Howdy!
I’m Jeanette.

ABOUT ME

Hi! I’m Jeanette Brown, and I’m so happy you’re here.

Right now, I’m a blogger and chef who’s writing a memoir and launching a start up.

At times in the past, I’ve delivered homemade cookies door to door. Field tripped solo with two-year-olds in Rock Creek Park. Stacked cups in an Ivy League cafeteria.

I sold ladies’ shoes in downtown Vail. Taught children to read in the Dominican countryside. Shipped books for a small, women-owned literary press in Cleveland Park. Sold cigars at Summerfest in Milwaukee.

I’ve also waited tables at about a dozen restaurants across half a dozen states. Worked the line in some kitchens, too.

We moved to Washington, DC, when I was nine.

The labor organizing that took my parents to the West Virginia coal fields had largely petered out. My mother was desperate for work that would let her use her brain. And my parents were worried remaining in Appalachia might tank my likelihood of going to college.

First day of school, Shepherd Elementary, September 1986:

I’m the only white girl.

In the fourth, fifth, and sixth grades.

To make me a little MORE different, I didn’t know if I was in the fourth or fifth grade for the first month of school. DC was trying to decide whether to follow West Virginia’s recommendation that I skip a grade.

Conveniently, I was assigned to Mrs. Shamwell’s 4/5 combination class. She told me to put my preferred grade on my work. I consistently put fifth. The school administrators ultimately agreed.

I dropped my hillbilly accent like it burned me. Which it did if you count the funny looks and giggles from the new kids I met at school.

Losing the drawl helped tremendously in terms of fitting in. (My poor little brother had a much harder time with this.)

There was a shooting the year before I arrived and metal detectors at every entrance. Way before Columbine. Back when Washington was called the “murder capital of the world.”

My classmates came from 85 countries. I was in the magnet international studies program. The Smithsonian was an extension of our classroom. And I rowed varsity crew on the Potomac.

Our graduation took place in Constitution Hall; the theme, “A Different World.” My speech started by celebrating the ways in which our world was different from the one that had refused to let Marian Anderson sing on that very stage because of the color of her skin. What brought people to their feet was when I said black lives—and immigrants’ lives—ALL lives matter.

I wouldn’t trade my Wilson tiger stripes for anything. It’s hard to be a tiger. But it also makes you strong.

I chose Columbia over Stanford for college. In part because the Palo Alto school offered me less in financial aid than it cost to fly there. (That I was in love with a guy at UVA didn’t help.)

I had romanticized visions of Columbia because it’s where my parents met. In the politically charged late 1960s. My dad was a sociology PhD student; my mom was married to one of his classmates. Memoir writing has unveiled more of the story there and elsewhere.

I majored in English at Columbia and minored in Spanish.

After thinking I was pre-med for two years.

I started studying Spanish in the 7^th grade. Because my dad told me I had to.

I wanted to take French. All the cool kids were. Besides, my name is French.

“No way, Juanita,” my dad said.

Speaking Spanish lets me communicate with A LOT of people.

Thanks, Papá.

I am a feminist. Some might even call me militant. If by that they mean I’m fed up with inequalities that should have been erased generations ago. I want my daughter and my son to have equal opportunities to excel in whatever field or fields they chose. To receive equal pay for equal work. To come home and do an equal share of the emotional and physical labor it takes to run a household and raise a family.

Call me crazy.

Better yet, go read Gemma Hartley’s fantastic book, Fed Up.

I had it in my head I wanted to be a psychiatrist. I eeked out a B+ in G-chem after getting a 37 on my first exam. Out of 150. Ouch. Not fun. And I was terrified of organic chemistry.

I’d stumbled almost accidentally into Edward Mendelson’s class on the Brontës and their contemporaries. Soon enough, I gave up the science that was kicking my ass and succumbed to the siren call of literature. English and Spanish.

I was also a peer counselor at the Columbia / Barnard Rape Crisis Center all four years. An early nod to an abiding fascination with psychology. Part of the pursuit of psychiatry in the first place.

People and their stories. I can’t get enough of them.

Okay. One of my jams.

My paternal grandfather was an editor. My father would have made a great one, too. Instead he became a coal miner. Settling for editing the sentences I spoke. Language and story came easily to me, maybe thanks to this early training.

At eight, I was dragging our neighborhood group of kids up and down the block looking for scoops. We compiled them into a neighborhood newspaper. Which we banged out, a couple copies at a time, using my dad’s ancient Royal typewriter and carbon paper.

Newspaper mastheads continued to show my name from elementary school through college. I began to shift toward magazines with summer internships in Miami and New York after my first and third years at Columbia. My first job out of school was as copy editor of Astronomy Magazine in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. A state I’d never visited before.

