The Good Ship Tenacity
“I cannot sleep. I just keep hearing my 4-year-old’s panicked screams that he can’t get out. I keep feeling his weight in my arms as I threw him to my 8 and 11-year-olds screaming for them to take him and run while I struggled to free my 6-year-old from the backseat of our just barely 24 hour-old car. I keep hearing the explosions of the tires, gas line, and other material. I keep feeling the flaming explosions and shrapnel hitting me and my babies as we ran for our lives. We made it out barely in time. My husband and I have some burning from the molten material that exploded onto us, but we are alive and none of us are in the hospital.”
These are the words I wrote June 9th, 2018—just weeks before I was to begin my journey into becoming who I should have always been. Orientation was scheduled, preparations were underway…and the last stop on this burling bullet-train of preparations was a family holiday to the happiest place on Earth before my scheduled 3-year disappearance from family life was set to commence. Instead we got hell—to this day inexplicable. Not one expert has been able to figure out why our brand-new vehicle with only 200 miles on it blazed and burst…perhaps it was simply the will of the universe.
The universe never has seemed to be particularly fond of me. I didn’t start life with a clear path to my destiny. It seemed that adversity piled, and my life was a living sequel to Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. But here’s the beautiful thing about destiny, we create it… or rather, we co-create it with luck and the universe.
When I got married at 19 and had my first child at 21, I felt deeply ashamed…as though, in the eyes of society, I had ended living. My fate was sealed, and I had squandered my potential. But Dylan Thomas’s famous words had long-inspired me, “Rage, rage against the dying of the light….Do not go gentle into that good night.” And raged I did, against societal expectations, against hardships, against fate, against luck, against the universe. But the Good Ship Tenacity is not manned by the Captain alone. With 1 baby in tow, I earned my Associate’s degree at my local community college. With 2 babies in tow, I earned my Bachelor’s degree from a small state college. With 4 babies in tow, I graduated with my doctorate degree in Occupational Therapy. And along the way, an entire crew of family, colleagues, and loved ones powered my ship to port.
I was determined that the winds of poverty, job loss, and homelessness that befell me in the years leading up to my Touro journey would not best me, but rather I would leverage the sword of sanctification against the jaws of hell that threatened to consume me. So when the sun rose on June 9th, 2018; then June 16th; and for the weeks that followed, I wrestled with God, with destiny, with the universe, with the pain of sacrifice and adversity. Could I in good conscious still begin my program while my family and I were in the midst of suffering? We had come this far, I had to try, and so I girded up my loins for battle, and I showed up determined to sanctify my suffering in the face of hell. With my army of fellow students, my brothers and sisters in arms; I stand before you today, to proudly announce I—like they— have prevailed.
As we enter our various fields, we have a duty to battle for those who do not have an army or a crew to man their own Ship Tenacity. We have a duty to apply empathy and compassion. To right the wrongs of our society. But most of all, we have a duty to sanctify suffering…ours and others’ alike. We never know the flames others are fleeing. In the words of the novelist and poet Mary Ann Evans, “It is never too late to become who you might have been,”… it’s not too late for a single person, a people, a society, or even a nation.
Judaic values surrounding social justice, intellectual pursuit, and service to humanity did not end as we walked victorious through the doors of our gladiatorial arena into the world. Our steadfastness in social justice, intellectual pursuit, and service to humanity must never cease.
The final words of my June 9, 2018 entry that I began this post with, remain particularly applicable at this moment, “We made it…Thank God!” Thank you.
Mommas, I see your struggle. I know your pain, and I remain committed to you. There is victory on the other side of struggle.
