As I was looking for a coaster to add to our updated office for my diet cokes, one in particular caught my eye. “Suck It Up Buttercup!” The exclamation is surrounded by pretty flowers and butterflies, but the fact is that this is a hard lesson to learn.  And in our current culture, one that some educators are not encouraged to teach and that some parents are afraid to teach.

Before someone starts to lecture me about the dangers of sucking up our emotions and trauma, you need to know that I understand this from a personal perspective and yes, it can be unhealthy.  However, there’s a danger to leaning into the negative emotions and trauma too much as it can completely debilitate a person.  Once you have been labeled depressed or anxious, it’s easy to allow those to turn into excuses for not working through it.  There is a fine line here, it depends on the person and it’s hard, but it can be done.

Some may think this is a generational thing.  After all, the so-called “Greatest Generation” were the kings and queens of sucking it up.  They suffered through The Great Depression and World Wars and yet they raised families, held down jobs, and contributed to society. Not easy, maybe not what we would consider to be healthy today, but necessary to continue functioning in the best way they knew how.  I am a child of that generation and I can remember my dad answering my concerns about how I was feeling or some kind of bump or bruise with a “that’s a sure sign of death” and send me on my way.  I learned to evaluate how I really was and whether I could handle things myself or not and the answer was that I could usually handle it.  I continued that with my boys, asking them if there was any blood or guts, to which they would answer “no” and go on their way.  Not completely heartless, if they needed my help I gave it and if they didn’t I sent them inside to wash it off, put on a bandaid and get back outside.  They survived.

It was an expectation that we would gain responsibility as we got older.  We were taught to clean, do laundry, mow the yard, rake the leaves.  I could clean the entire house by the time I was eight and I mean clean.  My mother was not so impressed because at that age, she was expected to cook lunch for groups of migrant workers of which her mother was one.  My boys learned to cook, clean, do yard work and do laundry themselves. Everything is relative.  All taught self-reliance for the time period and situation we found ourselves in.  This has translated well to my marriage, my work life and my volunteer passions, not always easy, but pushing me to work hard, do my best and suck it up when needed.

Life can be tough, even when it’s good.  There’s marriage, child rearing, re-locating, illness and death.  There’s choosing to be single, supporting yourself, taking care of all the details by yourself.  These are examples of sucking it up.  If I had run away or quit  every time I felt like it, I would never have survived.  But I was taught to make it work and I did my best to do that.  It is a choice I make on a daily basis.  It’s what some young people might refer to as “adulting” today, but it’s just maturity as far as I’m concerned.

What worries me is that today, I am discouraged, HEAVILY discouraged from saying this to my students.  My students who begin whining when they have to stand for longer than 10 minutes to sing on the risers.  My students who complain about their back or legs hurting when they have to sit on the floor.  My students who whine about it being too hot or too cold or too windy or too whatever outside.  The students who whine about how unfair everything is and resort to physicality when things don’t go their way. The students who choose what they want to work on and what they don’t want to work on because it’s “boring” or “stupid”.  The students who don’t understand that learning to follow directions or how to speak respectfully to others or how to be kind are life skills and will help get them through life. Telling a child to “suck it up” is deemed insensitive and will hurt their self esteem.  Let’s see what happens in the real work when they begin their first job and their employer asks them to do something “boring”.  Sucking it up until they can work their way up or change jobs for get more education is essential.  Sucking it up means you have the patience and skills to make it work until things can be improved.

Again, I understand that if someone is in an abusive situation, sucking it up is NOT the right thing to do, but chances are, much of what we’re complaining about is not really that big a deal and maybe we all just need to suck it up, buttercup.