The culture of being a mom is about how we live, and that means many things. For instance, it means that moms will often be depicted on tv and in movies with bad hair and worse clothes. It means that food marketers think that we moms want 100 calorie snack packs of everything and that having 4 mouse-sized cookies is better than nothing. And it means something that I never banked on...that all kids feel like my kids.

Pre-kids, I was more self-absorbed...maybe it’s just me (no it’s not). Now, as a mom, there’s no way I can be exposed to real or fictional stories of kids in trouble and not be stirred to want to do something...and how many times have I felt helpless to do something about it.

Enter the Hair Net
As part of a group of bloggers who gathered together (thanks to The Marketing Mama’s organizational efforts), I recently had the great fortune of packing food for Feed My Starving Children (FMSC). The night opened with a brief orientation that included a “before and after” story of an 8 year-old child whose life was saved because of FMSC’s food, as well as a 6 minute video of people in Haiti who receive the meals (incidentally, FMSC has long had a relationship with Haiti, as well as other 3rd world countries).

As I viewed the video and heard about the 8 year-old boy, I could feel my face contorting into that face you make when you’re trying not to cry and are fighting back the tears. Mercifully, no one else saw me because we were all glued to this video that showed a young boy happily stirring a pot of his Minnesota manna and a toddler who attempted to feed himself with a spoon in the same way my 22 month old beautifully and clumsily tries to shovel food into his mouth.

These kids are our kids. That toddler boy from Haiti and mine here in MN are the same, except that for some reason my son has drawn the card that puts him a place where he’ll never know what it feels like to be truly, deeply hungry.

When the lights came back on, I eagerly shoved my hair up into the hair net, knowing that it gave me the power to “do something about it.” The hair net was my ticket to entering a workroom where I could make a difference in childrens’ lives. After just 1 hour, the group of 100 or so volunteers of families and various organizations packed 64 boxes of food which would feed 38 kids for 1 year. Thank you, hair net (and FMSC).

The craziest thing about the night was that I had to stop at the market on my way home to pick up milk. With the images seared into my heart of the Haitian kids so grateful to have a pouch of life-saving food, I could hardly imagine a more ridiculous time to enter one of our many massive grocery stores, full of non-lifesaving “luxury” foods.

I’m not on a soapbox, for I am a lover of many “luxury” foods and I will never be able to answer why I get to live in a land of plenty and others in a land of nothing. I only know that I want to embrace more than ever the concept that for those who have much, much is required. And I’m re-aligning my definition of “much” -- it’s a relative term.

By the way, it doesn’t matter that FMSC is faith-based. They don’t check your higher-power beliefs at the door and the starving kids sure as hell don’t care if you choose to worship tomatoes or even yourself. Wearing the hair net was a great reminder that we are all one and that doing even the smallest things is supportive as we weave our way through this culture of motherhood.