lifestyle: priorities

A young wife and mother wrote us a long email asking about our lifestyle and how we prioritized; we pass on our answer here, for other young families who might have similar questions:

Hi, B--,

These are fairly comprehensive questions -- you are really asking, 'How can this be done?'

We always wanted this -- to live in the country, to grow our own food, to work together as a family, to acquire real skills so that we could serve ourselves and others directly.

I think on the 'about' page of our website, onecowrevolution, we go into this desire at more length.

We both graduated from the University of Dallas, Shawn 3 years ahead of me.  He gave up a promising career in professional theatre to marry, and took a job in sports field maintenance -- he always loved tractors.  But we wanted our place in the country -- that desire was always there -- so in order to have a job that gave him his summers off, he went back to grad school and got his MFA in drama so he could teach.  He taught drama on the university level for 25 years.

Always our income was very small -- a good thing, because one's 'needs' are pretty strictly limited by one's income, and we never got expensive habits.  We lived on beans and rice for the first ten years of our marriage; only in the industrialized world can we consider that poverty.  

We searched for land and learned that no one gives away a nice house or nice land for a low price.  We needed a low price, so that we weren't shackled by a big mortgage.

That ruled out 'nice' land and houses.  Okay, then we had to look at trashy land and houses.  We thought we had found the one that would do, were ready to sign, and then lost it to a real estate agent's oversight.  After some months of dejection, we continued to look.  Eventually we found a house and land that were absolutely nothing like what we wanted -- small, very damaged house, steep, unusable land -- but the price was peanuts.  We really, really wanted out of the city, so we bought it.  We thought we'd fix it up for a couple of years, sell it at a considerable profit, and buy a 'real' farm.

We made gardens on the few flat places with sunlight on them.  We got goats to eat the briars, and milked the goats.  Shawn and the older children (ten and under) did things I couldn't do with a small baby; I did all I could, within the limitations.  We got chickens.

It was our lifestyle.  In the summers we had projects, building things, teaching ourselves skills -- canning, butchering, making hay by hand, making butter and cheese.  Shawn and the boys added on to the house -- nothing fancy, but they taught themselves carpentry, some plumbing and electrical work.  Some of it was rough work, but the house is beautiful and genuine.  We had more babies.

I helped all I could, but most of my work was in the house -- meals, laundry, homeschooling, nursing, diapers.  Shawn and the older children got most of the chores done.  In the summers I canned things and got some gardening time.  I taught the boys to do housework so I could get some outside work done; they liked having some quiet, inside chores, so that worked.  Their wives thank me now.

We lived with God's earth around us, and it taught us a lot of things; it taught us, importantly, to expect that natural systems work, and that human interference/improvements should be used cautiously.  When we got the use of 3 acres of neighboring land -- steep, rocky, weedy -- we added a Jersey cow to the dairy goats, and finally we had 1) milk we really liked, and 2) lots and lots of it.  When we realized that cows can eat just grass, and the pasture can get better every year from her grazing, the pieces of the puzzle were clicking into place:  all life energy is sunlight, grass is just solar energy turned into cow food, cows grazed properly will improve a pasture year after year, so beef and milk are free, and there's enough milk to feed all the people plus a pig and some chickens.  God's world works; if we honor the nature of His creation, we can live a different and harmonious life.  Still suffering, still having things go wrong, but different things, things that make some kind of sense, and we know that nature is pulling on our side.  When the last baby weaned, I got to move up to half-time farmer.  I taught the 12-year-old daughter some cooking skills and took over the evening milking; I took over the day-to-day grass management.  I love being a mom; I love being a farmer. 

We definitely redefined what 'home education' looks like, but it hasn't stopped the children succeeding academically when they reached university. They are all brighter and better educated than I am. The ones who wanted to go to grad school, went.

Answer to your questions:

How do we homestead with a small, rough house and poor land, eight children, a low-income job, and homeschool at the same time?  Priorities, partly; it was what we wanted to do. We just kept striking other things off the list of 'necessary', we redefined a lot of things:  how much house we needed, what it needed to look like, how we needed to dress, what does home education really look like, what kind of activities we and our children 'deserved' (sports, vacations, trips to town).  We don't miss those things.  The children who are grown live simply still, so they weren't just waiting to get away.  Two have small farms nearby; the others all say they intend to have land in the country before long, somewhere at least to raise beef for themselves.  They love to come home.

I guess from my perspective -- the farm mom -- our life was built largely by Shawn's very great involvement in our children's lives.  He hated academe, but he taught so he could be home in the summers with his kids.  He worked with them, taught them skills, handed them the tools as soon as they were big enough to handle them.  He praised kid work and didn't hanker after perfection.  He supported my commitment to breastfeeding and didn't complain that he was pulling the lion's share of the work outside.  He ate what the farm produced and what I could cook with it, and didn't tell me he'd rather have city food cooked by someone with a gift for cooking.  He didn't complain about my housekeeping.  He put money into tools; he drove ugly cars.  He prioritized daily mass, family rosary, evening prayers -- not as a sine qua non; we're a family, not a religious community, and there were seasons when small children and daily mass were a difficult fit --but as a desideratum always.  

We have never had a television; we do watch some movies, too many, probably, but screens form a very small part of our day, except when we are writing.

We have been very richly blessed, yes; but the greatest blessings come from learning how God is taking care of us all the time -- the world works, God made it as a good home for Man, we can be friends with, stewards of, students of, benevolent masters of, assiduous servants of, His earth, and it will feed us and give us a home.

Don't know if this helps.

Many blessings on your search for land in PA; it's a beautiful place.