The Meaning of Tough

There was a time when I believed I understood what it meant to be tough.

I was 27 years old and had been playing recreational and competitive soccer for 20 years. In that time, I had injured just about every part of my body. I'd pulled muscles in my back, calf, and groin. I'd bruised my knees, a rib, and my tailbone. I'd severely sprained my ankle. I'd had a concussion, and dozens of black eyes and bloody noses.

I followed a stoic philosophy and would silently endure pain, because I was tough and because that's what men did. I found all sorts of ways to ignore or jury-rig damage to any one part of my body. And I thought that I understood what it meant to feel and to cope with pain.

Then my niece was born.

My sister's pregnancy had been normal up until its last month, when her doctor discovered that her baby suffered from a diaphragmatic hernia, which had caused her abdominal organs to be pushed up into her chest cavity. As a result, one of her lungs had not developed correctly and there was a chance that she would not survive long after birth.

It was their first child, so my sister and her husband were obviously devastated. Consultations with their doctors, nervous conversations, and hand-wringing were the norm as the pregnancy moved forward. The doctors were able to deliver the baby, but my sister hardly even had a chance to look at her newborn before she was rushed off to the neonatal ICU.

A day and a half later, I visited my niece in the NICU. As a nurse led me to her, I saw other families nervously huddled around their babies' beds. My niece was on a ventilator, and it looked as though there were a dozen tubes sticking out of her. I can remember feeling that everything seemed to be completely out of proportion.

My niece was stirring and her eyes were open. I could see that she was trying to cry out, but couldn't, because of the ventilator mask. There were tears in her eyes, but despite her effort they wouldn't run. Even though my little niece was at the center of very complex apparatus of doctors, nurses, and machines, it seemed as if she was incredibly alone in that NICU. And she was without the ability to vocalize her pain.

At that instant, my understanding of toughness changed.

Yes, my tough-guy role models were men. We could choose to endure pain, following our stoic or macho-man philosophies for as long as we wanted to. But here was a tiny human being who was heroically and silently struggling for her very life, and who was enduring much more pain than my bumps, bruises, and sprains ever gave me.

I now have a better understanding of what it means to be tough, and it has nothing to do with me and my soccer injuries, nor those heroes that I once admired.

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