Tamara

Tamara describes herself as Charismatic, funny, adaptable, empathetic, thoughtful. She is a stay-at-home mother of two girls in a large Northeastern city, living with a partner who taught her to cook. The time they cook together, away from the children, is when We get to laugh and share about our days together. I experience joy.

She names her class history without being asked. Growing up impoverished to working middle class made her humble, resourceful, but also hindered me. Her phrase for the resourcefulness is exact: I learned how to make a little stretch to a lot (food and money mostly). The hindrance was no extracurricular classes, no trips, parents who worked so much. She started college once and left: I had no support, so it was difficult managing. Among the things she is grateful for: Having shelter - I’ve been without. Mullainathan and Shafir (2013) argue that scarcity takes up mental bandwidth; Tamara does not use that language, but her entries keep returning to the arithmetic of stretching.

Her food world follows. Groceries come mostly by delivery app, from discount stores. She decides and cooks every meal, and cooks to her family’s tastes: I’m too tired to prepare myself something separately even though I want to eat differently. Lunch is normally nothing or what my kids are eating, because These things are cheaper. Soul food is hers, and she eats it often; a pizza-snack commercial from her childhood was what I thought an ideal childhood was like. Of comfort eating she is candid and unashamed: I have no other vices and food is the most affordable Vice. At school she was teased badly and went to food for comfort. Read this way, her days look less like a failure of will than like the ordinary, exhausting work of feeding a family on a budget.

She writes plainly that her weight and health have kept her hiding in my home, even before the pandemic, and that Even simple trips to the playground a block away is a hassle. What she wants is not thinness but movement: I would greatly like to walk around and travel again with my family. The diary records what she chose to say. It cannot tell us how her days feel, and this portrait does not guess.

Her defining moments are her daughters’ births, this year’s various bumps (pandemic, loss of a loved one), and one act of self-making: she shaved off all her hair. Asked for a word before and after: Before: restricted. After: bold. She felt like I could do anything without the worry of what other thought of me. The same refusal of a single standard shows in the healthy-food ad she imagined: Healthy people and people striving towards a more healthy lifestyle come in all shapes and sizes.

She is open to plant-based eating, for her own reasons: how her family feels after heavy dairy and meat, and her youngest’s eczema. Her community event is a civic one: help signing up for food stamps and insurance, the locations of clinics and food banks, and Local government and community organizers present to hear the community’s concerns. Her account of coping is honest, I tend to shut down unfortunately. Her superpower is her faith; her 2 a.m. person, her partner: He has proven himself in the past. Her letter: Always remember where you started and why you were there to begin with.