Prologue.
Katy
Hunger comes in many shapes and sizes. Food hunger.
Emotional hunger. Hunger for knowledge. Hunger for money.
There’s a list a mile long, and I’ve experienced some, but two stand out.
Emotional and food. Mom and Dad were poor, and sometimes we couldn’t afford to eat.
We lived in a slum and barely scraped by.
Don’t get me wrong, my parents worked, but they earned minimum wage and bills made up most of that.
I was more than familiar with the gnawing pain of hunger, of not having enough food.
I wasn’t a healthy-looking child. Luckily, I got school dinners, or I would have starved.
Weekends were when we really struggled. My parents sacrificed for me; I wasn’t the only one to go hungry.
Those images of red-cheeked, laughing, robust children were blown out of the water when people looked at me.
Scrawny, thin, sallow-skinned, second-hand clothes - that was me.
Kids bullied me, made my life hell, and I learned to escape into books.
They offered me worlds that I would never visit but would lose myself in.
Starved for knowledge, I devoured every book in the library and absorbed everything possible.
That was another hunger, or perhaps a thirst; I craved information.
Mom and Dad loved me, and I adored them in return.
But my peers destroyed me emotionally; none were kind to the poor girl.
Naturally, I was the bully’s favourite victim, especially outside of school.
I assisted where I could, taking on jobs like mowing the lawn and car washing.
Those meagre earnings helped buy food for us.
When I won college sponsorships, my parents couldn’t believe it.
I would be the first to attend. Mom and Dad were so proud and so ashamed that they couldn’t support my education.
There were no new clothes or books, and I’d continue to struggle. But I never blamed them.
Their parents on both sides had been drug addicts, and my parents attending school, hadn’t been important.
They wished they could go back and do things differently, but it was too late for them, but not for me.
Today, I was an architect at a large construction company and earned over six figures.
More than enough to move Mum and Dad out of the slum they’d lived in and into a nice semi-detached house.
Now I looked after them, and we had a good life. Once a week, on a Saturday, we headed down to a soup kitchen to help there. Nobody had ever helped us until I graduated, but we weren’t the type of folk who’d sit back and let bitterness overwhelm us.
People claim food is the language of love. This is my story and proof that food can help you find love in the strangest places.