Amena Brown:
That time I met India.Arie. That time I went on a really bad date. That time I was directed by Robert Townsend. That time I got mono on Thanksgiving. That time I went on a really bad Christmas tour that time I... Hey, everybody. Welcome back to this week's episode of Her With Amena, and this week I'm going to try a new thing. Okay? So I'm going to try it and then if y'all dig it, I want you to write to me on social media or comment when I post about this episode, and tell me if you dig it. Because if you dig it, then this is a thing that I'm going to come back and try every so often. So I want to do an episode that is on the theme of, "That time I..." And each time I do one of these episodes, it will be a very special story that I will tell you based upon whatever the theme is of the episode. Okay? So today we are talking about that time I got mono on Thanksgiving. It is Thanksgiving week as this episode releases, we are the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, and I thought it would be a great time just to share with you all in our HER living room about some of the Thanksgiving mistakes that I have made in the past.
Amena Brown:
I come from a divorced family, okay? So what this means is I have had the experience as an adult of having to decide which parent I spend which holiday with. So when I was post-high school, I think once I got into college in my early twenties, I decided that Thanksgiving would be the holiday that I would spend with my dad and my dad's side of the family, and then Christmas was the holiday that I would spend with my mom and her side of the family. And this arrangement worked out super great because my dad and his side of the family live in Nebraska, the flights were always cheap around Thanksgiving if I would just go and stay the whole week, and my twenties were a stressful time, so it was actually a relief to just get to my dad and stepmother's house and have nothing to do but just eat food and hang out. I would take the week off from whatever job I happened to be working at the time, okay?
Amena Brown:
The star of the Thanksgiving meal at my dad's house was my stepmother's cornbread dressing. Okay, and let me just stop and make a little note right here. There's a difference between dressing and stuffing, okay? Some of you are like, "I already know, I already know," but in case you don't already know. Let me just tell you: stuffing is when there's like a bread, crumb or situation that gets put inside of the bird, right? And baked, cooked, whatever alongside with the bird. Dressing is something that on the plate accompanies the bird, but is cooked separately from the bird, and my stepmother's cornbread dressing. It was everything. It was everything you could want. It's cornbread, sort of all crumbed up together with celery, and onions, and lots of Sage, and chicken or Turkey broth, and you stir all that up together. You bake it in like a lasagna pan and then it comes out, you cut it by the square. So basically you put this square of cornbread dressing next to your turkey. You go ahead and just drizzle some gravy on it. If you've got it. I remember there was one Thanksgiving that I think my brother and I almost made ourselves sick eating so much of the cornbread dressing; it's everything.
Amena Brown:
So as I got older, I learned how to also make the cornbread dressing, and I also spent my twenties learning a lot of the Southern food staples for my grandmother. So my grandmother taught me how to make macaroni and cheese, and I'll let me just stop and take a note here, I mean, we're talking about like baked four or five cheese, macaroni and cheese, okay? We're not talking about the one in the box, that's not a thing in my life in general, but it's definitely not a thing on Thanksgiving. Okay. My grandma also taught me how to make collard greens. So I was sort of picking up a lot of these amazing, soul food, Southern food type of dishes, okay?
Amena Brown:
So then I turned 30 and I fall in love with the man who is now my husband, but was then my boyfriend, and that first Thanksgiving that we had when we were dating... Because we dated a year and then we got married. So we only had one Thanksgiving that we were boyfriend and girlfriend, right? That Thanksgiving, I remember that my then-boyfriend's parents, they were going out of town for the holiday. His younger brother was staying in town because he was working through the holiday, and so as we are talking every day on the phone for hours, he tells me, "Yeah, I decided to stay for the holiday, my brother's here." And I was like, "Oh my gosh, we need to have Thanksgiving together." And he was like, "Okay."
