In the annals of human experience and human interaction, consider … the cheeseburger.
Not the kind you grab at the drive-thru, and certainly not the ones wrapped in cellophane you pop in the microwave.
“ … The best burger is the one that starts with an 80/20 ratio of meat and fat. Any leaner it will be dry and not juicy. When forming into a patty, make the burger thicker on the outside and thinner in the middle. This allows for more even cooking …”
Joyce Walker Bennett, who retired last month as a social worker in the Early Head Start program for Monongalia County Schools, wrote the book on cheeseburgers, and, everything else.
Her cheeseburger recipe is entry No. 16 in her book, “Life Lessons to my Early Head Start Moms,” which she penned as a reverse-retirement gift to the young women with children she’s been calling on in the past couple of years in her job.
Walker, who spent 25 years with the school district and a few years before that working in foster care, wanted to let those moms and their families know she wasn’t ready to stop helping them, even if she is moving on to the next chapter.
“Maybe this is something they’ll go back to over the years,” Bennett said of her book that contains 60, one-page observations, thoughts and practical asides, such as the cheeseburger recipe.
“I can’t stop caring, even though I’m quitting work.”
Beyond burgers
The federal programs of Early Head Start offer outreach for low-income families with young children.
Their goal is to help young moms, in particular, and promote all those cognitive, social and emotional development benchmarks that help infants and children grow into self-sufficient adults.
Her book is an encapsulated primer of her professional career.
It’s not a cookbook, and the cheeseburger offering might even be a study in Ground Beef Zen, of sorts.
That is, if you use your budget and resources to really make a meal the right way, you’ll come away with a lot more than a (fleetingly) full belly.
Clean counters and courteous interactions
She offers up other meditations of the importance of keeping a clean bathroom and kitchen, and why handwritten thank-you cards can still catch hearts in the age of the handheld mobile media device.
There’s also a lesson or two detailing why one should never, ever be rude to the salesclerk.
“These are the things I would have wanted someone to say to me,” said Bennett, the mother of two grown children.
Bennett was blessed with a good family life growing up, with a mother and father who loved her and her siblings. She has a good marriage and two kids who are making their way quite well in life.
‘And you are a good mom’
Many of the young women she counseled in her career haven’t been as lucky, she said. That’s why she started thinking about writing it all down as her retirement loomed.
As a young mom herself, she struggled for a time with post-partum depression. She worked a lot of menial jobs on the way to her career.
Early on in her social work career, she quickly discovered that some young women simply didn’t know about the fundamental things — grocery shopping, hygiene and the like, because, well, they didn’t know.
“And if you don’t know, you don’t know,” she said.
Over the years, Walker has been a national trainer for Early Head Start at seminars in Washington, D.C. and New York City.
She’s worked with teen moms, where she imparted the power of simply writing it down. “Keeping a journal really works,” she said, “if you give it a chance.”
So does keeping hope, she’ll add, if you give yourself a chance.
“You are a strong, loving, resilient woman,” she wrote in the introduction.
“And you are good mom!”
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