If there’s one thing I’ve learned from this meandering journey into adulthood, it’s this: there is simply no way to bypass the stage of being a beginner at something.
A building must be built from the ground up, and a skill must be learned little by little, with patience and persistence, and usually with plenty of mistakes. All babies must slowly grow into children, then to adults, and finally into old, softened and wrinkled grandmas and grandpas. Everyone who is any good at anything was once a beginner, unsure of themselves and unseasoned like new green wood.
This is what I remind myself whenever we launch into a new venture on our homestead. I want to be the kind of person who is always learning, always putting my hands to something new, always looking for ways to enrich this earthly stay of ours. But I’m also the kind of person, to my everlasting frustration, who despises my own inexperience. I have a very hard time being a beginner at something.
One night a few weeks ago, as darkness fell, we brought four young meat rabbits home in dog crates. This is a foray into something new for us, and you can tell. You can tell by the many questions we showered upon the woman who sold us the rabbits, and you can also tell by our recent history on YouTube. You can tell, too, by our excitement. This is the first time we will raise our own meat.
“There are getting to be a lot of animals around here,” said Anthony the next morning. I had come in from checking on our new rabbits. The morning sounds of chickens squawking as they emerged from their coop accompanied my walk across the yard. The dependable orange kitty had just slunk down into the window well for his daily leftovers. Yes, I agreed, it does feel like a lot of animals. As it should be! As we want it to be.
Still, I was surprised how burdened I felt the night before as we unloaded the buns into their shelters. I had begun to realize it, this new responsibility of four more animals. They need me! I thought with a matronly delight. We have had animals here for two years now, but we have never undertaken a husbandry outfit of this kind, with breeding and butchering and moving animals to fresh grass daily. Chickens are one thing. Chickens do not need you. They just need somebody, anybody, to dump the feed and check the water. Now it seems I’ll have to think twice before I jet off to visit my sister down south or hop on a plane to Idaho for a friend’s wedding.
I imagine this feeling is the barest foreshadowing of what it will feel like when a milk cow steps off a trailer onto our property someday. From that moment forward, I’ll be tied to her needs every day, rain or shine, come sickness or health or a fridge overflowing with more milk than we can handle. (I do very much want this.) At the same time, I know this sense of duty and ownership shouldn’t be dismissed just because rabbits are small and don’t make any noise. Life is changing as our homestead is growing, and the more work and attention is required of me, the more I feel I am expanding beyond myself to meet the tasks with grace — the kind of grace that’s necessary when you come face to face with your own inexperience. The kind of grace one ought to keep in steady supply for when they need it themselves.
I could feel my old feelings of ineptitude creeping in, and even a little fear. What if we did something wrong, and these beautiful creatures didn’t make it? The woman we purchased the rabbits from gave us helpful answers to our many questions, but she painted with some broad strokes — “if you keep them on the ground, they’ll get coccidiosis. You can’t feed pure alfalfa pellets.” Perhaps this is just how I heard her. I tend to get things skewed and think I’m being scolded, when usually it’s nothing more than my own insecurity trying to get its two words in.
But my husband, ever level-headed, was all reassurance. “They’re rabbits,” he said to me on our drive home. Rabbits eat grass. They have babies. Surely, we can give these rabbits a good life and a good death.
Isn’t it funny how even though you want responsibility so much, once it’s finally given to you, you feel too small and underqualified? I see this as having been the pattern of my development as a farmer. Riding in guns blazing, armed with all the passion of my agrarian ancestors coursing through my veins, only to be confronted with the news that, oh — I guess I don’t know how to milk out a cow, and I don’t know what age a female rabbit can begin breeding, and I’m not sure why it is my carrots are growing crooked.
I remember how small and, honestly, stupid I felt while learning the ropes at my first dairy job in college. There were too many things to remember, too many proverbial plates to keep spinning at the same time. “You’ll pick it up in no time at all,” my friend told me. “Soon you’ll be training the next person.” At the time, I thought, “that will never, EVER happen.” But a few months later I was showing the next girl how to warm the buckets of milk, throw down the hay from the loft, and stick her finger in the wobbly calf’s mouth before sliding in the bottle nipple.
