Tag: school lunches

“Almost Not Afraid at All”

I’ve been reading the “Tuyo” book series by Rachel Neumeier. It’s a fantasy series that takes place in a world where each region is separated dramatically from the next, with each region having its own extremely different weather, sky, peoples, customs, etc. I probably enjoy these books so much because they are very cross-cultural, as the people in these regions rarely interact, but the main characters are forced to leave their home regions and live among and befriend people who are completely different from them. 

One of my favorite characters is Tano who is rescued from a very abusive family/tribe situation. He is brought into a new tribe where he is treated well for the first time in his life and he slowly learns the things he needs to know to be a part of this new people. He struggles with a lot of fear and lack of trust, but he’s determined to overcome in these areas so he keeps pushing himself to do things that he logically knows are good for him, even though, physically and emotionally it terrifies him to try it. As he grows in these areas, and his fear lessons, he uses a line quite a lot, “I was almost not afraid at all.” 

I like that. I think that sums up how I live a lot of my life. Growing up cross-culturaly, I always struggled with not fitting in and the fear that evoked. I never quite knew all the customs and ways of doing things. I mostly got it, but there was always something that would make me take a misstep, draw attention to my ignorance, which generally drew mockery. I learned to get really good at observing people carefully and taking my cues from them. Every new situation felt fraught with danger. I don’t know where I’m supposed to go. I don’t know what I’m supposed to say. I remember in 8th grade we had been living in Haiti and due to the major upheaval and violence happening in the country, we had to leave and come back to the States. I came into middle school four months into the school year. At lunch everyone got in line to get their food. My mom offered to give me lunch money, but the idea of having to figure out where to line up, how to pay for my food, how to figure out the whole system, was too overwhelming for me, too many opportunities to mess up and draw negative attention. I just skipped lunch the rest of the school year and then ate a big snack when I got home from school every day. 

As I got older I was able to recognize that a lot of these fears were unreasonable. So, I would make myself do things that felt scary, but logically I knew I should/could do them. Fake it till you make it. I got good at walking into situations and being upfront about my ignorance. Hey, I’ve never done this before, could you show me how this works? I have also learned how to over-prepare in order to cancel out some of the fear. I’ll look at maps ahead of time so I know exactly where I will park, and exactly how long it will take me. Maybe I’ll write down notes on questions I need to ask, information I need to remember to get. Possibly I’ll talk through the whole scenario ahead of time with my husband, ok, so I’m going to do this first, and then this, and then this…does that sound right? I’ve learned to just do the things that make me afraid because the fear is unreasonable and things need to get done. 

This week I had a job interview. I can’t remember the last time that happened. All the things I’ve done on the side to make some money over the years have been initiated informally, by someone I know or a friend of a friend. So, extremely new experience. It was at a location I’d never been to with people I’d never met. (It’s a part time position, teaching a one-hour children’s music class once a week.) 

Ahead of time, I was expecting that I was going to be nervous. I was anticipating being nervous. I was ready to be nervous. But, a couple hours beforehand, I thought about it and realized that I was actually excited. Not nervous. I was curious and actually looking forward to meeting these new people and discussing the class. Yes, my heart was pounding a bit, and I took a couple deep breaths before I got out of my car, but practically nothing! 

The interview went fine. I’ll find out next week whether they want me or not. But, getting the position almost feels irrelevant. I feel like it was a big win to do something new where I wasn’t scared and actually enjoyed myself. I did something new, and “I was almost not afraid at all!”

1 John 4:18 says, “There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not been perfected in love.”

My journey to overcoming fear is directly linked to my understanding of how much I am loved by God. The better my understanding, the less fear I have. I look forward to a day when I will not be afraid at all. Until then, I’m pretty excited about “Almost not afraid at all.”

Ramen Noodles

It’s funny how certain foods are like portals to the past. As soon as you take a bite you are immediately back in an old memory. Ramen noodles do this for me. I don’t eat Ramen very much. I’m aware it’s not the healthiest option on the planet. But, occasionally, I will get Ramen for the kids (they rarely get it, and for some odd reason, have decided it’s a treat). I ate a packet for lunch today and as soon as I smelled the rich broth, I was floating back in time.

Fifth grade. Morehead, Kentucky. 

I think this was the first year our family stumbled on this amazing food. By this time my brother and I were latchkey kids. Our parents were working, and my mom was finishing up her last year of school to be a Physican’s Assistant. A save-a-lot had moved into town and my mom would stock up on freezer meals and fast foods that my brother and I could prepare for ourselves. 

Every day after school I would walk into the trailer, put the old copper kettle on. I’d pull out one of our orange bowls that had a white lining, bowls that had followed our family everywhere we lived,  and I would make myself a bowl of ramen noodles. 

I was always starving after school. Fifth grade was the year I stopped eating lunch at school. When we first moved to this school, I was in second grade and my brother was in fourth. My parents would send school lunch money with my brother and he would pay for both of us. We ate school lunches for about two years, but we didn’t really enjoy them. They served a lot of Southern American food that we just weren’t used to. Pinto beans and cornbread, corndogs (what was this thing?? I always pulled the corn breading off and ate the hotdog), really cheap hamburgers that had some kind of weird slime on them, mashed potatoes that were so runny it was almost more like a porridge. (There was one meal that I actually liked, beef vegetable soup and a bread roll.) 

When I was in fourth grade, we moved away for one year while my mom did an intensive year of study at the University of Kentucky in Lexington, then we moved back to Morehead. I was now alone at my school, my brother had moved on to middle school, and I had no idea how to navigate school lunches. Who did you pay? When did you pay? How much? It just seemed like an overwhelming problem, overwhelming because everyone else already knew what to do, and here I was, in 5th grade, clueless. 

Just an aside. This has long been a problem for me. My mother is British and grew up overseas, my father is American but he grew up overseas. I did not move back to the states till I was almost seven. And we moved to Eastern Kentucky that has its own unique culture going on. I spent a lot of my childhood not knowing what everyone else already knew. I would try to be very observant, see what everyone else was doing and copy them. Or just retreat. Or pretend like that was just not something I wanted to do, cause I had no idea how to go about doing it. Sometimes I would brave being made fun of and just ask, but other times, it seemed like too much energy to try and figure things out. And for school lunches, It was just easier to not buy any. 

So, I told my mom I would take a lunch. And then, I just didn’t. I didn’t like packing lunches. In fourth grade I got teased quite a bit because I would pack a lunch and bring food that was not “normal” like a whole tomato that I would eat like an apple, or a piece of bologna, and piece of bread, packed separately, cause that’s how I liked them. Somewhere along the way I just decided school lunches were not worth the hassle. So, I would sit at a table and wait a couple minutes until I could just line up with the other kids and wait to leave the cafeteria. I always had a book to read, so I wasn’t bored. 

Then I would get home, starving and eat Ramen noodles. And cereal. And whatever else was laying around the house. 

I’m not sure what kind of memory that is. But, I’m thankful for those hot hearty noodles that made me feel full and satisfied after a long day at school.