Amena Brown:
So then I go to my mom, and my grandma, and my sister, because they live here in Atlanta, and we just decided all of us were going to have Thanksgiving together and that I was going to host. Now at this time I was actually living with a friend of mine in her house, and she was gone for the holidays. So she agreed to let me host my first Thanksgiving at her house while she was out of town. So I commenced to just cooking for what felt like days on end. I probably was cooking for at least a couple of days because I cooked all of the sides. I cooked candy yams, I cooked collard greens, mac and cheese, and I cooked the cornbread dressing. And my mom was like, "I will take care of the turkey."
Amena Brown:
So I just remember maybe the Tuesday and the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, are just a blur to me between grocery shopping and cooking everything. And of course I'm feeling the extra nerves because my new boyfriend is going to come over and spend Thanksgiving with my family and his brother, because I hadn't spent a lot of time with his brother, and my sister. It was just all of the dynamics, okay? So I make the food and the food turns out amazing y'all, this is basically the beginning of me becoming the Thanksgiving host, right? Because I knew how to make all the sides and everything. I was so ready for it.
Amena Brown:
Now here's where things present a problem, okay? After we all sort of enter that Thanksgiving malaise, where like you've already had your one or two plates. And then you're just laying around, sitting around, watching football, if it's still on or watching a movie by this point, got to be late into the evening, and I'm not going to lie, I was starting to feel a little out of it. But I was like, "It's probably reasonable for me to feel out of it; I just hosted my first Thanksgiving. I spent the last two days cooking. I'm probably just tired." So everyone leaves and goes home, and y'all, I wake up the next morning and my throat feels... Like y'all seen the movie Knives Out? My throat feels like Knives In, okay? My throat feels like there are just daggers, and needles, and knives just scratching my throat away. My throat felt like it was on fire in the worst way, which I was assuming must've been strep, but it just unnerved me that I just went to bed and woke up, and that was the first feeling I had when I woke up as being in terrible pain.
Amena Brown:
So I called my boyfriend and I'm like, "Oh my gosh, my throat hurts so bad. I don't know what's wrong." And he's like, "Okay, I'm coming to get you." So he comes to get me. I'm calling my mom, who's a nurse telling her we're on our way to the Urgent Care. Y'all go into the urgent care and what do they tell me? It's not strep, they tell me it's mono, okay? And if you're not familiar with mono, mono is something that you typically get when you're a teenager. The colloquial term for mono is, "The kissing disease." Okay? So somehow I have managed to skip getting mono as a teenager because I never got mono in high school or college, but somehow at 30 years old, have decided to get mono for the first time after hosting my first Thanksgiving.
Amena Brown:
And now, it's just taking away some of the cool from me in my relationship to my new boyfriend. Now, thankfully Matt and I, we were friends for two years before we started dating each other, so we had already just been hanging out. I've been hanging out with him when I just was wearing sweat pants and a raggedy T-shirt, and so there were a lot of parts of our relationship where we already had gotten rid of a lot of those pretenses, but now you're dating, you're trying to be cool. And you want that person to think of you in a certain way. And here I am in the car with my boyfriend in the parking deck of Walmart, where I am picking up the meds that I have to take for mono.
Amena Brown:
And the doctor was like, "You need to go home and quarantine yourself for at least two weeks." So I had to just go home after that. We picked up some books and some magazines, and I just had to stay at my house for two weeks and try to feel better. It took me weeks to feel like my normal self, and that is that time that I got mono on Thanksgiving.
Amena Brown:
What does this mean for you? If you are cooking this week, because I'm going to tell you, I've never gotten mono again, but I have had some other Thanksgivings where I basically cooked myself sick. And I don't know if I just get so excited about cooking that I'm just in the kitchen and forgetting to drink water and eat food and just do all the things you need to be healthy as a normal person, I don't know. I don't know what that's about with me, but it has happened to me a few other times where I have totally cooked for days for a holiday and then promptly got sick either the day of that holiday or the day after. Okay, so look, if you are the person who is cooking this week, take some breaks, okay? Drink some water, get some rest. Don't get mono is the main point. Delegate tasks, let some other people make the dishes. And I know it's hard, I know it's hard because you want to feel like you can trust people to make food. And sometimes they make it and you can't trust them with it. I know that's hard, okay? But you got to protect yourself. Just don't get mono, okay? And to be honest, these days don't get COVID okay?
