I’d park my car and just sit there. Sometimes for hours. I mostly worked weekends while my kids were with their dad, and I hated being alone in the room I shared with them. That room was just another reminder of how little I had, and when my children weren’t around, I felt like I had nothing. They were all that mattered. Everything else sucked. I’d sit in my car, radio off, in complete silence, while every bad thing anyone had ever said about me played on a loop in the background like the worst movie soundtrack ever. I knew I was a failure by every metric there was.
On one of those nights in my car, alone with my thoughts, I decided I’d had enough of myself. I was disgusted by how low I had sunk, but instead of contemplating ending it all, I gave my feisty side permission to kick in.
My mother will tell you that my feistiness was there from the moment I came out of her screaming. I was born with it in spades, but I also think feistiness is something that can be learned. Like all personality traits, being a stubborn, scrappy fighter has advantages and disadvantages, but it’s an important tool to keep in your toolbox. Because while feistiness can lead you to make crazy decisions that would have benefited from just a little more forethought, it can also get you off your butt and ready to fight for your life.
That night, my feisty inner voice rose up against the negative ones with rebellious fire. My feistiness told me that I was the one contributing to my own misery by being passive about it and allowing it to consume every fiber of my being. It told me that I had more power than I realized and I could part ways with my unhappy state. That inner voice was passionate, and that passion was able to temporarily overpower the apathy that had consumed me so that I could make an important realization: the only way I’d ever get out of this “poor me” state was to stop focusing on myself and start looking outside my pathetic little life. And the best way to do that, I thought, would be to volunteer somewhere.
If I could somehow help others in need, it would distract me from my own neediness. Now, there was the first brilliant thought I had had in a while! It might be the most brilliant thought I had ever had. (Not an understatement.)
The next morning, I picked up the phone and started calling various organizations, asking if I could become a volunteer. At that time Matea was two and Luka was barely four. I couldn’t afford a babysitter, and while my kids were with their dad on the weekends, I was always working. During the day on weekends, I had picked up an additional part-time job bookkeeping for a different restaurant, so I was busy pretending I was brainy enough to be trusted with grown-up things like spreadsheets and budgets. I could volunteer only during the week, when my kids were with me. Naturally, I assumed they would volunteer alongside me. But no homeless shelter, hospital, soup kitchen, or any other sane organization I called wanted hyper, little two- and four-year-olds “volunteering.”
After being told the same thing over and over again—“We’d love to have you, but your kids are too young”—I gave up. I was already feeling like a loser, so getting rejected from volunteering, regardless of the reason, upgraded me to a whole new level of losership! (It’s a word.) Finally, I’d had my first brilliant thought—my first constructive idea for how to save myself from my stupid self-pity and misery—and even that had failed.
That same old record started spinning in my head: I am a complete failure. Every idea and thought I have is useless. I am useless. I have nothing to offer. I don’t know how to do anything. Okay, not completely true. I’m pretty decent at changing diapers and I do know how to cook a great meal with next to nothing, but that’s it. That’s all I know how to do. And considering how many times my boy has pissed on me during a diaper change, even my diaper-changing skills could use some improvement. So there you have it. The only thing I’m good at is cooking. So what? Who cares if I can make my kids a great dinner? They’re too young to really appreciate it, and it’s definitely not changing the world, and I’m definitely still a total worthless loser.
Suddenly my mind lit up with memories of the years I spent cooking with my grandmother, cooking for friends’ birthday parties and baby showers, cooking for my sister’s wedding reception. No matter where I was in life, no matter how I felt about myself, through all the ups and downs, the one thing I’d always felt confident about was feeding people. If I couldn’t find a place that would let me volunteer, why not create a place to volunteer? Just because no soup kitchen in a thirty-mile radius would let me serve their soup didn’t mean I couldn’t feed people. I could feed people in my home.
I was learning an important lesson that would come in handy for the rest of my life: Don’t accept no as an answer. See it as a challenge, as a question. “No? Not this way? No problem. I’ll find another way.”
That evening, I impulsively (something I’m really good at), without really thinking it through (also really good at that), wrote an email and sent it to everyone I knew in the LA area.
Subject: Wednesday Night Dinners
Dear friends,
Starting this coming Wednesday, I will be cooking for anyone who needs a meal. Please think of people you know who are either struggling financially and could use a free dinner, or perhaps a college kid who is sick of cafeteria food, or someone new to town who is lonely and needs to make some friends, or maybe an elderly person who just lost their spouse and is feeling lonely, or anyone else who would appreciate homemade food and good company. Invite them to my place. I will feed everyone. My door will be wide open starting at 6:00 p.m.
Love you all,
Kristina
I didn’t have a plan. But unlike all the other chaos in my life that I couldn’t control, this was a crisis of my own making, one that felt manageable, and I was hoping the adrenaline and excitement that fueled this new idea would kick-start my creativity and give me some momentum.
I woke up early that Wednesday and went to a place I had become very familiar with: the 99 Cent Store. The 99 Cent Store and I were pretty much dating at that point and I was fully committed. When you’re poor, dollar stores make you feel like you’re doing all right. You walk out of there carrying not one but two or three bags of stuff that you actually paid for yourself without using food stamps, and you start feeling like you just went on a fancy shopping spree. I loved that store, I trusted it, and it always came through for me. Total confidence booster.
That Wednesday, I purchased a bunch of bags of pasta and then I found some fresh vegetables and even some cheese. I wasn’t aiming for a gourmet meal or following a specific recipe. I was just trying to create the most delicious-tasting dinner I could on a tight budget for a lot of people. Or no people.
Would anyone show up? Would my friends even take my email seriously, since they knew what a pathetic mess I was? My stubbornness won out against my negativity and I cleaned the little apartment I shared with my roommate, cooked the biggest pot of pasta I’d ever cooked, and baked some homemade rolls (much cheaper than buying them).