by Kathy Mann, Author and Speaker
I recently wrote the story of my grandparents’ love and their life together that spanned seven decades. I travelled to the coast early January and interviewed my 94-year-old grandmother about her life and how they fell in love. My husband stayed behind to feed the cats and to work, so the week was an opportunity to soak up the female company of my grandmother, mother, aunt and my two little girls. We laughed, we shared and we bonded. There is something special about being in the presence of multiple generations of women.
The week was an incredible experience for me. I was so impacted by what I learnt about my grandmother’s life and the struggle of being a teenager in England during the Second World War. The rations made life exceedingly difficult and many people were malnourished. Meat was in short supply since the government forced farmers to grow crops of grains to feed the people. The interventions of the English government on farmers were severe and they demanded double the output and would even take over farms that were not performing. The suffering went on for many years and people suffered great losses, including the lives of their loved ones.
The women played a significant role in the war. They cared for the children and the sick, they worked in factories, drove tractors on farms and repaired aeroplanes. With the men away at war, it was the women who kept the cities and homes functioning. They held society together and leaned on each other for support. When my grandmother lost her baby, her sisters organised a coffin and a funeral. They laid her little boy to rest while she was too sick to do so.
In January I thought about how much freedom we enjoyed and that life was comparatively so much better. And in a matter of months, we were no longer free to leave our homes or to show our bare faces outside. The restrictions the English government imposed on the people was also severe and difficult for people to bear. The limitations were about saving lives, but with an enemy that was easier to identify. The strategy of the English government worked - the allies won the war and the farmers fed the nation successfully by rising to the challenge. It’s too soon to tell whether any particular government has implemented the right strategy in the long term. Just as those women in the war, all we can do is our part to support each other and move towards victory.
As a teenager, my grandmother’s house was bombed and her family was almost killed. They lost everything within a few seconds but they walked out with their lives and their loved ones. She went on to live a long life, to have many children, grandchildren and great grandchildren. We might lose a lot in the months to come but my grandmother has shown me that we can survive great losses and still come out strong. We can leverage the support of our fellow lionesses and our loved ones. And we can emerge from this pandemic a version of ourselves we never thought possible.
Post traumatic growth is a phenomenon where people change fundamentally as a result of great adversity. Common characteristics include developing a deep compassion for other people, a change in career path, altered spiritual beliefs and become a stronger version of themselves. Will this pandemic create a new version of you? What will your post-pandemic growth look like?
Kathy Mann is an author and speaker with a special interest in stress management. She is passionate about guiding people towards their best lives possible in harnessing their strengths and innate talents. She offers a stress re-framing service, which shifts beliefs to be more constructive around stress. She does this by educating her clients about the variety of stress responses that exist and how we can benefit from them. Kathy's books Avoiding Burnout and Harnessing Stress are available at major retailers and online at Amazon. She is a wife and mother of two beautiful daughters and lives in Johannesburg, South Africa.
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