I’m truly flabbergasted about the person I’ve turned out to be as an adult. If you knew anything about my childhood, you would probably think that it’s not so abnormal for me to be the way I am today. But if you knew the things I vowed to my mother as a teenager, you would surely laugh at me!
Let me help you understand.
First, there’s my dad. Born in a small town in Iowa, he moved to California as a small child, growing up as a good ole’ Caly-boy. After serving in the Vietnam War, he moved to Washington (the state) where he met and married my mom. Maybe he had redneck blood in him before moving to the Northwest, I don’t know.
And then there’s my mom. She grew up in northern Idaho on a farm way out in the country. She attended a one-room country school until she was a teenager. Her life consisted of frugality, resourcefulness, and all that was country life. In her teen years, her family moved to a small city where she had to adjust to a different way of life.
I was born and raised in said small city. Our house was situated on about one acre of land that used to be part of an old orchard. The house was built in the wee 1900s, and my dad learned DIY skills by gutting it and rebuilding it himself. It was closer to the edge of town, quiet, and surrounded by horse pasture. Our neighbors across the street were Finnish and grew a spectacular garden every year.
This little piece of property was my mom’s haven, a place where she could live out her dream of country life on a much smaller scale. Every summer she had a huge garden that required hours of weeding and watering every week. We always had a load of animals: chickens, rabbits, dogs, cats, hermit crabs, hamsters, and even goats! We even had a few old trees from the original orchard: a pear and several apple.
Although we ate our fair share of processed foods, my mom was always experimenting with health foods. The two that stand out in my mind the most as the worst ever: carob candy bars and tofu! I hated them both. And the health food store always smelled disgusting. My mom was amazing at making nearly everything from scratch, canning her abundance of summer produce, and letting us kids learn how to cook.
The summer before entering high school was a pivotal year for me. I decided one day that I hated the garden and I hated the goats! I did not want to spend one more day in that nasty, dirty garden. Mom would make me join my younger brothers in weeding, and she gained great pleasure from throwing earthworms and giant tomato worms on me in hopes of extracting a scream from me. Her attempts never failed! And when the goat escaped for the umpteenth time and collapsed the side of our above-ground pool in order to get a drink of water, I decided that I would rather eat her than ever have to look at her again!
That summer I struck up a deal with my mom. If she would allow me to stay far from the garden and the outdoor animals, I would do all of the family laundry for the entire summer break, bake homemade bread every week, and make dinner several evenings a week. This would allow me to stay indoors where I could keep my fingernails clean and I could listen to my music on cassette tape.
I was surprised when she agreed to it. I will never forget the hours I spent in the kitchen and laundry room. I made homemade bread by hand (no bread machine!!!) nearly every other day. I remember combing through the cookbooks to find something that I thought I could make without any help. I distinctly remember making Pavlov for dessert one night. I’d never heard of it before, but since we had all the ingredients for it, I decided to give it a try. I think that one surprised my mom.
And the laundry! Who knew that a family of five could generate mountains of it every day? At least it seemed like it was every day. I started making laundry rules for the rest of the family.
It was that summer that I swore to my mom that I would never live on a farm, I would never have a garden, and I would never have chickens, rabbits, goats, or any other “farm” animal.
“You just watch. You’ll end up marrying a cowboy and then your life will be full of those things,” she would tease regularly.
I hated it when she said that! I didn’t think it was funny. I did NOT want to marry a cowboy, much less live the farmish life she subjected me to! I made up my mind that I wanted to live in a big city. Not just any big city, either. I wanted to live somewhere hot because I hated the miserably cold winters.
Fast-forward to my twenties.
I did not marry a cowboy! I married a bona fide big-city boy with a rock star mullet. He was a drummer and had never worked in a garden, nor had he ever milked a goat, much less owned one. And to make the deal sweeter, he lived where it was HOT… Phoenix.
But something peculiar happened. Being a person who loves to read and research routinely, I began learning more and more about our conventional food system versus eating organic, unprocessed foods. The more I learned, the more I wanted to grow some of my own food. OUTLANDISH! How could I ever admit to my mother that I wanted to have a garden so that I could ask for advice? I spent over a year researching desert gardening because this was new territory for me. And then, to my own astonishment, I was growing tomatoes, cucumbers, carrots, peas, and beets.
My city-boy husband had a growing aviary system in our backyard with exotic parrots. One pair started laying eggs, but kept breaking them before they could hatch. The solution: buy a bantam hen and have her lay on them. As soon as we got the hen, the parrots stopped laying. But I was suddenly won over by seeing the looks on my kids’ faces every morning when they would bring a chicken egg in the house. Fresh, organic chicken eggs. How cool was that? Wait, did I really say that? But one egg a day isn’t enough for a family of four. I realized that I “needed” more chickens. And by the way, where can I find someone who has a goat so I can get some nutritious milk?
Oh dear, what has happened to me? I’m turning into my mother… and then some!!! I went farther than my mom did. I gave birth to my babies at home in my own bed (with a midwife, of course). I didn’t immunize my babies. And then when they got a little older, I homeschooled those growing kiddos.
But wait! It gets even more strange. I started making my own kombucha, grinding my own wheat for bread, and… maybe I should stop before you think that I plum lost my mind.
Now that you understand where I’m coming from a little bit more, please allow me to say, “Welcome to my blog!”
