The Cupboard Under the Stairs

Two Saturdays ago I was part of a Leadership Panel for the local Kappa Kappa Gamma chapter GIRLS (Girls Inspiring Respect, Leadership, and Service) Academy, a day-long retreat for 5th and 6th grade girls. Each panelist responded to questions like, “How did you get where you are today?” and “If you could offer advice to your 5th or 6th grade self, what would it be?” Then, the girls asked questions, among them, the ubiquitous, “If you could travel anywhere in the world, were would it be?” (South Africa)

Part of my response to the “from-there-to-here” question was, “Read books. And lots of kinds of books.” Shortly after, I watched a girl with red hair and freckles work up the courage to ask, “What one book would you recommend we all read?” My answer was spontaneous and obvious. Harry Potter.

Late last night, I finished Brene Brown’s Braving the Wilderness. Brown loves JK Rowlings’ Harry Potter series, too, and writes about it a couple times in her latest. When struggling to convey new, research-supported ideas, Brown imagines Rowlings’ voice saying, “Give us the stories that make up that universe. No matter how wild and weird the new world might be, we’ll see ourselves in the stories” (4). The second time as an example of connection through collective pain, Brown describes the scene from Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince when the Hogwarts staff and student body, gathered around Dumbledore’s body, raise their wands to dispel the dark mark. “Wands Up” (124,5).

Both Brown’s observations are relevant to the project, but a couple pages early in her book prompted me to even more reflection on Harry Potter and Little Free Pantry. Brown writes about how not belonging in one’s family “is still one of the most dangerous hurts,” having “the power to break our heart, our spirit, and our sense of self-worth” (14).  A page later she writes, “Sometimes the most dangerous thing for kids is the silence that allows them to construct their own stories—stories that almost always cast them as alone and unworthy of love and belonging” (15). One of three outcomes then occur. 1. Numbing or inflicting pain. 2. Denial and passing on of pain. 3. Courage and empathy (14).

The Dursleys kept Harry Potter in a cupboard under the stairs. The series inspires not because Harry, “The Chosen One,” defeats Voldemort. It inspires because for Harry outcomes 1 or 2 are most logical. Instead he is sorted into Gryffindor, a house known for its courage, and as Horcrux, he embodies empathy with the one most responsible for both his individual pain and his world's collective pain; he literally understands and shares Voldemort’s feelings. In Order of the Phoenix, just after Belletrix Lestrange kills Harry's godfather, Sirius Black, Harry says to Voldemort, “You're the one who is weak. You will never know love or friendship. And I feel sorry for you.” Harry escapes the cupboard under the stairs.

Little Free Pantry is another cupboard, and I like to think it offers another counter-story to those who see themselves as alone and unworthy of love and belonging. In a world where numbing or inflicting pain and denial and passing on of pain are increasingly normalized, I am certain it is a weird, wild, new space calling all who interact with it to courage and empathy. 

My advice? Read books. Have courage, girls. Pantries Up. 

Dumbledore's Army Forever

Feels

Today’s my birthday. Folks I know say they feel either older or younger than their actual age, which may be because most either dwell on the past or dream of the future.

I feel younger…hipper than my 43-yr-old self.

Last night to celebrate early, my husband, Josh, and I ate burgers at Art’s Place, a Fayetteville fixture and total dive with the best burgers in town. (Locals, I’m choosing Art’s Place over Hugo’s ten times out of ten, smoke and all.) Halfway through my burger and already feeling indigestion (still with me as I write), I said, “I know MTV is still on, but I haven’t thought about it in years.”

This and the indigestion are two ways I know I’m not as young or as hip as I feel…rather imagine.

My two daughters are practically grown.

But I also feel like the new-ish mother of a 1 1/2 -yr-old. Giving this nascent movement the attention it needs takes all my time. I worry too much…have sleepless nights. I am re-learning everything. I love Little Free Pantry profoundly.

Commonly applied to parenthood, the saying, “The days are long but the years are short," is a call to the present.

I don’t make New Year’s resolutions, but I do give myself gifts sometimes. I learned it from my 90-yr-old Grandma Myrtle, known to purchase, wrap, and place Christmas gifts from herself to herself under our family tree. This year for my birthday, I am giving myself the present.

Today, I am 43.

Ruminations

As I’ve mentioned, I am a reader. Some years ago, I read Gretchen Rubin’s The Happiness Project. (Who doesn’t need more happiness?) Rubin is also a bibliophile, salt and peppering her work with literary allusion when not extrapolating from literature outright, so I enjoy her work. Her system for achieving more happiness was far too systematic for me, though. Guessing that may’ve been feedback she received; her next book, Better Than Before: Mastering the Habits of Our Everyday Lives, is all about doing more of the things that make us happy and less of the things that don’t. Turns out habit formation is no more forumlaic than happiness and largely depends on who you are. Rubin identifies “Four Tendencies” influencing habit formation—Upholders, Questioners, Obligers, Rebels.

All this preamble to say I am a Questioner. Among their characteristics, Questioners are “often willing to do exhaustive research” (20). Yep.

I’ve also mentioned I love the podcast On Being. Last week’s episode, “The Opposite of Good Is Indifference,” featured a conversation between Krista Tippett and Arnold Eisen about 20th century mystic, religious intellectual, and social change agent, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel. A quote attributed to him has resonated with me all week:

                Words create worlds.

A Questioner, I spend my evenings researching food insecurity (hunger?), poverty. Every source agrees, words matter. How we talk about ________ matters. 

In nursing school, we were taught conflation of the individual with his or her diagnosis de-humanizes. That patients are “clients.” So in the anti-poverty, anti-hunger field. In 2006 Mark Nord with the USDA led efforts to replace the word “hunger” with “very low food security.” Despite immediate backlash, the new terminology stuck. “Food insecurity” is considered more accurate in the American context if less emotive. “The hungry” or “homeless” is thought reductive. Emergency food organizations serve clients, not “poor people.”

I’m still pretty new to this. It’s taken some time for me to learn the jargon, and a Questioner, it really matters to me that my words be well-informed. What kind of world does “food insecurity” create? I ask that question having just read the Medium article, “Saying ‘People Experiencing Homelessness’ Will Not Influence Change.”

I’ll have to keep researching, ruminating on this. What I know, though, is many doing this work, myself included, probably don’t spend enough time talking with the food insecure/hungry. And our questions might sometimes be the wrong ones, generating answers that create a world where people are still hungry and homeless.