Can you imagine a space where Monday mornings are your absolute favorite day of the week? Think about this a second, how we as adults usually despise Mondays. We just spent a whole weekend brunching and lunching with our friends and family over bottomless mimosas. Dressing up and cheering on our favorite football or basketball team. Mondays for most of us are simply just not the best days. Imagine a situation where Mondays were your favorite day. You wake up after a long weekend at home bright eyed and smiling. You quickly put on the crumpled up jeans and dirty shirt you have worn 4 days in a row. You rummage around to find your pair of socks only to your dismay you can only find one. It’s okay though one will do because its Monday. You slip on that sock, grab your beaten up slightly too tiny shoes and holy coat, take a deep breath and run out the door into the biting cold. Monday’s oh Mondays are just the best days. You get to your destination and low and behold you are the one everyone hates that day. Not because you didn’t do anything wrong but because well life is hard and everyone is just trying to survive. Sometimes that survival looks like lack of self-control and hate towards others. The tears come and the lonely creeps in but you still are choosing to be happy because its Monday. Because on Mondays you walk into a building where you are guaranteed breakfast and lunch for five days straight. Mondays mean those pains in your stomach will stay at bay and make night time bearable. Mondays mean you won’t see mom cry about not having any food to give you. Mondays are the best five days because you don’t have to feel hungry every single second. Mondays they are just the best days.
Over the last couple of weeks I have had the pleasure of volunteering a couple hours a week at a local elementary school not even five minutes from where I live. Five minutes from where I live there is an entire school of kids just like the above. Not just a few but hundreds of kids. I am not sure Mondays are really their favorite day. Most don’t make it to school on time when it’s cold out or they are late jeopardizing that coveted hot breakfast. Some have had so much trauma happen from the weekend they are past the point of starving. That one meal doesn’t erase the amount of garbage that they are processing. So many spend the first couple days back to school crying because they have entered a space where people care and the meals are guaranteed. They are able to let their guard down if only for a short time.
Y’all so many times we sit at home at night and feel sorry for ourselves because we don’t have this or that. We had a stressful day at work and to top it off we missed lunch and didn’t get dinner till 8. We take it out on our loved ones because by golly life is hard and so unfair. Friends we don’t have a clue!!! We want to sit and talk about the problems in our school district and with this and that being what needs to change. I am telling you that what needs to change needs be begin with each and every one of us. Our mouths need to shut and our eyes need to be opened. Action must start with us. Not action of our mouths but with actions of our hands and time. We need to change, we need to be a community that can find 1 hour a week to put someone else before ourselves. I don’t know the stats on how many kids are in need who suffer from food insecurity but I am going to find out. But there is need in this community. We need mentors in our schools who can come along side these kids and have a safe ally. We need people willing to ask the question “How can I help”. We need people willing to part with just one Starbucks each week to help provide food for a child to take home over the weekend. I am not naïve to think that I can change a town or a school or all 24 kids in a classroom. But I do know that I can show up for a couple kids each week and be a safe space for them. I can pack a few extra granola bars in my purse to hand out for later so that maybe their stomach doesn’t growl all night long. I know I can do that.
For the past 11 years while I have been coaching I have seen what this looks like for these kids once they enter high school. Most can’t stay on a sports team because they are working to help at home. These jobs sometimes go late at night and thus they are falling asleep in class and grades are struggling. They don’t have anyone on their side encouraging them to keep going because it will make a difference. And we wonder why these kids can’t control themselves. Why they are angry and get in fights. Why they can’t pick themselves up and do what is right. We need to change not these kids. They are surviving, just trying to survive even if it is in the completely wrong way. We as a community need to come alongside these teachers and parents and administrators and ask “How can we help”? That should be our only question. We should not be giving opinion we should just keep asking the question “How can we help”?
So many thoughts and feelings, so much sadness. I don’t know about you but I can’t anymore pretend that children are not hungry at night feeling sad and scared. I can’t pretend, I can’t unsee and I can’t not care.