Amena Brown:
Look, this is a pandemic Thanksgiving, many of us, we're not going to be able to gather with our families, our friends as usual, so this is also a great opportunity. Make some new traditions. Maybe you find some new dishes to cook? Maybe if you're used to cooking for a larger crowd and you're not this year, you can figure out how you can make some dishes for one, or for two? Make your own little Thanksgiving meal for whatever the size of your household is. And listen, there is no shame in not cooking at all for Thanksgiving; you can support your local restaurants by getting takeout. If you're not into cooking. You have a lot of options this year regarding receiving the Thanksgiving food. But whatever you do not, I repeat, do not get mono.
Amena Brown:
This week of Thanksgiving seems like a great time for me to share with you all the things I am thankful for. Number one, I am thankful for pandemic bralessness. Pandemic has brought us a lot of terrible things. One thing that the time of quarantining and even still, even though we're not necessarily quarantining right now like we were when the pandemic first really hit the States, I'm basically still working from home, and home most of the time. And I'm going to tell you something, my shoulders are very thankful for that. Do y'all know that I don't even remember the last time I had on a bra with underwire. I mean, who cares about underwire now? You know? Quarantining has brought me and my breasts the ability to just hang out, and me and my breasts, we are thankful for that.
Amena Brown:
Also I am thankful for designer masks. And when I say designer, I don't mean these very expensive designers, but I am just thankful for all of the different creators, fashion brands, clothing lines, especially these independent clothing lines and fashion brands that have been making these amazing masks, like Etsy is a whole place to go and just find all sorts of different prints that the masks are made in, all sorts of different messages the masks have. Some of them have the masks that tie in the back and some of them hook around your ears, and some of them have one strap that goes around your head, and one strap that goes around the back of your neck. And look, it's important to wear masks. And also it's important to me to be cute. And I want to thank and give a special shout out to all of the people who are helping me do both; helping me be safe, helping me keep other people safe and helping me look cute while doing it.
Amena Brown:
I also want to say that I am thankful for leggings and sweatpants and just in regular life, I would have been thankful for them because I wore leggings and sweatpants all the time before, but now, I mean, that is really my attire every single day. And leggings and sweatpants, I just want to thank you. I want to thank you for your cotton. I want to thank you for some of you having a five or 10% spandex. I just want to thank you for your various designs. Your ways that you have held me in, you have held me down, you have just held me, leggings and sweatpants, and I thank you for that. I don't really know how I'm ever going to return to jeans life. Jeans just isn't really it for me. And it's weird to think about that because one of my friends and I were talking about how, when we worked in corporate America to get the chance to wear jeans was very exciting. I remember my first corporate job where we had casual Friday. I was super excited about those jeans, but now I work during the week, but I dress like it's Saturday every day, and I don't have any regrets about that. So leggings, sweatpants, I think you.
Amena Brown:
Another thing I'm thankful for is this season of The Bachelorette, and let's just talk about this a little while. Let's just talk about this. I'm not a person who normally tunes into The Bachelorette. The only other season that I watched was Rachel Lindsey's season, and just to be utterly honest, I was watching because I was like, "Wow, there's a Black woman on here." The rest of the seasons of The Bachelorette, I just can't take it. But this season, there was so much trash that happened on this season right here, and I'm going to try not to do any spoilers if you haven't watched it yet, but this season of The Bachelorette has really brought me a lot of joy, because some elements of trash TV, they just bring me joy.
Amena Brown:
And just seeing this season slowly unravel in these very fascinating ways. The Bachelorette is really carrying me through, y'all. And I don't even normally watch it, but I was glad to watch this season. And so I thank both bachelorettes and I think all of the suitors and the roses. Wow, that entertainment, what a blessing to us to have that season be like this, this year. And if you think about it, 2020 itself has just been a year of a lot of strangeness, a lot of oddities. And so this season of The Bachelorette was actually to me, the perfect season of The Bachelorette to have happen right here in the middle of 2020. So I am thankful for that.
