This piece of Ancestral Intelligence is part of the Tiger Moms Project

Story by Cher-Wen DeWitt:

Growing up, my mother always folded extra lessons on toughness into her parental gospel, magnified by the fact that she had been an outdoor survivalism disciple and kayaking instructor as a teenager in Singapore. In the in-between times that mortared together the days, whether buckled into the front seat of the car, sitting on a barstool at the kitchen island, or sprawled in star shapes across the couch, she drilled me with 'what if' questions. What if you're lost in the forest and can't find fresh water? What if someone breaks into your bedroom at night? What should you do before using bamboo for firewood? Answer key: Tie a piece of plastic to a branch overnight to collect condensation; put something heavy into a pillowcase which I can use as a makeshift flail; cut holes into the bamboo chambers so they don't explode and impale me. 

Her goal, it became clear to me, was to find an alternative to toughening me through emotional distance, which had no place in our hyper affectionate household. It was to prepare me for a range of situations so absurd that I would not be alarmed by run-of-the-mill personal challenges as they cropped up in my life. While my mom busied herself with training me in survivalist ingenuity, she always made note of ways in which American children's upbringings were clearly setting them up for a life of dependency on things that they did not need. I started to track these mentally as 'American Weaknesses', things that I could theoretically ask for, but expect to be met with an exasperated look of disapproval. Now, I do still find myself trying to unlearn residual side effects of this training, like not feeling comfortable asking for help, or never thinking to seek medical treatment (hello, piece of glass I kept in my foot for a year because 'it wasn't that bad')...but I'm more grateful than ever for the core of the confidence I carry in my ability to figure things out, to seek solutions when the 'correct' one doesn't present itself. My mom's endless game of 'what if's left me with answers about what kind of woman I wanted to be.