We call it her men-strual cycle. Every six to eight weeks, Saoirse sets aside Mordecai (her cat), her novels, her school books, her 18th century Italian gown that she’s hand-stitching. She goes online and starts sifting through her dating offers, filtering out anyone who shows a predilection for desecrating their coffee by contaminating it with sugary syrups until it turns into a big slurpee. With what’s left, she starts a few online conversations, then decides who to go and meet, provided it doesn’t interfere with the farm, the cafe, or her singing lessons. She cycles through a few rounds of dating, then brings home stories, but no men. She doesn’t like too many premature attachments to form between our family and her suitors. If pressure emerges to take the relationship further, she friend-zones them. If the man can exist there, she periodically makes time to see them. If they protest and push against her boundaries, she is surgical in the separation.
And then she returns home to Mordecai, her novels, her coursework, and her 18th century Italian gown that she’s hand-stitching. Until the men-strual cycle begins again.
We are currently in the middle of fresh cycle. And while she doesn’t permit me to meet these characters, she does let me look at their online profiles. She holds the phone at a distance where I can see if I squint. I’m not permitted hold the device, or to swipe or scroll. I have a tendency to fumble with the apps, inadvertently dismissing promising candidates.
It has become our ritual to meet over a pot of French press beside Panther Creek once a week after chores, pushing aside the meat deliveries, the cafe prep, the bookkeeping. We talk about her latest adventures, scroll through her current prospects, and scan profile photos for evidence of big slurpees and desecrated coffee.
This week, she pauses in her conversation and watches the water of the creek flow by. “Mom,” she finally says. “Would you say I’m naive?”
Intentional, yes. Not naive.
“What about innocent? Or sheltered?”
“Where is this coming from? Are these men saying this to you? Because that sounds AWFULLY pejorative. They don’t have the first clue about how you live!”
“They’re not saying that, exactly…” She chooses her words carefully. “But there are little things to suggest that’s what they think.” She endures casual slights, disguised as flirtatious charm, about being rural, about being a farm girl, about being home-schooled, about working in a family business, about preferring to go home alone at the end of a date.
We laugh it off. I tell her how I used to be able to date men at college, and we’d seem completely compatible on a university campus. Then the first weekend they came home to the farm with me, I was done with them. They could seem intelligent and competant in an academic setting, but get them on the farm and watch them nearly faint when a ewe passes her placenta and a farm dog carries it off to eat it.
The casual slights say more about them than they do about her, I argue. “We are less than 2 percent of the population,” I remind her. “You’re not naive, you’re not sheltered. You’re from a different culture.”
She is able to leave the issue behind with the coffee grounds, and head down to the valley to make her deliveries. I am not.
In my lifetime, I have seen farmers go from heroes to zeroes and back again. It’s another cycle, just like the men-strual cycle, only stretched out by the years.
When I started kindergarten, farmers were still on the school boards. The school cafeteria had only recently begun using processed foods instead of preparing lunches from fresh produce that would be dropped off by the district farmers each week. We really were the backbone of the community.
Within a few years, the ag crisis was running strong, and farm kids were mocked in the school, whether or not the smell of the family business followed them onto the bus. They were assigned classes based on their father’s vocations. I remember being shocked in middle school when I was suddenly separated from all my college-bound classmates and moved to a separate classroom attached to the school’s mechanics wing, along with the other farm kids and the kids with behavioral disorders. The fumes from the attached garage permeated the room, making me physically sick each day. I longed to separate myself from the stigma, while a sense of rage and indignation took root inside me.
Those confusing feelings wound up defining my academic path. I studied what happens in communities that causes them to lose their farmers. I worked at identifying ways to heal my culture and help create a positive future.
Bob and I became part of a groundswell of idealists, speaking about the power of farms, the importance of small-scale agriculture.
We went from zeroes back to heroes again. It seemed like every glossy magazine and national newspaper caught the fever. There was a new crop of young folks ready to make a life on the land once more.
…Until the money got too tight, or the isolation got to be too much, or the physical strain of the labor became too great, or the marriage couldn’t hold up under the stress.
Bob and I saw that, to make it in farming, we had to protect our culture and buffer our family from the 6 disastrous IB’s of farming: Injury, Illness and Isolation, and Burnout, Bankruptcy and Break-ups. It’s not enough to teach a kid to pull weeds or drive a tractor. We felt our children had to learn a completely different way of engaging with the world. They needed to understand the importance of nutrition to fight illness. They needed to understand the power and significance of rest and play to fight the injuries and burnout and breakups. They needed to learn to engage with the public to fight isolation. They needed a completely different understanding of wealth to counter the threat of bankruptcy. We taught them that wealth and well-being literally comes from the ground up. It begins with healthy soil and livestock, clear water, nourishing food on their plates, and hands and hearts.
We had to teach them a different definition of success. It isn’t about the score on a test or the grade in a class or the prestige of the college or the title of the job. It’s about showing up to talk it out after an argument; about saying I love you each night and not going to bed angry. It’s about choosing what you want to learn and finding the resources to help you learn it, whether that’s castrating pigs, training donkeys, or hand-sewing an 18th century Italian gown. It’s about being part of a team that helps the ewe have her lamb, makes sure the sow is comfortable when she farrows, gets the turkeys processed or gets the sausage made or gets the customers their food.
Did we shelter them? Did we isolate them?
Or did we raise our daughters to thrive in a culture that has historically been failed by conventional society and economics?
As much as I’d like to answer this question, I cannot.
Bob and I made our choice. We did the best we could with the information we had.
Saoirse and Ula now must look at the world and decide where they will stand in it. They will be the judges of our choices.
I have my suspicions about how it will play out. Sooner or later, the pejorative comments will melt away to understanding. Someone will care enough to want to know more about her way of life. That special someone may not be willing to drink their coffee black, but they will be a true friend to my daughter, helping her to grow in ways she never dreamed possible.
But until that time, I am certain of a few things. She has Mordecai the cat. She has her novels. She has her 18th century Italian gown to work on. She has a family that is crazy in love with her. And she’s a happy young woman. Call that naive or innocent or sheltered, if you like. I call it rare.
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