Amena Brown:
Also, another thing I'm thankful for is I'm thankful for Lovecraft Country fascinating me and scaring me into nightmares. And let me just tell y'all, I do not do scary stuff. I don't do well with horror movies, I don't watch horror films, I'm a person who will watch a movie, and if it gets too scary or anything like that, too supernatural, I will have nightmares and I will not be able to go to sleep, but I could not not watch Lovecraft Country. And if you're hearing me say this and you're like, "I don't know what this is," Lovecraft country is a sci-fi, I guess, I guess I would say it could fall in the category of sci-fi, fantasy, horror show, and it's just wonderful. Shout out to Misha Green, who is the creator of Lovecraft Country. And I was like, "I cannot not watch the show," the conversations on Twitter, and even among my friends that were watching, there are some episodes that we had to really break down and discuss.
Amena Brown:
So I am thankful for Lovecraft Country, even though, because it is still scary to me, and Lovecraft Country was scary in an interesting way because it definitely had some horror sci-fi elements to it that were scary for that reason. But then because of the way the story is written, and because the story is centered around these Black characters, navigating racist America, even though it is not set in our present day, it's very timely to watch. And a lot of the racism that you're watching in the show is also racism that is happening in real life, so it had this element of sort of the double horror in the sense of in part, it's scary because of these monsters that are showing up in the show, but it's also real life scary because some of the elements in the show are scary things that happen in real life.
Amena Brown:
And I also want to confess to y'all, I was talking to a friend of mine about horror films, and I told her, as I was trying to say the word, "Horror" her, I realized, I don't know if it's my Southern upbringing, but for me, when I say it, "Horror," it doesn't have two syllables. I'm really saying, "Whore." I don't know where the extra, "O-R" is. I don't know where it's at, okay? But as far as I'm concerned, it's a horror movie. It's a show with horror in it, but that's one syllable and that's all I have. I just discovered that's all I have, and I don't think that I can teach my mouth another way to say that word. So if anybody wants to take me to Rocky Horror Picture Show, it is H-O-R-R, and y'all can go searching for that other, "O-R". I don't know. I don't know where it's at.
Amena Brown:
Another thing I'm thankful for is Twitter. And I know, I know y'all, I know; Twitter can be a strange place, okay? I have some moments where I'm like, "I love it here." And then I have some moments where I'm like, "Oh no, I hate it here," but I am thankful for Twitter this year because Twitter was one of the ways that I was able to find out if anybody in Atlanta was actually finding Lysol in this store. It is also how I was able to find out how voting and polling locations were going, where I live, because it made it easy to search on there and see what people were talking about. And for TV shows like The Bachelorette, like Lovecraft Country, like Married at First Sight to have just, almost a group of some of your friends and other people you may not really know, but they're cool, and they're funny, and to get to talk about that stuff on Twitter has been amazing. And also there've been some times that Twitter has just been a dumpster fire, bless us all, but I am thankful for the times that Twitter was amazing, so Twitter, you are also on my things I'm thankful for list.
Amena Brown:
And I'm also thankful for Thanksgiving memories. I know that this Thanksgiving is just going to be really different for me because I normally take the whole week off, I go to the store Sunday or Monday, I start cooking already on Monday because there are certain dishes that take preparation and whatever. It's like a Cook-a-Palooza for me Thanksgiving, I love it so much. And this year is going to be different, there won't be the large crowd of our friends and family at our house, and there won't be as much preparation to do because we'll just be making food for a much smaller crowd of people. But I was thinking about one of my favorite Thanksgiving memories, and I think it's good to be able to grieve the things that being in a pandemic causes us to lose, I think that's important. And I also think it's important to think about some of the memories we had before, and let some of those bring us joy.
