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For some people, past experiences of stress, trauma, or loss are affecting their ability to deal with the challenges caused by the pandemic. If this is part of your experience, talk about it here.

In the late 70’s I became a mother. My husband’s mother lay ill and dying 6 months into this. My husband was a free-lance photographer. As he supported his father in keeping him company in a months long vigil, and was depressed, his business dwindled and dropped to virtually nothing. I had given up a lucrative job in a medical college. We had no health benefits. Had I not been breastfeeding our daughter ( which I did for her first year), I don’t know how we would have fed her. I recall one time having only 1$ for food; I spent it on 9th street @ the open air sheds of the Italian Market, allocating fifty cents for 2 different vegetables. I cooked and froze some as purées, freezing them in ice cube trays which were easy to defrost .. As our daughter grew I introduced these into her diet yellow (squash), green ((spinach), carrots (orange), etc . - is it any wonder that she became an artist and loves vegetables? My husband learned somewhere about tofu. Tofu was foreign to us. He was Italian, and I, a Wasp. Soybeans were then under 40 cents a pound and a lb of beans made a great deal of tofu. He bought a paperback: The Joy of Tofu which introduced us to the process of making tofu- soaking the beans overnight, processing them into a milk, adding a coagulant such as Epsom salts or lemon juice, and shaping them into bricks in a wooden settling box. The by-product, Okara, was also used ias an extender ( think hamburger helper) or made into a sausage-like protein. A 1lb brick of tofu was the result of soaking overnight and processing for an hour, which filled the hour our daughter napped. Beans(tofu) and rice were cheap and formed a complete protein. We have not been food insecure since then but I still live near the market and I have my settling box. As a new {3rd? Wave) has been predicted I told my daughter we should stock up on some GMO soybeans, just in case.… My parents married in 1933 during an economic depression . My mother was thrifty and organized her meals to recycle creatively into more than one day’s meals for a family of six. This laid the groundwork for my learning thrift and recycling . She was a college graduate and a teacher. She returned to working outside our home only when I was in junior high school. I returned to work when my daughter was 9. Until then I eked out a living with my home skills , sewing gifts for kids’s gifts and our wardrobes, gardening whatever we could grow and eat, learning to hand make my own breads and English muffins ( another good book was “Better Than Store Bought” - who knew you could make your own bagels or ricotta cheese @ home until then? Remember, this was before the Internet gave us instant access to. Everything and phones were still on wire tethers and walls),I made homemade play dough tree ornaments, etc., heated our home with wood and a Franklin stove which I tended while my bread rose on a shelf behind it. I think it made us more creative and resourceful. It also made me a committed recycler. It also led to my collecting and hoarding items “ in case” I ever needed them for myself or others, in my desire to not be caught short. Meanwhile, I plan to fill a jar with soybeans and decorate my kitchen with it Just In Case. And I am mindful that When you have your health you have your first million” I’m quarantined and holding onto my first million as I work my way through the million articles I’ve collected in my past 75 years. 😂😂😂😂😂😂😂