Tag: The South

Fat Fridays: Moving Forward Inch by Inch

This past week I’ve been fighting a lot of my food addiction demons. Mindsets and thought processes that make me binge eat or just completely not care about diet, health, etc. It’s been a bit frustrating. I’ve done the heavy work of recognizing my unhealthy thought patterns, but how do you get rid of them? Sometimes, logic is not enough to break free from a sugar addiction. Or emotional eating. 

I’ll admit that my diet went out the window while I’ve been trying to figure this out. Then yesterday, I went to the store to get a pair of jeans. I live in the South. It’s still pretty hot around here, but I know that cool weather is on it’s way, and since my weight loss, I don’t have any pants my size. So, I went to the store and pulled about four pairs of pants to try on, all in the size I thought I was, and low and behold  none of them fit. They were all too big. What?? So I went back and got the next size down and that worked fine. I don’t know if men have this in their sizing but women have these W sizes which are cut a bit baggier in the butt and thighs. So, I am a solid 16W, down from a 22W. I was able to fit one pair of regular 16, but another style was too small. 

I decided then and there that I was going to just focus on losing the next ten pounds and maybe with that weight loss I’ll be a solid regular 16, not just 16W. I’m finding that looking at how far I have to go to get to my Dream Weight is overwhelming. So, I’m just going to focus on the next ten pounds. 

I think, in all of this, I keep having to remind myself that I am human. Not perfect. And perfection isn’t required of me. I’m on a journey towards health and sometimes the journey is going to be backtracking and side trails and mess ups and just standing in one place for a minute. But each day I get to decide to try again and see if I can move forward another couple inches. So, here’s to the next ten pounds!

See you all next week. 

Covid and the New School Year

I just read an article on SLATE titled, “I Have No Idea What I’m OK Letting My Kids Do During Covid Anymore” by Allison Benedikt. I was nodding and smiling the whole time I read it, cause yep, I’m in the same place. 

We are in the South. Our schools are not requiring masks, and our governor just made a rule that parents can opt-out of any mask mandates. The Superintendent of our school district made an announcement that our schools can’t offer virtual options when we have absences due to Covid. In a high school meeting we were informed that absences are a big problem and we need to have signed notes any time our kids are absent and make it a big priority to have as few absences as possible. Ok. Great message when you also don’t want kids to come to school if they have any symptoms at all. Our homeschooling co-op has a rule that if ANYONE in the family is sick, don’t come. Which is a pain in the butt when you have a big family, but it’s very effective at keeping any possibility of germs from showing up. But, public schools do not have that policy. 

So, my kids went to school the first week. Day three, one child came home and was not feeling well. By evening she had a fever. She ended up having strep throat and then three days later also came down with symptoms of the hand foot and mouth virus. Both of those are pretty common childhood illnesses that get passed around all the time. But, I want to point out something. Last school year my kids went to public school and wore masks. We did not get sick. The entire year. It was bizarre. No strep. No colds. No stomach bugs. And no covid. 

I talked to the nurse practitioner who saw my sick kids (cause yes, the strep and other virus both spread to all the other little kids). I asked her what she thought about masks at school and the idea that kids DO need to be exposed to childhood viruses so they can build their immune system. She hemmed and hawed. Wouldn’t commit to any stance (which is understandable, it’s a highly charged subject). 

I had one child who did not get sick. It was time to send kids to school, everyone from the elementary school was staying home except her. She had no symptoms. According to public school policy, I should send her to school. But, she COULD get sick. It was very possible that I would send her to school and then by the afternoon she could have a fever. What do you do? So, I gave her a mask and told her to wear it. No, it doesn’t block everything, but it does block some.  Hopefully it would make her less contagious. Well, when I picked her up at the end of the day, she was not wearing her mask. Said it was hot. Got annoying. Fortunately, she did not end up getting sick, but my thoughts of maybe sending my kids to school with masks kind of fell flat. Without it being a rule and someone enforcing it, there is no way they are going to keep them on. I also was talking to a therapist who works at the school and she said the kids who were showing up with masks were getting teased about it. 

I think the general attitude in our state is that Covid is a virus. It’s unavoidable. Like colds and the flu. Vaccines are available, but like flu shots, are going to be very limited in what they can do in the longterm, simply because covid is a constantly mutating virus. And so, we are going about the business of doing normal life with Covid. And it’s messy. No one knows what the rules are. No one knows who to listen to. The hospitals are filling up. When my father got sick with Covid, he ended up getting transferred to an out-of-state hospital. 

