By Amy Dunaway
Many will rise to the occasion in times of adversity. I am not one of them.
This is hard to admit as a former food stamp kid. I thought the SNAP challenge would be doable and relatively easy for me. If childhood hadn’t taught me how to get by on so little, being a poor student certainly did. And then living abroad, from Ireland to Cameroon, I remember having no money to spend, or literally, no food to buy. Once I had to make a pack of melba toast and four packages of fruit snacks last a week. It was very hard to eat two toasts and hide the rest like a squirrel, still hungry but knowing I would need to keep temptation out of sight. I had no money and, in retrospect, probably could have asked for help, but I didn’t. I made it through, and so I thought this SNAP challenge would be much easier. Four dollars a day, while not much, was more than melba toast.
But I still struggled to make good food choices fit my week’s worth of 28 SNAP dollars. My fresh food options were limited and even my frozen vegetable options were proscribed by what the cheaper grocery store offered. At some point by the middle of the week, I had to look in the mirror and admit that an unshakeable case of crankiness had hit me.
My general crankiness of feeling thirsty, hungry and limited in food choices devolved my attitude and interactions. “Stop that!” I’d yell at my kids, who were playing loudly. You know, like kids do. Outside.
“Go away!” I said to the cat, pushing her off my lap on more than one occasion when she was just looking for a neck scratch. Or in one case, when I had forgotten to feed her bowl.*
Clearly, my attitude, parenting skills, and use of multi-syllabic words were at an all-time low. I knew this for sure when I discovered that my husband ate two of my burritos that I had been planning to eat. Let’s just say I’m sure my rendition of “You ate my burrito?!” sounded exactly like Cro-Magnon man’s from 40,000 years ago.
At that point, I did resolve to be nicer and used the rest of my SNAP money to buy some spinach. I felt better after I ate it, but that couldn’t shake my shame. I was shamed for being cranky with my family, friends and colleagues and all the other drivers on I-70. I was also shamed for knowing that I could stop the SNAP challenge and buy the food that I wanted when other families can’t. And, of course, I felt quite shamed knowing that they’re probably more pleasant to be around than I was.
As my mom would have pointed out, I have forgotten where I came from. And that made me realize, too, that some of the memories I have of her crankiness may have been that she was eating light–which is a funny sad realization for me. Many times, I remember telling other volunteers in Cameroon that sometimes the best dressed teachers wouldn’t show up for work and as maddening as that could be, sometimes they didn’t show up because they felt awful. They lived in a half-desert with limited food, water and health care.
And now, I know that they’re not the only ones.
So I’ve ended my SNAP challenge and I would like to think I’m getting more back to normal. Just know, if you need me on a tough day, make sure I eat some spinach first.
*The cat has since been fed and is doing just fine.