who can be stopped by a freight train if she wants to do something badly enough. Among the Smith women there are countless stories, many of them not mine to tell, of a sharp and innovative strength that stands up and shakes its fists in the face of seemingly impossible circumstances. I love that about the Smith women, and I love the legacy it has bestowed upon my own girls.
These days, I’m close to so many women—all amazing and beautiful for their differences—that I’ve come to draw a different conclusion. I think passionate, never-say-die strength is just God’s gift to all women, which is funny to me in light of all of the vast misinterpretations I’ve heard and read of 1 Peter 3:7 (wherein Peter refers to the wife as the ‘weaker’ partner). To quote Washington Irving, “There is in every true woman’s heart, a spark of heavenly fire, which lies dormant in the broad daylight of prosperity, but which kindles up and beams and blazes in the dark hour of adversity.” Heavenly fire, indeed. It’s the fire that propels us on when we’re sick and our kids are sick at the same time, or when we feel so tired that we don’t want to move or be touched, let alone dry a child’s tears, hold a baby in our arms, or reach out to our husbands in intimacy. It’s the strength that allows us to do more things in one day (and often at once) than we can count and then sit down and really listen to a friend, chase our kids around the living room until they drop to the floor in giggles, or pay the bills, answer emails, and watch a television program all at the same time after our kids are asleep.
It’s the strength I’ve noticed in my mom for as long as I can remember. I’ve never seen my mother let anything stop her from doing something she needs or wants to do. Her sheer determination is the reason she now has metal pins in her ankle. She walked right off the back of a very highly stacked pile of logs at the construction sight for the Edisto Island Church of Christ because something needed to be done up there, and she was naturally the woman to do it. When they hurried over to where she’d fallen, she calmly said to my dad, “Could you please get me something to use for a crutch? I think I’ve broken my leg.” I can just see the look on my dad’s face as he scooped her up off the ground and carried her to the car. I just love that even in that moment she hadn’t given up on doing it by herself.
Mom’s leg has never quite been the same. It swells, and sometimes the pins hurt, and many times her legs ache with restlessness. I know she has chronic back pain as well, even though she never talks about it, and I think getting a full night’s rest has long been a thing of the past for her. You’d never know that any of this were true.
When Mom visits us, she jumps on the trampoline with the kids. Once, while she and Daddy were both (yeah—Dad’s body may be over 65, but his heart is still and always will be quite young) out there jumping, Dad’s foot came down right on top of Mom’s, and she hurt her toe and reluctantly had to stop for the day. Zoe still talks about that. “Remember that time Papa jumped on top of Grandma and hurt her foot?” I always laugh out loud when someone hears Zoe say that for the first time. Watching their facial expressions, I can just imagine what sort of mental image that statement has provoked. Even when there are no accidents, this jumping with the kids zaps Mom’s energy and makes her legs swell, but as I said, Mom never lets anything stop her from doing something she wants to do, and she wants to jump, run, and crawl around on the floor after the kids (Yep. They love EVERY moment of it. Riley and Zoe call it “bugging” them. “Bug me, Grandma, bug me!”). No wonder they love her so deeply and can’t wait to wrap their little arms around her neck.
The afternoon Zoe got her cast, she sighed dramatically and said, “It’s too bad I broke my arm ‘ecause now I can’t do anything. I can’t write, I can’t put on my clothes, I can’t—”
I held up a hand and shook my head. “No.”
“Huh?” Zoe said, puzzled.
“No. You might be wearing that cast for 5 weeks. You can not allow it to keep you from living. Those things will be harder for you, true, but don’t say ‘I can’t.'”
In honor of my mom and all the women I love, I offered my daughter her first lesson in bearing up. The funny thing about this strength we possess is that we often don’t realize it’s there until God forces us to tap into it. Motherhood has a way of teaching us all, as we die to ourselves a little bit and press on with sometimes tear-stained faces, that we’re a lot tougher than we think. It’s in those moments when we are certain that we can’t but know we must that we discover we have more inside us than we ever dreamed. Recently I heard celebrity fitness trainer Jillian Michaels say, “I believe everyone functions within a comfort zone that is far below what they are capable of.” Women, especially, are often surprised by their own stores of strength.
Zoe nodded as I spoke. “Otay, Mom. I’ll show everyone that I can still do it!”
“That’s my girl.”
A few days later, Kevin had all of the kids out playing at the elementary school. Kevin and Riley practiced basketball while Adam putted around the court (on Zoe’s Barbie scooter…I just love my son:)) and Zoe played on the playground. Kevin turned his head to check on everyone and spotted Zoe dangling from the monkey bars by her good arm.
Okay, so maybe she embraced her legacy a little too well (think refrigerators and log piles). Sarah Pezdek-Smith said, “The strength of a woman can carry the weight of the world.” Perhaps Zoe just thought she’d start with her own weight. One-handed.
