Hope's Edge_ The Next Diet for a Small Planet - Frances Moore Lappe [29]
Precisely because I had absorbed these images myself, I found my new life a surprise. Rather than experiencing my children as a burden, I discovered that I enjoyed them more than ever. While I was married, I always viewed myself as the mundane Mom—reliable but dull. But I discovered that when I was alone with my kids, I changed. I became more spontaneous. My relationship with each of them got better, closer.
Part of the change came from my decision not to have a TV anymore.* To my great surprise, the children never complained. Even though I work until 5:00 every evening, I am home with them every night they are not with Marc. (We share custody.) Between 6:00 and 9:30 every school night is “our time.” We listen to the evening news on listener-supported Pacifica radio station KPFA, and often talk about what we hear. They do their homework at the kitchen table while I read the newspaper. We play games, listen to records, make up dances, do acrobatic tricks in the living room. On longer summer evenings we skate or ride bikes. Every night we have at least twenty minutes of “story time.” After story time is “lie-down time”—I lie down by each of them for five minutes or so. This is the one point in the day when we each have the other’s total attention. Feelings come out that would never come out otherwise. Sometimes we sing, or I might write messages on their backs for them to guess. Sometimes we just lie there in silence.
While others sometimes see a conflict between my work and my children, I don’t. I couldn’t accomplish what I do without them. They are my grounding force. They keep me from working so hard that I would run the risk of burning out. They pull me back from feelings of despair. They are positive. They welcome each day. With people like that around, no wonder I have energy.
But I want them to see my tears and my anger. I want them to understand the injustice in our society and others. When my daughter was three and my son was six, we lived with a Guatemalan family for four weeks while I studied Spanish. In the town of Antigua, where we lived, as in so many Latin towns, the estates of the wealthy are all behind walls, so you can’t see who owns how much. One evening we climbed the hillside behind our home. From the top we looked down on the entire valley. For the first time my children saw that just two families owned huge estates (coffee fincas) covering a large portion of the valley. My son was shocked: “But, Mommy, that isn’t fair! Those people have so much. But the people we saw this morning on the way to school were just living alongside the road. They had no houses at all.” He continued, “I wonder what would happen if we were giants and we could reach down and take all of the rich people and put them in the poor people’s houses and all of the poor people and put them in the rich people’s houses.”
I didn’t answer. I only thought how glad I was that we had come. (I still had no regrets even after they both got amoebic dysentery. I do think, however, that their most enduring memory of Guatemala is not the social injustice but that awful green-brown medicine!)
Building the “Food First” Institute
But I’ve jumped ahead of my story.
A few weeks after I landed in San Francisco, the rest of the Institute arrived—Joe Collins and David Kinley (formerly with the North American Congress on Latin America and the Corporate Data Exchange). We three—plus the cartons of books and papers, a few filing cabinets, and some typewriters—were it. That was four years ago. Now the Institute for Food and Development Policy has ten full-time and six part-time staff, plus at least twenty-five work-study students, interns, and volunteers. We have published fifteen books and booklets, dozens of articles, a Food First slide show,