When my mother was diagnosed with cancer I immediately threw myself into things I felt could give me a sense of control: Researching the sh!t out of her illness and applying to graduate school.

Which is how I ended up in a dual-degree master’s program in journalism and Caribbean and Latin American studies at NYU in the years when my mother was dying. That bit I don’t recommend. I was half present at best for graduate school.

But I don’t pretend that doesn’t mean I don’t sometimes get the story wrong.

We are all always telling ourselves stories in our heads. It’s how we’re wired.

But too often those stories are based on incomplete data. Which can lead us down paths that diverge from the truth.

The more data you have, the closer to the truth you can get.

Since WAY before I had any idea what I wanted to be when I grew up. In addition to whatever I decided I wanted to be when I grew up.

There were times in my life when I could have become a mother and didn’t.

Because it would have been unfair to me and to any child I might have brought into the world.

I had healing to do before I could give my body over to growing another human. Before I could trust myself to care for my body and—through pregnancy—any tiny human growing inside me. I needed to heal in order to carry a child.

I healed enough to carry two beautiful children. My greatest gifts in this world.

My reasons to be.
My reasons to be better.
My reasons to believe.

And now, those babies-growing-into-prickly-precocious-tweens are giving me the chance to relearn yet another lesson all over again.

I am limited in how well I can care for them by how well I care for myself. Putting my selfcare first is the best and greatest gift I can possibly give to them. Because they need me to stick around.

My mother was an award-winning textile artist and mathematician. Her passions came together in stunning works of art that were featured in books and hung in museums.

My mother’s fatal flaw was not taking care of herself. She died when I was 25. Too many decades of putting herself last.

Her death broke me.

Ever so slowly, ever since then, I have been putting myself back together. Trying to heal my wounded heart. Trying to heal my wounded mind.

And then my dad died.

Know what my dad’s fatal flaw was?

Not taking care of himself.

He was so profoundly uncomfortable with so many of his needs that he tried to deny having them.

With more selfcare, my parents could have been unstoppable.

Or at least still here.

Who among us doesn’t feel this?

(It’s not just me, is it?)

I’m freaked out half the time that I’ve already sentenced my kids to decades of therapy. Or much worse.

With things I’ve done, things I haven’t done, things I didn’t even know I was doing. Or not doing. Things I shouldn’t have done. Or should have.

It’s crazymaking.

I’m a human, last I checked. Which means I’ll very well end up hurting my kids in one way or another. (In addition to ways I surely already have.)

I hope I can at least heal from my own traumas so my kids don’t take them on as their own. In addition to the ones they will inevitably have to suffer having nothing to do with me.

Attempting to follow my own advice and prioritize selfcare.

Despite decades of doing the opposite. Parents who modeled the opposite. A society that praises the opposite.

But the opposite leaves me less than. Without a full charge. Less available to my own children, setting them up for dysfunction now and later.

I’m thrilled to finally have a more solid hold on selfcare. More than at any time before in my life.

But I’ve also been around the block a time or two. Or 12.

I know that life has hardships still in store for me. For you. For all of us.

It’s just a matter of when. Hard stuff doesn’t stop coming at you. You just choose to stop trying to outrun it.

But that means standing and letting the wave of feelings hit you.

That wave of feelings that at one point seemed so intolerable that you’ve been running from it ever since.

Yeah. That one. Letting it hit you.

Know what lets you get back up again?

Selfcare.

If I keep showing up here to describe how I’m taking care of myself…I’m gonna have to be taking care of myself.

Or at least that’s the idea.

I’ve been lying my entire life. Hiding huge parts of myself from almost everyone I knew. For almost as long as I can remember.

I have tried to be exceptionally truthful in the ways I could. In what I did choose to share. For what that’s worth.

A virtuous, repentant part of me trying to make up for less goody-two-shoe parts. Including one that apparently gives zero f*cks about lying—at least when it comes to certain things. And another that finds it easy to tell the truth, just not the whole truth.

I am guilty of the above on so many counts.

And not just because I worked in PR for five years.

Having both your parents die before your 40^th birthday can light a fire under your ass. My mom was 57 when she died, my father 78. They both achieved remarkable things in their lifetimes. Amid a sh!tload of struggle.

I wish they’d both had more time to do the things they did best. To pour their hearts and souls into what turned them on. The world would be a better place.

I didn’t think I wanted to be parentless in this world already.

Many days I don’t.

But here I am.

And if my mama taught me anything, it’s this:

I’m quilting, Mama Melinda. I’m quilting.