Before the chaos – the constant instability that would come to define much of my life – I had a childhood that many dream of. I was a white male, born into a middle-class family, in a predominantly white, suburban town. While my family tree was a bit complicated, the first few years of my life were comfortable, stable, and supportive.
When I was six, the stability that I was accustomed to quickly unraveled. My parents divorced after my dad cheated on my mom with a neighbor. Within a month, my dad had gotten my mom sent to a psychiatric hospital, kicked my half-sisters (his stepdaughters) out of the house, destroyed my mom’s home daycare business, and moved his girlfriend in to live with me and my younger sister. I didn’t see my mom or half-sisters for months, and was forced, under threat of verbal and psychological abuse, to call my dad’s girlfriend “mom”. After nearly a year, my mother began regaining custody, and for the next two years my younger sister Charlotte and I had to split time between our mother and father. Eventually, he lost interest. Unwilling to attend a single court-ordered counseling session, he relinquished his custody. We haven’t spoken since.
As I matured, the complexity of our situation became apparent. We were comfortably middle-class, but my mom was reckless with her finances. She had erratic, impulsive spending habits that I quickly caught on to. To help her save money, my siblings and I often cared for the children attending my mom’s daycare (which she reestablished shortly after regaining custody of us) in place of an employee. My mom’s mental health started to deteriorate rapidly as well. Sometimes I would tend to her when she would come home drunk after a night with her new boyfriend, cleaning her up after she vomited. After she and her boyfriend broke up, her mental health took another turn for the worse. She started taking a host of medications that would often leave her incoherent at night. Most evenings after finishing my homework, I would go into my mom’s room to console her as she sobbed and threatened suicide with the few words she managed to get out. I would lay with her and rub her back, holding back tears as I questioned why I was the one taking on this burden.
Throughout our childhood, I often tried to provide my sister Charlotte with parental guidance. Despite only being a few years older, I was the primary father-figure in her life. What made this dynamic even more bizarre was our close physical proximity to our biological father. Not only did he still live in town, but he was a middle school teacher and the high school basketball coach. For years, Charlotte and I would see him in passing and hear stories about how fun his class was. Sometimes, I even found myself in the same room as him, both of us avoiding eye contact at all costs. These interactions inevitably led to a feeling of guilt. Charlotte and I had to have been the reason he left, right? He seemed to have room in his heart for other kids. Why not us?
As a high schooler, I felt anxious about our family’s financial struggles and my mother’s poor decision making. To help out, I got a job at a local restaurant. It wasn’t much, and I never let my mom know, but I would pitch in to buy groceries and pay bills whenever I could. I knew that we had plenty of money to get by, but I worried about my mom’s long-term financial stability, and hoped that she would save more if I covered some of the costs. She didn’t.
During the summer before my senior year we found out that 13-year-old Charlotte was pregnant. After months of defending her from bullying and trying to ascertain how we were going to support an infant, I became an uncle to Grace. With the baby’s father out of the picture, I took it upon myself to act as the predominant male figure in young Grace’s life, just as I had done for her mother. I was determined to provide Grace with the stability we never had. In the months after Grace was born, I spent most of my free time with her. I did my best to make sure that she felt loved and secure. I spent so much time with her that “Unkie” – baby talk for “uncle” – was her first word. Though my mom and I helped care for Grace in the early months, Charlotte quickly rose to the challenge. She transferred to an online school for her first semester of high school so she could focus on parenting. To everyone’s astonishment, she excelled in school and became a phenomenal mother. Resilience runs in the family.
When it was time for me to apply to college, I decided to move several hundred miles from my home, hoping to avoid being summoned back for every crisis. Right before moving out, however, my mom’s daycare was shut down. She had been running it over capacity, knowingly ignoring multiple warnings from the state until her license was terminated. Stubborn and not knowing how else to make money, she had continued to operate the daycare illegally. Eventually, she was caught and summoned to court, presumably on her way to prison. Since Charlotte was under 18 years old, if my mom became incarcerated, Grace would have been removed from Charlotte’s custody. While my new college classmates were enjoying orientation week, I was filling out paperwork to hastily transfer legal guardianship of Grace to one of my older half-sisters. Knowing my distance limited me, I made plans to enroll in a university closer to home. Fortunately, the judge spared my mom from jail time and I did not have to transfer.