And us parents are standing on the sidelines, scratching our heads, hoping that we are making the right choices for our kids. But not sure. 

Thoughts on Race from the Racially Awkward

Today I was at the grocery store. A group of us shoppers were crowded in line, paying for our groceries. I was just finishing paying and I smelled this amazing aroma of fried chicken. I glanced behind me and there was a really large black man standing there waiting to pay. I commented, That chicken smells so good, it makes me want to go get some! He commented back that he wasn’t even going to get to eat it, it was for someone else. I sympathized and went on my way with my groceries. A typical southern grocery store interaction. As I was walking out, I wondered why all interactions with people of a different race can’t be like that. Just two people chatting together in the grocery store line, not seeing color.

The problem is, I know that it goes a lot deeper than “I just don’t see color”. I was reading a book on American history that was focusing on the nonwhites in America. The atrocities that were committed against the Native Americans blows my mind. Sure, we all know that the white people and the Native Americans fought wars with each other, weren’t friendly with each other.. But have you ever read the actual accounts of what happened?  What is most horrifying is reading the historical documents written by the white men who led these atrocities and realizing that they did not see Native Americans as people. They just weren’t human, so it didn’t really matter. Looking at the history of slavery in America: for 200 years the white people kept black people as slaves. Again, there seemed to be a total lack of acknowledgement that black people are humans. Then after slavery was abolished we had the Jim Crow laws for almost another 100 years that were designed to keep black and white people separated as much as possible. Again, not seeing black people as humans. This is the history of our country, and it’s not a distant history. My father’s generation can still remember segregation. 

I am puzzled when people say that racism is a figment of the black person’s imagination. I see examples of it all the time, just in the comments that people make in my hearing. Besides, our country was founded on racism. It is a blight on our country. I really struggle when people say that we live in a Christian country, founded by Christians, and it is only in the past couple decades that we have wandered from our true roots. I struggle with that, because I read about our true roots being genocide. Stealing land. Enslaving an entire race for several centuries. These are not actions that I would proudly stamp with the label “Christian”. I’m not saying that our country is all bad. Our constitution laid a foundation that could eventually lead to freedom for all. But, it took us a long time to get here. And I’m not convinced that we have truly arrived yet. 

Now, things are different. All races are legally equal. All races are legally protected. We are now supposed to be a united, non-racist country. Except that we are still awkward with each other. There’s a lot of mistrust. There’s a lot of misunderstanding. I know that I myself am Racially Awkward. I see all races as equally human, equally important. But, I’m not comfortable around all races. I tend to feel like I’m walking on eggshells. Afraid that I’m going to inadvertently say something offensive. Afraid that I’m going to come across the wrong way. Afraid that my actions will be misinterpreted. I wish so much to be friends with people of other races and show that I am not racist, and show that “I don’t see color”, and say, look, I am not part of that whole horrible history of white people. But, I don’t know how to do it, and so I am just Awkward. 

I wish that we could just be blunt with each other. My family lives in a primarily black community in the South and my kids are often the only white person in their class. They relate conversations to me and I sometimes cringe. The high schoolers have no problem hurling racial epitaphs at each other and joking about race and poking fun of each other and I think, Is that ok? Is my kid crossing the line? Is he being unfairly picked on because of his color? But, at the same time, I envy them. Because they don’t seem to have any inhibitions. They just say what they’re thinking to each other. The awkwardness isn’t there. 

I’m not sure what the answers are for our country. I think some real educating on the racial history of our country would be good. Let’s not gloss over what happened in order for us to claim this land as our own and create our own country. Let’s be honest about it. As a Christian, I think it would be totally appropriate for those who call our country a Christian Country to enter a time of mourning and fasting and repentance, to stand in for the sins of our ancestors. We need to keep ferreting out laws and regulations that are keeping true equality from happening.  And then time. We need time. We need our kids and our grandkids to be able to live in a world that isn’t tainted by the sins of our past. Where they can establish true equality and true brotherhood. 

In the meantime I will continue to pursue friendships with people who look differently than me and maybe one day, I will stop being awkward. But it’s going to take practice. And that is something I can do. 

EDIT POST: I have been thinking on this some more. I have been friends with people of all races and many different nationalities most of my life. I think my awkwardness developed much later as an adult. Perhaps it’s just because I became more aware of racial tensions where before, I had been oblivious.