An early start to the day for Truman
Stacey Truman, who lives in Moyock, North Carolina, near the Virginia border, leaves her house every weekday at 4:45am and drives almost an hour to Kingston Elementary. It’s also her job to open the school and turn on the lights every morning before preparing the day’s lunch offerings with two colleagues. After she checks her email, she enjoys the quiet and writes on bananas at her desk before the rest of the cafeteria crew arrives and the morning becomes hectic.
Working hard
Her husband, Zachery Truman, a computer tech, helps get their girls ready in the mornings, “because I’m not there when they wake up,” she said. For almost two years when her girls were younger, Stacey Truman also worked nights as a waitress because her family needed additional income to pay their bills.
“My girls sacrificed because I only saw them on the weekend, other than when I’d sneak in while they were sleeping to kiss them on the forehead,” she said. “When I was getting their lunches ready the night before, I started writing little notes on their bananas to let them know I was thinking of them and wished I could be there.”
Truman’s own childhood didn’t include “talking bananas.” Her parents divorced when she was 9, she said, requiring her and her two sisters to move into their grandparents’ house with their mother.
“It was really hard, I wanted to give my daughters a better life than what I lived through and experienced,” she said. “Writing on a banana is such a simple thing, but it has an impact.”