Kiara

Kiara’s five words are Nuturing, enthusiastic, dedicated, thoughtful and loving. She has been married seven years, homeschools her two children every other year, worked as a substitute teacher well before the pandemic anyway, and is slowly starting a childcare business. At about six she begged to skip children’s church for the nursery to help with the babies. Her superpower, alongside thinking fast in a crisis: I also feel I'm a baby whisperer.

Her timeline runs in five-year steps, and she noticed the rhythm herself: every 5years something really defining happened. At almost nine she understood why she sometimes woke to find only her sister and herself at home: her mother lived with sickle cell disease and would go to the hospital in a crisis without waking them. At that point I grew up instantly. She listened to the doctors because I really wanted to understand what every term meant. At fourteen she nearly lost her mother, and found my faith for myself. At eighteen she was an honor-roll student who also helped run her mother’s home daycare, and she failed the standardized exit exam Six times maybe more. The felling of failure began to haunt me. Five years later, I made myself understand that I can only be a real failure if I stopped trying. Three months of tears, headaches frustration brought a GED. The diary does not dwell on what it cost a child to be her mother’s helper; she frames it as knowledge and maturity, and so does this portrait.

Food, for her, is a story about how the body feels. Her grandmother’s heart failure taught her that what we feed our bodies displays how our bodies to allow us to feel. About a year before the diary she became vegetarian, for two reasons in her own words: beef began to give me a stomach ache, and The thought of eat an animal that just wants to be an animal. Her plate is fruit and a bagel, a meat substitute with steamed vegetables, a bowl of salad; her food words include colorful and indian. She is teeter tottering toward vegan, held back mostly by cheese, and by a household where her husband is way too much of a sweet tooth and meat head and her older son prefers the same five or six veggies. Because her children have dairy allergies she often cooks them a separate meal anyway, So I may as well prep what I really want to eat for myself. DeVault (1991) showed how much unseen thought goes into feeding a family; Kiara’s entries show that work done across three diets.

Her temptation is bread: Bread!!! It's the devil. Asked what bread would say, she gave it a wheedling voice and a long friendship: We've been hanging out for years, you might as well have another. Under stress she forgets to eat until a headache tells her, then reaches for whatever is quick. She prays first, Immediately, I pray!!! Then she takes metime: a long shower with a eucalyptus shower bomb, and jazz.

Her Day 5 goal is one carb during only one meal a day; her affirmation, I can because I choose to. Her letter sees her running the day school she dreamed of, and a nonprofit for her community: You finally got tired of allowing others to place their fears on you and followed your heart. On the last day she wrote that the study has really been an eye opener to questions I've never asked myself. One reading is that the diary became one more place where she claimed authority over her own story.