I retype his words for a story I’m working on, a story I don’t even want to finish in these days after learning my job, these eight years of security, will be swallowed whole by a black hole in less than three months.

Most of us don’t know what it’s like to be hungry, he said.

And maybe it’s true for most. But not for me.

I know what it’s like to be hungry.

And that’s why today, when I mark the ending that stands six weeks before my sixth baby is due, those memories sit like jagged glass shards in the back of my throat.

I know what it’s like to be hungry, and I don’t want to ever know again.

///

When I was just a girl, 11 years old, I shook out the breaded fish sticks and frozen fries and stuck them in the oven so my mom didn’t have to do it when she got home from the evening job she worked after finishing her day as a school librarian.

It was the same kind of meal every night, something easy, something we could all make for ourselves, something meticulously divided into the fifteen days that stretched between each paycheck.

We split it any way we could, and we knew we could not ask for more, even if our bellies didn’t sit full. More cost money, and we didn’t have more money.

There was no food pantry or 4 Million Meals charity event or food assistance program, because my brave mother wanted to do it on her own.

We were three kids, climbing into bed with our stomachs rumbling in ways we learned to ignore.

///

My mother hated being in that hunger place. She hated dividing a paycheck with not enough food. She hated knowing her babies could not remember the last time they had full bellies.

This is not what I want for my own children. This is not what I want for myself.

So panic follows me in and out of rooms, the room two share and the one twins share and the one the first boy has claimed as his sleeping-room because it’s a library and he loves falling asleep surrounded by books.

They are sleeping, no fear or worry or hunger anywhere near those soft, other-worldly faces.

But they are too near mine.

What will I do if I can’t take care of them?

What will I do if I lose this house that keeps them safe and warm and dry?

What will I do if there is not enough food?

These are questions I cannot answer today.

///

I stopped eating lunch and breakfast when I was 12 years old.

It wasn’t only because I wanted to watch my weight, like I said all those years later. That was just part of it.

I made my excuses, it was too early in the morning to eat before school, athletics class was right after lunch, and if we had to run the 1.8 again I was sure to hurl it all up anyway. But there was another reason I could never say.

What sat at the bottom of that decision, right beside the need to look thin and sculpted and beautiful, was saving my mom the anxiety of opening a refrigerator and seeing it empty again, no oranges, no carrots, no fish sticks or French fries or leftover Hamburger Helper tucked away in its drawers and on its shelves.

Lunch came and went at school, and day after day after day I walked into that cafeteria with my stomach screaming and then I walked right out to that old oak tree where my friends and I would hang out after they were done eating and I was done pretending. I never stayed in that torture room as long as it took my friends to eat, because I couldn’t stand to smell all the food we couldn’t afford.

Someday I would have enough to eat.

///

Except it wasn’t so simple, that having enough to eat.

Maybe we took it for granted all these years we had steady jobs and extra income and the refrigerator stayed full of good and healthy food, but now, in these days after getting that pink slip about a job ending with the year’s ending, in these days of counting 77 days of a job remaining and 122 days until we meet our sixth child, in these days where hunger memories haunt, I feel the panic every time I open the refrigerator.

It turns a world sideways and leaves a mama breathless, and then all those boys come bounding in the room again, looking for something else to eat.

And there is food enough today, but what about tomorrow? What about in 77 days, when that job walks away? What about six weeks after that?

My husband follows me around the house, watching me from the corners, trying to convince himself I’m OK, and then, seven days after learning about an ending I don’t really want to consider, he throws out his theory about this anxiety I feel and how we attack it by following it to its source.

So what is the source of your anxiety? he says.

I know, but I can’t say, not yet, not out loud. I can’t say it’s losing a home. I can’t say it’s losing food and health and security. I can’t say it’s losing kids who need shelter and food and clothes, right along with a parent’s love.

I can’t say that at the heart of it all is this: Even though she is a hero in my eyes, I am afraid of being my mother.

I can’t say all of this yet.

///

It was early on a Christmas morning. There was hardly anything waiting under the tree that year, even though she’d pawned her old wedding ring for a little Christmas cash. She wanted to do more, but what can a mom do without money?

We were too old to believe in Santa by then. But we heard the bells, and we heard the boots, and we ran to the door to see who might have landed on our old rotted porch with the holes punched all through it.

No one was there. But a box was.

Inside that box were a ham and a turkey and cans of cranberry sauce and green beans and potatoes and already-made pies.

Someone had left a feast on our front porch and then left faster than we could make it to the door. My mom didn’t have to look into the eyes of charity, and she couldn’t return what she’d been given.

We ate better that day than we had in a long, long time, and for the first time in years I went to bed with a stomach that did not toss and turn and rumble.

That meal lasted us days and days and days, and even today, even after all these grown-up years, I still wish I could thank the kind soul who bandaged a mom’s heart for Christmas.

///

So what can I do?

Fourteen days after tearing that pink slip to pieces in a fit of despair, it is still a question I’m trying to answer, and I just can’t.

There is a reason for this.

I can try and try and try to figure this all out, and I can try and try and try to secure some kind of hope and future for my family on my own, and I can try and try and try to take control and make a plan and search all those job sites and apply for every one of them, but the truth is my future is not up to me.

Keeping a house, filling a refrigerator, building a career is not up to me, not really.

It’s up to a God who planned my every day before I was even born.

That doesn’t mean I don’t do my part, of course it doesn’t, but it does mean that when the whole world feels like it’s turning upside down, when I lose my footing because of an envelope and an unexpected letter, when it feels like I can’t find my feet and maybe won’t ever again, even then I can rest on One who is more capable than I am.

Security is not an easy thing to surrender, at least not for me. I want to do something. I want to figure it out. I want to try to make it all OK.

But if this experience, this losing a job I thought was secure, has taught me anything at all, it’s that the whole world is shaking, and I need a rescue, and I cannot save myself.

But my God is a rock of peace, and that means I can and will stand again.

It means that even if my kids are hungry, even if we lose the only house we’ve ever lived in together, even if we’re out on the streets sleeping on the blankets I made for each boy’s second birthday, we are held. Safe. Still loved.

Maybe it’s harder to see it from here, in this dark of groping for a handhold or just a foothold where the next step might be hiding, but I know it to be true still.

So we go. We follow him into the dark. We brave the weight of all that anxiety, knowing that once our eyes adjust we will see the way forward and through and out again.

We will still stand, there at the end of the world.