Renee

Renee describes herself as Funny curious loyal caring strong. She lives on her own with her dog in a large Southern city, is a college graduate and an avid football fan, and at the start of the diary had recently made a promise to myself to eat more home cooked meals than eating out, and to move every other day, to be better to my body and more healthy in these unhealthy times.

Food reached her as a double inheritance. Her parents grew tomatoes, cucumbers and peppers and sent her out to pick vegetables for dinner. Her grandparents taught her cakes and biscuits made from scratch and not from a box, and recipes written by hand and not from a book. Her conclusion: I learned food is an expression of love and pride. Her father is still the one she asks. He showed her how to take the membrane off ribs and how to season a cast-iron skillet. She plans and cooks her own meals: cereal, fruit and skim milk; a salad with protein and nuts; protein vegetable carbs; almonds for a snack.

Under the plate is a fact she reveals slowly. She has lived with type 1 diabetes since childhood. It is part of her, known to close friends, and only comes to the forefront when it is time to take medication. Yet every meal means counting carbohydrates and matching insulin, and she explains plainly what a miscount can do. Her comfort foods come with real pleasure, BBQ chips with a diet soda, a cheesecake whose textures blend together even though they shouldn’t, and with the vocabulary of limits: Set limits and keep them. Her Day 5 wish is to eat anything and not gain weight or cause health issues to my body, and to Stop counting carbs and calories prior to eating. She asks for food without calorie labels. One reading, in the spirit of Kleinman’s (1988) work on illness as something lived and not only treated, is that the plate has been a place of vigilance for most of her life, and what she longs for is rest from watching, not permission to overeat.

Her defining moments move in steps. At fourteen, a move from a small parochial school to a big-city high school, where I finally believed it was ok to be me and not another cookie shaped out of the same cookie cutter. In college, a frightening pregnancy that ended in loss. Her mother brought her home to rest on the couch, with her parents and her dog nursing me, and she learned that my body wouldn’t let me down even though I had diabetes. And now her grandmother, nearly a hundred, who after several strokes often does not know her. Renee tells her that people long gone are out of town or at work, to spare her. She is the woman I wish I could become when I grow up.

Asked about a challenge she overcame, she describes, briefly, admitting herself to a hospital for three days, In order to keep my sanity, and keeping it from her parents. Her lesson: I learned that I am self reliant and more independent than I believed. She says no more, and neither does this portrait. Her 2 a.m. person is her best friend, because he is always there, understands my family and keeps my secrets.

First among her superpowers she lists Courage. Her letter to herself is about rest: I am happy you are finally relaxing and no longer worrying about things that have not happened.