Brittany

Brittany’s five words are Kind, understanding, considerate, persistent, down to Earth. She is twenty-nine, married seven years, with three young children and two cats, and has recently moved to a part of the South with mountains and hiking trails that she has absolutely fell in love with. She plays guitar with the kids and treasures one thing above all: enjoying my coffee and some quiet time before everyone else wakes up.

Her food personality screams quick and delicious!: mama usually eats while walking. Breakfast is often a banana; lunch a sandwich and yogurt; dinner something like spaghetti and a salad; there is a spinach-berry smoothie she loves, and a vanilla doughnut from the shop down the street, only once every few weeks! She began ordering groceries for pickup with COVID-19 and plans to keep it. She cooks almost every meal, planning around a picky oldest child and a husband who despises cheddar cheese. His family is Hispanic, and she goes to her in-laws to learn enchiladas and flan. Asked to imagine a calm version of the wild parenting photo in her collage: Calm parenting photo- what's that like?? In that world she would make the lasagna, the one that takes hours to prepare. Her ad for a squeeze-pouch snack ends with heavenly music and children who are, briefly, angels. The joke and the longing are the same.

Her lifeline is a full circle. At eight her father taught her guitar chords, and she played in church: I remember those days fondly. At sixteen and seventeen came fast-food and grocery jobs, a bad crowd of people, cigarettes, and a lost period from eighteen to twenty away from home. At twenty she moved back, and trust with her parents mended, slowly. At almost twenty-two she met her husband, learned she was pregnant, and quit smoking the same day. It was a full circle moment for me, to come from such a negative time into such a beautiful time.

Three years before the diary, a hurricane flooded their apartment from the shins down. They climbed out of a window with two toddlers and drove a rental truck until the water stopped them. She remembers her children just enjoying a moment in the rain, and herself trying to create laughter and took pictures to remember. Rebuilding meant loans, repaid slowly and steadily, and the best deals she could find.

She also writes with candor about adult ADHD, diagnosed at nine and never treated because of her parents’ beliefs. That week she was seeing a doctor about it for the first time as an adult: I know in my heart that it's time to ask for help! Her weakness is blaming herself, if only I was a better mother or wife. One reading is that the appointment, made during the diary week, was itself an act of the hope she named as her superpower. Her 2 a.m. person is her sister-in-law, one of my biggest supporters in life.

She would not go vegan (her family truly enjoys a non-restrictive diet), and hopes the animals she eats had a long life and died humanely. Her Day 5 goal is not about nutrients but about a table: one meal a day together, at seven, when her husband gets home. Her letter, set years ahead, imagines the children helping with dinner five nights a week: They even said they look forward to our dinners together, it's something that everyone can count on. DeVault (1991) described the family meal as something women produce through constant, unseen coordination; Brittany’s plan is that coordination, written down.