Thanksgiving is the perfect time to set aside the electronics, and reconnect with real friends and family. Also – This Thanksgiving, gift food, stories | Share your recipes with readers
by Emily Freehling
FREELANCE WRITER
Keith Cartwright has listened to countless stories of individuals who have overcome traumatic experiences in their youth.
“Those stories almost always start with, ‘Here’s who came into my life,’” said Cartwright, the Adverse Childhood Experiences Coordinator for the Virginia Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Services.
This strengthens his belief that resilience—the ability to overcome hard things in our lives—is not something we build alone.
“Resilience is literally the product of human connection.”
That’s why Cartwright is so concerned about what the U.S. Surgeon General has called a public health crisis around loneliness, isolation and lack of connection. In an advisory released this past spring, the “nation’s doctor” stated that lacking connection can increase the risk for premature death to levels comparable with smoking daily.
As he sifts through the growing number of statistics indicating Americans’ mental health is suffering, Cartwright looks at what avenues young people have to verbalize their feelings to caring individuals in a constructive way.
He points to a statewide survey conducted last year of 5,000 18- to 24-year-olds. The survey showed rates of substance use and risky behaviors increasing, but Cartwright homed in on a different detail in the data.
“The one thing that stuck out most to me was when we asked young people, ‘If something challenging is going on in your life, do you have somebody you can talk to about it?’” he said. “Sixty-five percent said, ‘I do not.’”
In today’s world, kids can be surrounded by people without being able to name anyone with whom they can authentically share their feelings. School buses can be a sea of downturned heads, as phones pull kids into a virtual world where so-called “friends” or “followers” can pile up by the hundreds or thousands. Meanwhile, each kid on the bus may be carrying an emotional weight and feel that nobody can help them share the load.
This bolsters Cartwright’s belief that we all need to get better at making authentic connections with the people around us, whether those are our children, spouses, coworkers or friends.
Because people are the biggest protective factor that can help us all weather trauma in our lives.
Interviews with Cartwright, along with other national and local experts in child development, form the basis of a special section in the November edition of Fredericksburg Parent and Family magazine, now available at numerous distribution points throughout the Fredericksburg region.
This special section, entitled “Building Blocks of Resilience,” is made possible by the Rappahannock Area Community Services Board, and is intended to help parents, caregivers and anyone else who regularly interacts with young people learn about how to build resilience within families, and in our children.
Visit fredericksburgparent.net to read the digital edition of the magazine, and visit rappahannockareacsb.org to learn more about the important services and trainings this organization provides to help build stronger individuals, families and communities in the Fredericksburg region.
This Thanksgiving, Write It Down
by Martin Davis
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
Editor’s Note: Have a recipe you’d like to share with Advance readers? Send it along, and we’ll consider running it. Submit your recipes here.
In our podcast recorded Wednesday night, Shaun Kenney, Cori Blanche, and I turned off the political discussions and turned on the memories.
Thanksgiving memories, to be exact. The episode, which drops Monday on Spotify, found its most-meaningful moment when Cori talked about the way food is an expression of familial love.
As often happens when I’m on the air, the things I want to say come to mind after the mics are off. Such was the case with Cory’s comment, which sparked a delayed memory of my mother’s expression of love that I use without fail most every week.
It’s a simple cookbook she put together for my brother and I.
The recipes are classic comfort food, like my mom’s recipe for potato soup – still a favorite on cold weekend days and long winter nights.
“I just make potato soup,” my mom wrote. “I really don’t have a recipe.” But she put one together, anyway. I follow it to the letter, but my daughter – whose tastebuds are remarkably attuned to the way grandma’s dishes taste, loves to remind me that “grandma makes it better.”
It’s the stories mom shares that make this homemade cookbook work. The recipes are simply a nice touch.
The most compelling story is the one about how she learned to cook. I reproduce it here in its entirety – it’s worth the read.
Marty recently asked me where I learned to cook. Daddy had an aunt, I called her Ma White. She and Pa White ran a boarding house and small neighborhood grocery store on Chapel Hill Street right before the train trestle to Five Points. The steps are still there that went from the street to the house and store. I stayed with them a lot while Mother worked. Ma White served lunch everyday to Liggett& Myers workers (it was just across the railroad tracks). She would serve 100-150 people lunch every day for 50 cents per plate – all you could eat! She always had country style steak, friend chicken, and several vegetables. I watched her cook and as I got older, she let me help. I shelled beans, peeled potatoes, filled salt and pepper shakers and kept bowls filled. Funny what you remember as a child – I remember when the end of World War II was announced – everyone was running down Chapel Hill Street, hollering “The War Is Over! – Duke Memorial Church bells ringing very loud – the whistles at the two tobacco factories going off at full blast – I was only three years old but I vividly remember this scene and wondering what was going on!
The country style steak made it into the recipe book, and many of the vegetables she made with Ma White.
The way I learned to cook was not all that different. I watched mom, and bit by bit, she let me help.
The recipe book is now 22 years old.
And though I can’t see my mom as much as I’d like at her home in North Carolina, she’s there with me every week when I return to those pages and cook a bit of home for my family.
This Thanksgiving, capture some of the special dishes by writing them down for your children. Better yet, let them help you.
Then add the stories.
It’s a simple act that Thanksgiving is meant to birth. And reconnects us to who we are, where we come from, and the values we take into the future.
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-Martin Davis, Editor
