Episode Details

We are still social distancing here.

Today’s guest is Theresa Melendez - Filipina Project Engineer, Worship leader, mom and wife. She’s also in a band!

Danielle asks how Theresa and her family are doing during COVID. She says she is “blessed” because her work is considered essential, so she’s been learning to work from home. Her husband is a freelancer and most of his clients are not working right now, which means he is not working. Their kids are doing school at home and that is the most stressful part of COVID for her. Theresa calls herself “strict” and says she wants her kids to learn Chinese and do algebra… She wants them to take education seriously but knows that she can’t be “that super homeschool mom.” There is grace for and for them in this season. She said however we can get it done is the way we get it done. But she is “breaking the rules” a bit by taking her kids to her mom’s house Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Theresa says this not only helps her to be able to keep working but it also is good for her mother who is home alone otherwise and it always her to be useful.

Theresa doesn’t love working from home. She says it’s hard to look around the house and see all the things that need to get done that she can’t do because she’s actually working.

“We’re coping pretty well.” She says. But at the same time Theresa says, “I’ve never spent so much money on food!” It’s either a huge increase in her monthly budget for food or she just never noticed how much money they spent on food before COVID. Perhaps, she says, it’s because it’s such “a huge ordeal to do to the grocery store now.”  She jokes about having to find a face mask that will match her outfit. Now she spends time a lot time pre-planning her trips to the store focusing on how to get in and out of in the quickest amount of time with the least amount of touching and contact with people as possible.

Maggie adds that we’re all in that same place of having to rethink things that we never had to before, like going to the store and minimizing contact. “Our brains are working so much more than they used to.” Maggie notes that Theresa’s home is now also her place of work and so her brain is having to switch back and forth between work-mode and mom-mode. There’s a bit of brain acrobats going on where our mind has to juggle all the things while seemingly trying to be as productive as before we have all these other obstacles.

Theresa shares that she mostly grew up here in Poulsbo, having moved her in 1987. “I’m a navy brat,” she says so she’s been exposed to lots of different cultures. She remembers not really knowing what race was until her family moved to North Chicago when she was in the 5th Grade. It was a predominantly African American community and that was the first time that she noticed that she was different. Then after living in Chicago her family moved to Kitsap County and there were only two or three other Filipino kids, a hand full of Native America students and maybe two African American students. It was a predominantly white community.

She recalls that in Chicago people were fascinated with her, but when she moved here she began to hear things. She learned about swastikas and white supremacy.. and she wondered “what does this have to do with me?” She thought it was about someone else. Her friends never treated her differently and she felt she was never exposed to blatant in your face racism. Growing up kids would make jokes asking her if she eats dogs? And she was like “no…we actually  have dogs as pets likes everyone else.”

When she stepped into the leadership here in our community she was thankful to be under leadership that was very open. Theresa feels more boundaries because she is a woman than she does because of her race. It’s not as if she feels that people have their thumb on her. Theresa has worked in th