Sharon's Story..."Six Weeks of Hunger"

How do you describe what it's like to be hungry? It's like being pregnant...you really have to experience it. But there are some things most people could understand.

Imagine that you know there isn't enough food in the house, no more coming in for awhile and you have two small children. What do you do? First of all, you make sure they eat…cereal with milk for breakfast, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and kool-aid for lunch. Supper varied—either tuna casserole or macaroni and cheese. I made a big kettle of one (enough for several days) and then a kettle of the other. What did I eat? If the kids didn't eat all of their lunch, I'd finish off the last couple pieces of crust that were left. Otherwise, a plateful of the casserole of the day had to tide me over from one night until the next.

I was already underweight, and I lost more weight which left me feeling tired all the time. The migraine headaches I had been plagued with since high school had become worse. My days were spent between the bed and the sofa, except for the few minutes on my feet in between getting the children dressed, fed, down for naps, and bathed in the evening. I didn't do as good a job as I should have in watching my children. I was lucky our apartment was in a complex where the buildings faced each other with a courtyard in between. During the day, all the kids from the apartments played together outside while I lay on the sofa with my pounding head, trying to ignore the constant gnawing feeling in my stomach from lack of food. It seemed that watching the kids and getting them to sleep at naptime or at night was almost more than I could handle. They shared a bedroom, and I vaguely recall hearing them jumping on the beds and playfully fighting with each other when they were supposed to be going to sleep. Walking from my room or the sofa to their room took more energy than I had.

I avoided looking at food ads, and I remember going to the store one day (a block away but almost too far for me to walk as we had been eating very little for a couple weeks already). I went in to buy one thing, bread or milk I think. By the time I walked out of the door, I was almost in tears. Having to walk down the aisles of food to get what I needed and passing all the shelves loaded with jars and cans plus the aromas of baked goods was too much to bear. Everything reminded me of things we couldn't afford. For some reason, I remember seeing a jar of pickles and thinking how good my grandmother's dill pickles had always been. It was upsetting knowing that I really couldn't even afford to buy a small jar of pickles.

I grew up thinking that my parents had plenty of money, but I didn't realize until I was older that we probably fell in the poorer portion of the population in my younger years. We always had plenty of food on the table, so I had never known what it was like to be hungry or not be able to have a treat of some sort if I wanted it.

At the time that this situation occurred, I had been married five years. My husband was out of work and received an unemployment check which had to cover our rent and our car payment. It left only about $5 a week for groceries (which would probably be $15-20 these days). I never saw cupboards so empty. We had moved 2,000 miles away from our families, and though there may have been help available, we were completely ignorant of that fact. Nowadays I think everyone knows about food stamps. If similar programs were available then, they were not widely known. We went to church (when I was feeling well enough), but it never occurred to us to ask the church for help.

Besides being hungry, there was the emotional side of the situation…the feeling of failure. We had moved away from home to be independent, to build a better life, and suddenly we were alone...alone with 2 small children depending on us and trying desperately to make sure they were getting what they needed. We were lucky only in that, eventually, when we didn't know what else to do, God worked through our families. They bought us tickets to go back home and gave us a place to live and food to eat until we reestablished ourselves. My children and I went back. My husband didn't return for 10 months, and by then, our lives were forever separated.

The terrible fear of being hungry haunted me for many years. For a long time, I would finish eating whatever was left on my children's plates and couldn't even bring myself to discard the ends of the bread loaf even though no one would eat them. I found it difficult to throw out food that had been spilled on the floor.

I worked for many years after that. I often did additional part-time work either in a restaurant where I got paid plus all I wanted to eat or driving cars back from auctions for a car dealer at which time I also got dinner going down and a late snack coming back. I had a marvelous babysitter who watched my two little ones, even when I worked my second job. Many nights she invited us to eat dinner with them. She always cooked more than she needed. I suspect that she knew I wouldn't refuse a meal, especially for my kids.

No matter what I had to do, I was never out of work, and my cupboards always had food in them. I couldn't bear the thought of opening the cupboard doors and finding nothing there. I had been through that for about six weeks in my life, and I was determined it would never happen again.

It's impossible to communicate the feelings you have when you're hungry, the sense of failure, the isolation you feel from everyone else, the embarrassment at admitting that you can't handle things on your own. The saddest thing of all, though, is that most people do not understand this can happen to anyone, even in our country. People are hungry and do go hungry, and sometimes I'm sure they don't even have enough for their children.

If everyone tried to live like this for just one week, no breakfast, no more than a slice of bread for lunch, a plateful of a cheap noodle casserole for dinner, no snacks, possibly nothing more than kool-aid or powdered milk to drink, then they might begin to understand hunger. It isn't always because people aren't trying that they are having problems. Sometimes things just happen. Some people have families to help them out, some know where to go. These days I believe more people do know how to avail themselves of help, but outside of the government, all other agencies depend on people helping people—not out of necessity but because the need is there. Without this help, many families just can't make it.