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A Hard Kind of Quiet
Some of us wear faces that were never fully our own.
We carry the set jaw of the men who raised us—men who worked as if stillness were something to be afraid of. We pull their legacy on like a heavy coat, often long before we have the shoulders for it.
For a long time, many of us believe the body is only for work.
We measure our worth by what our hands can take without breaking. We pry up old floorboards. We cut the crepe myrtles down to the knot. We learn early that to rest is to fall behind, and so we don’t rest, and we call that strength.
But there is a hard kind of quiet that comes later. It arrives the morning we learn to touch our own jaw gently. It is meeting our own eyes in the glass somewhere in our thirties and finally giving ourselves permission to say:
Let the shoulders drop. Let the hands rest.
It takes a different muscle to stop flinching.
It asks us to go back into the room the flinch came from—to face the small breaks our fathers left behind. So many of them only knew how to make a fist because no one ever showed them how to open an empty hand. They were not cruel. They were unfinished, passing down the only shape they were given.
This is the work we inherit whether we ask for it or not: to feel the cold draft of old grief move through us without letting it freeze us shut.
And then come the children. My daughter cups my face in her hands. My son leans his small, unedited weight into my chest. In those moments I understand exactly what I am being asked to become. I want them to feel something open—not the old, braced silence that teaches a child they have to earn their place by going quiet.
So we practice.
We learn to live inside these bodies differently. Soft enough that when the people we love lean into us, they don’t feel stone.
Steady enough to stay.
~
author: Mario Brown
Image: Author's Own
Editor: Molly Murphy
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