Amena Brown:
And I remember when we would go to Thanksgiving at my grandma's house. My grandma had a tradition, and I know there are other Black families that had this same tradition where you would go around, and someone would say the grace, and then everyone would say a scripture after that, like a Bible verse. And there was one Bible verse that only has two words, "Jesus wept." And I remember as a kid, even before I got old enough to where they would have been expecting me to know a Bible verse to say after the Thanksgiving prayer, I would always look around and sort of see this grimace on the faces of the other adults when grandpa said, "Jesus wept" because that forced everyone else to have to think of some other Bible verse that they could remember. And, "Jesus wept" was the only one they had in their arsenal, right?
Amena Brown:
So I want to also be thankful for Thanksgiving memories, be thankful for my grandpa stealing the thunder of every adult at most Thanksgivings by saying, "Jesus wept." And then the rest of the people had to think, do they know another scripture verse? Can they say this other one? Will they have to go and stare at a Bible without everyone looking, and then come back and say one? And listen, my grandma's house was one of those houses where everyone had to say one, it wasn't just up to the people that wanted to, and they would stand there and wait for you until you found something that you could remember. So thank you to Thanksgiving memories.
Amena Brown:
And last, but definitely not least, I want to say thank you to all of you. We are weeks, weeks, weeks into the relaunch of HER with Amena Brown, and it has been so wonderful to me to connect with you all, to know that you all are listening, whether you are listening in your earbuds, or your headphones, or you're in your car or doing your chores around the house, whatever it is that brings you to listen to this podcast. I just wanted to say thank you because I am so, so thankful for each of you. The hardest part for me about recording a podcast is that I can't see any of you that I'm talking to you and you're hearing me, and you might be talking back to me wherever you are, but we can't see each other. I hope a time will come when the pandemic is over, And when we're able to get back to having some events and stuff where I can get a chance to actually meet some of you in person to see you set up some, HER living rooms live in some cities so that we can be together. But I am thankful for you. I hope that you have found some inspiration in the stories and the laughter that is here on this podcast, and this podcast would not be able to continue on if it weren't for you. So I am also thankful for you, listeners.
Amena Brown:
Tell me what you're thankful for. Give me some comments on social media. You can follow me on Twitter or Instagram @amenabee, I'd love to hear from you. Tell me what you're thankful for. Tell me what it is important to you right now. Maybe what are some of your Thanksgiving memories? I would love to hear that. Thanks for listening.
Amena Brown:
For this episode's Give Her a Crown, I want to give a crown Toni Tipton-Martin, author of Jubilee: Recipes from Two Centuries of African American Cooking. Part of Thanksgiving for me is celebrating the soul food traditions that were passed down and kept in our family. Toni is doing such great work, preserving the archive and history of Black culture and food in America.
Amena Brown:
I also want to give a crown to native American poet Joy Harjo, one of my favorite poets and our current United States Poet Laureate. Each year in the before times, before the pandemic, my husband and I would host our family and friends in our home for Thanksgiving. And before we prayed over the meal, we would always take a moment to honor the Indigenous people who originally lived on the land, where we now live. We live in Atlanta, Georgia, and the land here was originally inhabited by the Muskogee Creek people. After the Muskogee Creek were forced off their land by colonizers, many of their tribe who survived now live in Oklahoma. Joy Harjo is from Oklahoma, and she is Muskogee Creek. To close today's episode, I want to read to you all an excerpt of one of Joy's poems, Remember, from her book, She Had Some Horses.
Amena Brown:
"Remember the plants, trees, animal life who all have their tribes, their families, their histories, to talk to them, listen to them. They are alive poems. Remember the wind, remember her voice. She knows the origin of this universe. Remember you are all people and all people are you. Remember you are this universe. And this universe is you. Remember all is in motion. Is growing, is you. Remember language comes from this. Remember the dance languages that life is. Remember.
Amena Brown:
For more information about Joy Harjo and Toni Tipton-Martin's books, you can get this info and much more in the show notes at amenabrown.com/herwithamena, And you can follow me on Twitter and Instagram @amenabee.
Amena Brown:
HER With Amena Brown is produced by Matt Owen, for Sol Graffiti Productions, as a part of the Seneca Women Podcast Network, in partnership with iHeartRadio. Thanks for listening. And don't forget to subscribe, rate, and review the podcast.