When I first moved to Baker, Montana in 1994, “healthy choices” weren’t even part of the conversation in my life.
I was a single mom with four kids, three daughters and one son, ranging from 2 to 8 years old. (The personal relationship challenges and obstacles… that’s a whole separate story for another day.) At the time, I was a fairly new registered nurse making around $12–13 an hour.
We were living in a 20-by-40-foot 1964 trailer house.
To say that healthy food wasn’t a priority is an understatement.
Back then, what I knew about nutrition mostly came from basic school classes. I didn’t focus on labels, ingredients, or long-term health. My focus was simple: keep everyone fed, keep a roof over our heads, and pay the babysitter so I could go to work.
That meant 99-cent hotdogs, ramen noodles, and generic mac and cheese (four boxes for a dollar). Big bags of the cheapest cereal we could find. The least expensive milk on the shelf.
And you know what?
No one was hungry.
At that time in my life, that meant I was doing my job.
Even as a nurse, I wasn’t standing in the grocery aisle reading nutrition labels. My priority was survival- personally and financially. Feeding four kids, managing life, and getting through each day.
Healthy living, as I understand it now, didn’t come all at once. It was a slow evolution. One small change at a time. One better choice layered on top of another.
And that’s how my kids learned too.
Do I feel guilty about how we ate back then?
No.
No one was hungry. And in that season of life, that mattered most.
This is where my journey started. It didn’t change overnight- but it did change.