These idiot turkeys, gobbling their way around next year's pumpkin patch, and a pen of 28 broilers, are all that's left of our 2009 farm season. I drove a truck full of jack o'lantern pumpkins, cured onions, and brussels sprouts into town for our last delivery of the season last night. And Paula fed me steak and potatoes and wine, and I felt a little sad about not being able to see her every Monday all winter long. But still I'm wondering when it will sink in that this is it. My suspicion is that it won't really happen until next Monday, when I can spend all day writing rather than scrubbing carrots. Or maybe not until Monday night, when I can eat dinner with my family and watch
The Big Bang Theory like a normal person. Who knows.
But the end of the season is absolutely making me think about the beginning. And I don't mean the beginning of this season, but the beginning beginning, like years ago when we first decided to get ourselves into this. And how little we knew what the future we were dreaming of would really be like. How in February of 2005, I was not even thinking of being a farmer, and I officially and uneventfully turned 30. Friends of mine seemed to have a lot of angst about 30. . .unfulfilled dreams, wrinkles, that sort of thing. Turning 30 did not bother me one bit, I swear, mostly because I had other things to worry about and because in my mind, I had really turned 30 in 2001 when we found out we were pregnant and bought a Subaru station wagon. Not the cool Outback, but the cheaper, far less hip Legacy model. It was a grown-up thing to do, buying a station wagon with a high safety rating and car seat anchors. And then in 2002, just after our fourth anniversary, we bought our first house, a 1952 brick ranch with rusty plumbing. We had a baby and a station wagon and a mortgage and, between us, ten years of college under our belts, and we were both still only 27. My mother has always accused me of being “in such a damn hurry about everything all the time.” And I’ve always just rolled my eyes, because she’s my mom, but I did beat thirty to thirty, so I suppose she’s right.
My husband is incredibly thoughtful about gifts, about everything, really, and that year he helped me celebrate my birthday by taking our screaming, colicky newborn son and our potty-training challenged 2 year old daughter to my mom’s for the night so that I could have a few hours of peace, by myself, in the house. Turning 30 was not stressing me out, but many other things were. When Simon was a newborn, he screamed all day and through most nights, was losing weight, and was generally a source of incredible worry for all of us. We didn’t know it then, but he was allergic to dairy and soy, both of which were staples of my nursing-but-trying-to-lose-the-baby-weight-diet. Madzie, at two, had developed a habit of hiding behind the couch to poop in her new “big-girl” princess panties. “Poor Cinderella,” she would say as we swished yet another BM off of Cinderella’s big underpants smile and into the potty. If I knew then what I know now, I would have just put her back in diapers. At the time, though, I was
panicked that she wouldn’t be potty trained in time to go to preschool, so I tortured both of us by making her try, day after unsuccessful day, to use the toilet. My totally inept potty training regimen is something I’m convinced she’ll speak to a therapist about when she’s older, along with the fact that I humiliated her by writing about it here.
And money, of course, was another issue. I’d gone back to work, teaching night classes at the community college, 10 days after having my son. I’d done that because we had crappy private health insurance, and were facing a $4000 out-of-pocket hospital bill for my 24 hour maternity stay, and our savings were hovering somewhere between 0 and $15. Matt had a good job, but the health care crisis hit our family before most others. We are that family, the one that doesn’t have employer-sponsored coverage, makes a little too much to qualify for government health care assistance, and spends between 9 and 15% of our net income on health care. We’ve been doing this since 2002, when we decided that one of us should go part-time and raise our kids. And at that time, and sometimes even in this time, our health care costs were absolutely keeping us from paying other bills on time. Our credit card balance soared into the thousands before we really knew what was happening. We were horrified.
And in the midst of all this, my mind got pretty dark. I was having trouble staying calm. Life felt frantic and I was nervous all the time. Anyone who has ever faced the demon that is post-partum depression will understand why I don’t want to go into too much detail here. But I was yelling at Madzie, something I hadn’t done before and really never wanted to do. (Okay, I still yell a little at my kids. They are sweet, but they are a sweet handful. But yelling days are not my best days. Not by a longshot). Simon's poor pitiful crying grated on my nerves, and it was hard for me to remember that I loved him and he was only a baby and he was in a lot of pain. I didn’t keep up with the housework. I said horrible, mean things on the phone to my sister. My teaching suffered. Matt was sympathetic, but it was no picnic for him either, and neither one of us had much left for the other at the end of the day. And one afternoon in March that year, I put both of my screaming children in their bedrooms, called my mother and my doctor, and told them both I thought I was losing my mind and I was the most terrible, ill-equipped, witch of a mother and that I could maybe use a little help. My mom came over right away, tucked all of us up in warm blankets and love, and saved the day. My doctor prescribed Paxil. Matt patiently and lovingly suggested I try massage and acupuncture, despite the fact that our insurance didn’t cover them and they were pretty expensive therapy and he would never in a million years have done either of those things for himself.
And so we began to recover from what remains the most miserable few months of our life together, during which we both turned 30 and neither one of us cared. Paula and Brooke started bringing their kids (and Starbucks) over for regular playdates and gossip, which was better than therapy for me. My neighbor and dear friend Gwyn and I started a fairly serious stroller fitness program, pushing our four kids to neighborhood parks on long walks that frequently ended at the local donut shop (so much for losing the baby weight). There was suddenly a lot to laugh about, and I wish everyone who has been shamed by post-partum depression got to do it surrounded by such delightful and forgiving people. And because once I had the Paxil, I got back to being my old silver-lining sort of self, I realized that with love like this all around, there really wasn’t anything to fear. And that change could really happen. . .that you could really just decide to make things better for yourself, and if you put some effort in, things would, in fact, improve. So once I had gotten back on my feet, mothering-wise, Matt and I started looking around at other things we’d like to fix up in our lives. Like we’d like to have more control over our schedules. We’d like to have someone home all the time with the kids. And we’d like to make a little more money, because our emotional recovery had not helped our financial situation at all. Not like trip around the world money, but no credit card debt and bills paid on time and a little bit of savings type money. And it seemed to make sense that starting our own business would be the best way to accomplish all this. And if we could get through the post-partum thing, we could probably make starting a business together work.
And now, almost five years later, here we are. Post-partum made us buy a farm. We don't quite have the more money thing solved, but the bills are getting paid, usually on time. I'm at peace with it. And the schedule and being home things, well, I am almost full-time home on the farm, and we can see a time when Matt might be too, a few years down the road. Our kids are happy, running wild around our wide-open acreage, and they witness every day the way that family, and love, and hard work, when cultivated together, make this a life we can all finally be content with. And being content is a new feeling for all of us. We may not be at the end, but we've
found our way. Thank God.
I am in a sort of post-slaughter daze today. Last night was uncharacteristically lazy, as we watched America's Funniest Home Videos with the kids, and after they went to bed, The Wrestler, which I'm sorry to say had too much wrestling, not enough relationship, and though the acting was, in fact, great, it was just not good enough to redeem the story. Netflix can have that one back. And this morning I'm just sort of roaming around with my coffee, trying to plot out my next best step.
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