Better a dry crust with peace and quiet than a house full of feasting with strife. Proverbs 17:1

As a child, I never lacked for food. My adopted mom went on health food binges in which the food tasted too heavily natural on my tongue and I resented this, but still, I ate. I also had to eat whatever was put on my plate, even if it made me dry-heave. (Like Ratatuille, a nasty, soggy sort of eggplant stew. I still detest eggplant) But there was always plenty. There were always left-overs. The refrigerator was never empty or the cupboards bare. In a sense, compared to the poor, we feasted every day. Even if it was eggplant we were feasting on. I ate breakfast, lunch and dinner, alot more than I can say for some in other parts of the world and I am grateful for that. But in my house there was strife. Sometime after my 8th year, things began to go very, very wrong. My adopted mom metamorphesed from a really great mom into a monster I did not know; someone I could not count on. Someone who seemed to take pleasure in punishing me. I was about 27 years old when my brother told me she was an alcoholic. Devastated, I rang up a counselor from the group home where I had spent my teenage years, and she concurred. Everyone had known this but ME. It never occured to me that all the alcohol around my house; the jugs of wine, the flats of beer, the bottles of gin could make someone act the way she did. It was simply a drink to me. My adopted dad tried to hold things together, but as I grew older, I just could not. I did not have the mental tools to be able to understand what was going on. I did things I should not have done. I was unclean alot of the time. Kids tormented me at school, so I had nowhere to turn; home was just as bad. I wished, I WISHED I lived in a poor home where people loved each other. I wished I did not live in a place where the palatable tension drove my anxieties through the roof. So, I can identify with this Proverb. It is not plenty that satisfies us, but love with the basics. Love shares a crust of bread in a pauper's hut. It is this contentment that makes that hut a palace and the crust taste like a delicacy. (I won't say caviar because I have tried it and it is a truly nasty, salty substance) If I had been asked as a child what I wanted, it would have been the crust...with peace and quiet.