Stephanie Jankowski with her two oldest children.
True or false: If you can afford a high-speed Internet connection, you can afford to keep your refrigerator fully stocked.
I’ve generally considered the answer to be “true.” And then I saw this:
My family isn’t the only one who suffers from LMLP, is it? Long Month, Late Pay = grocery budget is gone and so is our food!
#31DaysAndStarving
#CerealForDinner
It was a Facebook status update posted by one of my favorite funny bloggers, When Crazy Meets Exhaustion, a.k.a. Stephanie Jankowski, who attached with it a picture of her near-empty freezer.
Jankowski, 34, a married mother of three, has a decent following — more than 7,000 Facebook fans — a beautiful website, occasional deals with corporate sponsors and, on top of her blogging efforts, a full-time, work-from-home job as an online English teacher. (Her husband is also a teacher, but he works at a public high school, teaching math.)
In short, Jankowski is a successful working mom — someone I look up to. She was not someone I ever expected to concede, even in a joking fashion, that her grocery budget was down to zero and that she’s out of food. That’s not supposed to happen to bloggers like her — bloggers like us.
I reached out to Jankowski, who explained that her situation is definitely not as desperate as some, myself included, might otherwise assume.
She said that her family is steadfast about keeping to a budget. When the months are longer and paychecks are spaced further apart, sometimes their food budget doesn’t stretch as far as they’d like it to. They have emergency savings that they could dip into if need be, she said, but they prefer instead to make big meals that last several days or even make the odd trip to a cheap fast food place.
“We are professionals, we have that cushion,” she said, but “that doesn’t mean we don’t struggle to make ends meet as well.”
Still, Jankowski knows that her family’s challenges pale in comparison to others. She said she was surprised how many of her readers, in response to her “Long Month, Short Pay” joke, shared far more dire stories of struggling to put food on the table.
“I still feel that we’re very fortunate to have what we have,” she said, “even when we don’t have it on time or exactly when we need it.”
For now, Jankowski’s refrigerator is stocked again — her family recently went grocery shopping after both she and her husband received their latest paychecks. And while she’s also back to posting more light-hearted jokes, the unexpected responses she’s received from readers have inspired her to revisit the subject of hunger. She intends to promote a fellow mom blogger’s food charity effort, The Scary Mommy Thanksgiving Project, and is trying to figure out other ways to help.
“It’s been gnawing at my brain: ‘What I can do?’ Jankowski said.
“The dollar,” she said, “doesn’t go as far as it used to, or should, for anybody.”
Photo courtesy of Stephanie Jankowski
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