And it never goes away.  It never, never goes away.

I grew up with immense food uncertainty.  I did all these things, and I did most of them with two much smaller sisters.  I resented them for getting to eat before I did when I was nine and they were two and three, because I was old enough to understand hunger, and they weren’t.  I hated my mother for years because we never had anything to eat, and it took until well into my adulthood to realize that she had hated herself, too.

I start asking people what they want to do about dinner starting around nine in the morning when at a convention or other vacation spot.  I need to know.  Even if the plan is just “oh, food court” or “oh, we have those leftovers,” I need someone who is not me, someone who is less wrecked over their relationship with food, to promise me that I am still allowed to eat.

It never goes away.

Childhood hunger is never satiated.

I have never been in straits quite that dire, but…there was an odd stretch of my childhood when we had very limited food. My mother was very depressed and working unspeakably long hours. Sometimes when she came home, it was easier just to let her sleep than to nag her about food. When I had exhausted cooking everything I knew how to cook (it wasn’t much) I wouldn’t eat. (I imagine she didn’t either.) We had very little money for groceries anyway. There was food in the pantry, since it was my grandmother’s house, and she’d stocked it, but it was like twenty bottles of bulk bbq sauce and expired cans of crushed tomato and stuff. I didn’t know how to turn that into food. Possibly there was no way. Some nights—this was back when you could get tacos for 39 cents at Taco Bell—we would take a dollar and eat and then she would go back to sleep.

The nadir of this came during one summer, when I didn’t have school lunches to fall back on, and so I would frequently go a day or two without eating. I didn’t really feel like I was being starved, because it was a thing I was choosing to do, to help out. I think I believed on some level that if I bothered my mother, she would find a way to fix it, I just didn’t want to bother her because she was so tired.

We got food stamps a little while after that, and it was…I can’t really explain what that was like. We couldn’t believe we were being allowed to have this much food and that it was okay. Mom cried a bit, I think. That whole summer was like we were in this weird little bubble and it wasn’t as good as other people’s bubbles, but it was suddenly so much better in there.

Anyway, TL;DR, anybody who says food stamps are for lazy people, you can unfollow me now and kindly fuck yourself on the way out.

(( I can definitely relate to this. My parents did the best they could, but I also grew up in a household that was often food poor. At the time, I thought it was normal, I assumed everyone must live that way. I remember waiting in long lines for hours to get a block of government cheese and a box of powdered milk, because that was to be our food for the next week. If we were really lucky we might have gotten a loaf of bread.  If it wasn’t for my Grandparents and their garden we probably would have gone without more often than not.   There was a church across the street from my house, and I remember walking home from school and being really excited if they were having a wedding or a funeral there that day, because it meant I could sneak in and get something to eat. Which I did as often as I was able.

Childhood hunger is a real problem. And it does continue to affect us as adults. Food = comfort, certainty, security. Even as an adult if I know I am getting low on money, I start skipping meals; because deep down I know it’s better to have food when I really really need it, versus being able to eat when I am only mildly uncomfortable.  Childhood hunger is a problem that never goes away. ))