We have been told that to be resilient is to stand apart. To weather the storm unmoved, to endure without breaking, to carry the weight without complaint. Fathers especially are given this story. The good father is the oak: tall, steady, admired precisely because he does not need to lean. He shelters others but never asks to be sheltered. His strength is measured by how little he requires.
This myth has a certain beauty to it. We do not carve statues in the shape of vines; we carve them to look like pillars. All that is soft is gone, what remains is that which is hard or has been hardened. And yet, when you live long enough inside the weight of grief and care, the myth begins to feel brittle. A father who cannot bend, who cannot admit need, eventually snaps. The oak rots from the inside. The story I inherited about resilience has left me lonelier than I know how to name.
I did not really begin to question this until I found myself sitting at my daughter’s bedside, watching her chest falter in the dark. One breath would come, ragged and shallow, then a pause too long. Then another gasp, as if her small body was unsure whether to continue. In those moments, she did not fight. She yielded. She let the air and the mask, and our trembling hands do the work. She trusted that she could rely on what held her.
Her resilience was not in resistance but in reliance. And it startled me. Because if resilience for her is reliance, if her survival is the sum of many hands, many ties, many threads, why have we been taught to imagine resilience as the opposite? Why have we been told that to lean is failure, that to rely is weakness?
Endure in silence, carry your grief like a private stone, prove yourself by not needing anyone. This script makes us solitary. It distorts fatherhood into isolation, as though to love well is to disappear into a fuzzy invisibility. But a single knot, no matter how tight, cannot hold anything on its own. Only when the knots are tied together do they form a net. A father’s resilience, I am beginning to believe, is not found in how firmly he can stand alone but in how deeply he can rely and be relied upon. Resilience is reliance. Strength is not in separation but in connection.
There have been other moments, lower ones. Sitting on the floor holding my daughter when she is too weak to play, to sit, to do much but be held. I trace her small fingers as she drifts in and out of awareness. I often cry then, not from crisis but from the sheer fact that I cannot change her body, cannot take away the fragility she carries every day. Her eyes sometimes meet mine here for a moment before they close. She does not flinch from my weakness. She doesn’t need me to be unshakable; she needs me to be here. A father willing to remain, even if that means relying on her gaze to steady him.
This is the reversal our culture resists: fragility is not the opposite of resilience, but its ground. My daughter’s life has taught me that. The ventilator, the feeding tube, the medications, the meal trains, the help around the house, the thoughts and prayers and good vibes whispered over her—all of it is reliance. And yet it is precisely in this web of dependence that her life continues. Resilience emerges not in being untouched by need but in being held within it.
A spider’s web offers a better image of resilience to me now than an oak. The web trembles. It breaks. But it is also repaired, rethreaded, renewed. Its strength lies not in rigidity but in flexibility, not in singular hardness but in the pattern of connection. Each thread relies on the others; each knot tied to something beyond itself. Fragility is not erased; it becomes part of what holds it all together.
Fathers are rarely given permission to see themselves this way. We have inherited a silence, a script that says we must carry the weight without asking to be carried. And so, we rarely speak to each other about care, about grief, about the unbearable tenderness of watching a child suffer. We retreat into the myth of the oak and call it love. But what if fatherhood were something else entirely? What if resilience has always been reliance, and our silence has only deepened the fracture? I imagine naming aloud the weight of nights spent pacing hospital corridors, the helplessness of waiting rooms, the fear of not being enough. Not to prove endurance, but to weave ties. To hold each other as surely as we hold our children. What if fatherhood was not a fortress but a net?
Reliance does not mean passivity. It means fidelity. To keep showing up even when you cannot fix, to remain present when nothing changes, to lean and be leaned upon. This too is strength. When I sit beside my daughter during a seizure, I cannot stop it. All I can do is hold her hand, call her name, wait for her to return. My resilience in that moment is my reliance, on her will to come back on my wife’s presence, on the small circle of love that refuses to let go.
This is why yielding has become, for me, another name for love. To yield is not to surrender the bond but to trust it more deeply. To stay when you cannot control. To let others carry you when you cannot carry yourself. Yielding is not weakness. It is reliance. It is what nets are made of.
And in the end, this is what remains: not solitary strength, not the illusion of the oak standing alone, but the quiet fidelity of ties that hold. My wife’s hand in mine. Friends who ask the second question. Machines that breathe for my daughter until she can breathe again. My daughter herself, teaching me without words that life is carried by yielding. When I get to thinking like this, she looks at me as if to say, “Of course it takes more than one person. You’d last what, maybe 2 minutes on your own? 3 tops if someone left you snacks.” Alas, she is non-verbal, and I don’t read minds.
The myth told me that to be a resilient father was to stand apart. My daughter has shown me that resilience is the opposite, it is to stand together. To be one knot in a net strong enough to hold the weight of the nothingness of grief. To yield to reliance, and to find in that yielding not failure but promise.
Resilience as reliance, not resistance.
These ordinary instants are the ones that change your life.
Stephen Hager goes by his second middle name (he has three), Bud, because it’s easier to remember and baristas never misspell it. Along with his wife he is a caregiver for their 8-year-old daughter, Emma, who has pachygyria, a rare neurological disorder. He believes in taking an active approach to advocating for his child and others like her. To this end, he sits on various advisory councils at Children Hospital of Orange County (CHOC), volunteers on consulting and directing boards for various non-profit centers and lends his writing skills where he can. Experiencing a lack of support for parents of medically complex children, Bud founded a support group through CHOC focusing on parent-to-parent interaction. He is also a professor of psychology and has a small private psychotherapy practice.