The examples that I’ve laid out are some of the most formative experiences of my life, but this list is far from comprehensive. Every month it seemed like a new earth-shattering crisis arose, followed by fleeting moments of stability. This distress was often accompanied by mental abuse from our mother when she felt particularly overwhelmed. She made sure that my siblings and I knew that we were the source of the chaos. The unending stress took its toll: I now have moderate anxiety and an adverse childhood events (ACE) score of 6 out of 10. The groundbreaking ACE study, a discussion topic in our Psychiatry block, found that individuals with a score of 6 or higher are at risk of their lifespan being shortened by 20 years.
Despite all of the turmoil, my family endured. My younger sister is in her third year of nursing school, where she lives on campus with her 6-year-old daughter Grace and her boyfriend. She gets fantastic grades, has raised an incredible child, and developed a healthy relationship with Grace’s biological father – unwilling to make the same mistakes as our parents. I graduated college with academic success and now attend one of the best medical schools in the US. My half-siblings have similarly remarkable success stories. Unfortunately, countless families throughout the US face similarly incredulous challenges with less favorable outcomes. How were we different? What made us so resilient?
Over the past several years I have spent innumerable hours trying to answer these questions, and three themes stand out to me. First, despite our many challenges, we were still a middle-class, white family living in an affluent suburban town. We lived in a safe, green community, and had access to good housing, nutritious food, and great schools. The positive impact of this stability on my mental and physical development cannot be discounted.
Second, the robust social networks that we had established within our community also played a critical role in nurturing resilience within my family. We became very close with many of the families who attended my mom’s daycare. She often helped them out, giving them deals or offering them a place to stay, and through her generosity, she formed rich connections that we could call upon when we struggled. If we needed help solving a particular problem, we almost always had someone to turn to. For example, if the sink needed fixing and we couldn’t afford to pay for it at the time, we had friends who helped for free because my mom had previously been generous to them. These communal bonds brought with them a sense of security that was key to my family’s resilience.
The third, and probably most fundamental, influence on our resilience comes from my mother’s boundless compassion. Despite her shortcomings, my mom is one of the most selfless people that I have ever met. She didn’t run the daycare at double the legal capacity to make more money, in fact, she probably lost money from the extra staff she had to hire. Nearly half of the families couldn’t afford to attend, and their daycare fees were covered by the state at an unsustainably low rate. The kids who weren’t poor enough to receive state funding, but still couldn’t afford to pay, simply attended for free. My mom frequently offered up our house, inviting families to live with us for months at a time, free of charge, while they got back on their feet.
These decisions ultimately led to a toxic and stressful home environment for me and my siblings. Our physical needs were met, but emotionally we felt neglected. At first, we resented the hardship that my mother brought upon us. However, we were also exposed to the hardships of our neighbors, and over time we developed intense empathy towards them. Consequently, we began to identify more broadly with others who were experiencing misfortune. We may not have gotten to live a “normal” life, but we were a part of something bigger: we offered up our own stability and comfort to others who had it much worse at the time. Most importantly, the sadness and anxiety that my siblings and I felt paved the way for us to find passion in helping others. This perpetuated a cycle of selflessness, which spread throughout our social network, giving strength to those that we had helped. It became clear to me that shared suffering begets empathy, which begets selflessness, which begets resilience, which begets more empathy.
While my family’s story is unique, the circumstances that fostered our resilience are not. In fact, I believe that building a life around compassion and community is well within reach for most, especially those enduring hardship. This is not intended to downplay the importance of the external factors and privileges I benefited from, but to offer a pathway to hope and success as we grapple with the intense suffering felt by so many around the world right now. Issues such as racism, COVID-19, climate change and inequity are ravaging the globe, especially America. At times, these monumental issues seem insurmountable. The absence of clear solutions, diminishing trust in our political institutions, and disagreement on basic facts have left many hopeless. While the path forward is not yet clear, one thing is certain: coming out of these crises as a better nation than we went into them will be incredibly difficult work, and we need to be resilient to stand any chance of achieving this goal.
How can we foster such resilience when the future looks so bleak?
Empathy.
Much of the suffering that we witness and endure is senseless – a consequence of the individualistic identities that dominate American culture. Rather than empathy, our identities are rooted in political affiliation and self-preservation. This needs to change. A silver lining of these devastating crises is that they have given us an opportunity to feel empathy on a colossal scale. Extraordinary empathy, in turn, opens the door to extraordinary selflessness. Like COVID, selflessness is a contagion – able to ripple through communities with incredible force. Unlike its deadly counterpart, however, selflessness leaves hope and resilience in its wake, beginning the cycle anew. Resilience is the solution, and empathy is how we will get there.
The author is a medical student at the University of Pennsylvania. To maintain anonymity, all names in this story have been changed.
