Braid Your Tenderness with Tenacity
And don't forget: every braid has three strands
Just last week, I was dwelling on tenderness and brutality, and the way that we’re made most tender and need to enact the most tenderness in brutal times like these.
And now, I seek to anchor that tenderness with another quality that is challenging and necessary. We need to reach for a force that life-giving, even when we’re asked to conjure up more life force than we think we can bear to give:
Tenacity.
This word, tenacity, came up in relationship to tenderness in the introductory session of my new Authors’ Knot program.
We talked about how to be kind and tender with ourselves, even as we found the strength, courage, and tenacity to honor the commitments to get the creative work done.
And now, as I launch the latest KnotWork Myth & Storytelling episode into the word, I feel the way tenderness and tenacity want to wrap around us like a great belt. Once again, we discover how story invites us to embody and really know that which we might have merely thought was a good idea to think about sometime.
Dee Mulrooney offers us her story, Maggie’s Doll, which was inspired by her own mother’s story of growing up in Dublin in the 1940s. The little girl in this tale was well-loved and well-protected in what must have often felt like a hard, hard world. Both in the story and in the conversation that follows, Dee paints a picture that you might recognize if you have read Claire Keegan’s book Small Things Like These, or seen the Cillian Murphy film version that just came out last year.
Dee’s mother, fictionalized as Maggie in the story, was the adopted daughter of midwife who was taken in when her “real mammy” died shortly after the birth. This was the world where the women’s bellies were almost always filled with the next baby and the children’s bellies were often empty. In the face of scarcity, and despite much abuse, the culture was held together with fierce, devoted care, especially from women like Mrs. Long to attended both the birthing chamber and the deathbed for all the folks in the neighborhood.
This story weaves together the way things were and the way things are, along with the way things have always been and have never been in a way that just breaks my heart.
(In the very best way.)
One of the things I love best about Dee Mulrooney, this visionary artists and bold performer and fully alive human: she asks us to see all of the shadows and the almost-too-hard-to-bear, and she wraps us with such beauty and love throughout it all.
The third strand of this braid
That title up there, the one about braiding tenderness and tenacity? Perhaps you wondered about the third strand that any braid must have.
Clearly, it has to be love.
Certainly, I speak of the love that comes with the ultimate tenderness we reserve for babies and the very elderly, as well as the tenderness we offer when we kiss the hidden parts of a romantic partner.
But also the kind of love that is tenacious, devoted in the way that a vice grip is devoted to holding things together. This is the kind of love that shows up on the street and makes the calls to representatives and keeps planning a better future, even when the billionaires seem to hold all the cards.
So, on this day when everyone is talking about love or refusing to celebrate a holiday that’s been manufactured to celebrate love, I invite you to find a third way to strengthen that braid.
Tenderness and tenacity will keep the dream of a loving world together.
In the bleakest times, we must gather & continue to create
If you’re seeking community and intend to birth new creative work in 2025 (in spite of it all, because of it all), I invite you to consider one of the writing groups I’m offering this year.
The Authors’ Knot Program, February - November 2025
An intimate 10-month online writing program for thought leaders, memoirists, and heart-led visionaries working on a book or another “big project.”
This is ideal for you if you want more accountability and more specific feedback on your work. We're really going to focus on making progress on the thing you've been longing to write.
Learn more & apply now.
There’s one seat left in the 10 month Authors’ Knot writing program. We meet at 7 PM ET on Mondays, beginning Feb. 17. If you’ve been wondering if this is the year to declare yourself a writer, now is the time to act.
