We at THE CORNER 4 WOMEN's BLOG will be empowering, and motivating everyone, using informative and entertaining articles, poems and short stories by various authors
Thursday 22 June 2023
THE GREAT LAKES
Wednesday 21 June 2023
THE STORY OF OLD JACK
(author unknown0
***
GETTING OLD
GETTING OLD (author unknown) |
A DISH OF CRUNCHY NOODLES
A DISH OF CRUNCHY NOODLES
Tonight, after 2.5 years of living here, my oldest son sat down at the table with a dish of uncooked noodles, straight out of the packet, hard and crunchy.
He was about to chow down when I stopped him and asked what in the world he was doing.
He
said, ‘I made myself dinner.’
‘But
it isn’t cooked. I can cook that, you know.’
‘Well,
I wanted to eat something I used to eat a lot with my old family.’
So,
we sat down and I asked him to tell me about it.
He
said that they wouldn’t feed him due to being passed out (you can guess why)
and he would have to make dinner for himself and his brothers (ages 2 and 4
months when they came to us).
He
said that all the money they had would be spent on cigarettes and other ‘fun
things’ and so he would find change in their van and buy Ramen packets at the
store down the street, at 6 years old!
He
said he didn’t know how to boil water, so he would eat it like this. And, he
actually grew to like it.
So, he would break it up for his siblings, and would try to make bottles for the baby (at 6!!!!!!).
I
asked him to make me some.
I
sat there beside him and crunched it down with lots of water because it’s not
great…and he just started talking about how the first time I made them Ramen,
he wouldn’t eat it and I told him I remembered.
He said it’s because it reminded him of his Ramen packets and he didn’t trust me (big thoughts for 9!).
He said he isn’t sad he’s not with his ‘old family’ (his words) anymore, but that sometimes HE LIKES TO REMEMBER HOW STRONG HE HAD TO BE.
I
write this so everyone knows trauma isn’t healed quickly (sometimes never), and
adoption doesn’t erase the past or the memories.
Kids
can change, and they will change with love, but please never give up on a kid
because ‘they are hard.’
I
walked away in shock, in sadness, and so so so proud of how strong my baby is.
He’s so wonderful. And, we love him so much.
Friends,
THIS is the life experience of kids who come from hard places.
THIS
is living a trauma-informed life.
We
can’t imagine what kids from hard places have lived through. It is not just
about one act of abuse or neglect, it is about living in survival mode and
doing it day in and day out.
It
is about making sure younger siblings are also surviving, even at the expense
of childhood.
Trauma
infuses itself into every pore. Kids just don’t forget it. Their brains and
bodies won’t let them.
Those
of us privileged enough (yes, I said privileged) to enter into the lives of
children with hard life experiences must be willing to sit down, eat uncooked
Ramen noodles, and listen. We must not give up.
Our
kids didn’t.
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Tuesday 20 June 2023
7 INSPIRATIONAL STORIES---MOTHERS
INCLUDING
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Meeting Mr Timmy
Meeting Mr Timmy
by Jessica Bullock Scarratt
Mr. Timmy, the angel that walked into my office. He stopped in a week ago asking if I could help him with extreme low back pain that is shooting down his leg. He asked the prices etc and made his appointment for this week so he could gather the money. He comes in on Wednesday 30 minutes early for his appointment and is beyond nice and respectful. Everything I say/ask him, he responds with yes/no ma’am. He fills my heart with joy and happiness just being in the room with him.
Friday 16 June 2023
Thursday 15 June 2023
BREAD AND SUGAR SARNIES
BREAD AND SUGAR
SARNIES
By © J. A. Elliott 2023
I was reminded the other day about the strange combinations
of food we concocted and ate as children, growing up through the 1950’s and
60’s in my hometown of
One of my sisters loved buttered bread sprinkled with sugar, it didn’t matter whether the bread was brown or white as long as she could sprinkle sugar on it, then she was in heaven. I remember another sister, I did have five of them, liking sliced banana and sugar sarnies, and yet another actually loving Marmite soldiers. Yuk! If they were eating any of these near me, then quite frankly I was retching, yes to me they were horrid concoctions. Now mother loved her cucumber sandwiches. She would make up a dish of cucumber, onion and vinegar, which was then kept in the pantry for days. I’m sure it was more to deter me from raiding the biscuit barrel that it was kept in there, knowing I hated the smell or taste of cucumber. I could even tell if mom had cut up her cucumber then my tomatoes, when she made a salad. Even our milk took on that pungent acrid taste of the cucumber flavoured vinegar, if it was unopened and left in the pantry. It was even worse when we had our first fridge towards the end of the 1950’s. At least now I thought, the cucumber might be put in a sealed container, how wrong I was, it was simply transferred into the new fridge which concentrated the smells even more, and to top it all off, the damn stuff lasted longer by being in there.
One of my all time favourite things was a mug of hot Oxo with added salt, and dipping pieces of bread into it. It was recommended by our family doctor once, beef stock, to build me back up after an illness, and I simply loved it. Sometimes, although I know it’s naughty, because of the salt content and me being diabetic, I do indulge in a mug, the beefy smells take me back to my childhood days, and more memories come flooding back as I sit in front of my computer with my trusted single digit poised. Once again I digress…
As for myself as I’ve said before I loved homemade bread and
dripping, and we all loved mom’s homemade Jams. I bet everyone remembers going
wild blackberry picking when they were kids, and coming home tinged in those
tell tail blue purple juices on our fingers and around our mouths from eating
them as we plucked the fruit into our little dishes. Where I lived on
When our homemade jam ran out, like everyone else, when we could afford it we had Robinson’s jam, you know the one with the little Gollywog on the jar. We’d collect the little gollywog stickers so we could get those precious enamelled badges we all loved.
As a child growing up through the 50’s and 60’s, we were made to always have a slice of bread with our tined fruit and Carnation condensed milk, even to this day I’ll never know why this was. If we had a bag of Smith’s crisps, which was such a treat back then we were expected to have a slice of bread with it, we couldn’t make it into a sandwich but we still had to have a slice of bread and butter with it. I remember Smith’s crisps always had a little blue bag of salt inside, very unhealthy today, but back then at least you had the choice whether you wanted your crisps salted or not.
Back in those far away days of my childhood years, we never bothered whether what we ate was healthy for us or not, because mostly we had a balanced diet of fresh vegetables from our gardens or allotments, our portions were small but we never actually starved. Processed foods were in it’s infancy after the war, so most of what we ate was homemade or produced locally. Even our meat and potatoes would have come from local farmers, our fruits and vegetables were seasonal too from our local market. There simply wasn’t any supermarkets around to buy all those exotic foods of today from all over the world. So growing up during the 1950’s and 60’s wasn’t all bad.
FOOTNOTE
I actually like cucumber today, although not in vinegar.
The
Golliwog character, used by Robinson’s jams etc. were withdrawn in 2001 for
various reasons. The enamel badges produced by them are highly collectable
today.
So as not to cause any offence to anyone I have chosen not to publish any
images of a Gollywog with this posting, although I personally loved those
little character badges and collected many as a child, as did most of my
friends.
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