Farming aside, this is the way it goes in your late teens and twenties. You tend to slosh your way through a lot of things for which you feel completely unqualified. Things like, how do I set up a new bank account? How do I get insurance for my truck? How do I change my residency to a new state? How do I take my husband’s name? So many new tasks in a world you’re just learning to face as your own person. It’s so important for older generations to teach their children and grandchildren basic things like how to follow road signs, how to fill out forms, and how to handle money wisely. If you don’t know these things by the time you strike out on your own, it makes what is already new and unfamiliar territory a lot more intimidating.
We should be passing down traditional skills of subsistence, like managing the home economy, cooking nutritious meals for a family, and producing food from your own land. These things are worth knowing, not only because they greatly enrich a life, but because the time comes in most people’s lifetimes when such things are vital. Beyond food, what of the real treasure of a home — the family? Things like knowing how to manage a family and raise well-behaved children are not innate in us. And always there is that glorious call to love, respect, and encourage one’s spouse, followed by the question of how, or how best — ?
I am deep into all these things right now. My hands are in the soil, evidenced by my unsightly fingernails. My nose is hidden in stacks of books about farming, grazing, childbirth, fermenting, preserving. Sometimes it seems that everything I learn from books, people in my circles, or even just random people on the internet serves to remind me just how much I don’t know yet.
I give full credence to the problem of information overload, especially when it comes to the internet, because I have spent a lot of time in those particular whitewater rapids. Take the resurgence of homesteading and traditional skills, for one. It’s not surprising when somebody who wants to live a more agrarian life tries a few things for themselves, then gives up six months or a year later and goes back to buying eggs at the grocery store. Learning about homesteading from YouTube and Instagram can feel like drinking out of a fire hose. There is such a pull to do it all, and do it all at once, but this is unsustainable.
What is meant as education and inspiration quickly becomes overwhelming. Maybe you are like me, and have fallen into the pit of guilt for not doing everything you see others doing on their land or in their homes. If they are making their own soap, I decide I should be doing it, too. If they mill their own flour, I must do the same, if I am to retain my self-respect. And if they have already moved onto their dream homestead, especially if they are not any older than my husband and I — well, that’s just unfair, and warrants my bitter judgement.
Since leaving Instagram earlier this year, I’ve noticed a lot of this pressure relieved. While the sin of comparison is not something I can blame entirely on an app on the internet, I know that having snapshots of other people’s lives always present in my own mind and home was wreaking havoc on my life. Not only on my contentment with our circumstances, but also on my efforts at learning new things. It sounds contradictory. Shouldn’t having so much information so easily accessed be a tool for learning, not a deterrent? It would seem, at first thought. But anyone who has spent any time on social media knows that the battle between the pros and the cons is not as simple as that. It’s way too easy to become distracted by what someone else has or has accomplished, and before you know it you’ve taken your eyes off your own tasks and goals, opening your mind up to all colors of envy and even judgement.
When it comes to homesteading, these days I read a lot more books. For one thing, reading a book is considering one person’s perspective at a time rather than a host of different personalities on Instagram. Books also need to be consumed in slow, deliberate fashion. I’m learning to ask other folks my questions. Sometimes my questions might sound obvious to the person who has been steeped in animal husbandry, or child-rearing, or preserving all their life, but they’re important things I need to know the answers to if I’m ever going to get where I want to be as an agrarian, as a woman.
I often remember something a farmer friend told my sister and me years ago. We had come to help her butcher chickens, and it was the first time either of us had done it. I was reluctant — or maybe horrified is a more apt term — to reach my hand into the warm cavity of a freshly killed, scalded and plucked chicken. I won’t speak for my sister, but I needed a lot of coaching through that smelly, squawky day. I watched six-year-old Amish children placidly snipping the feet off the dead chickens, expressions serene, and felt like all my street creds were entirely useless.
But our new friend, a confident, intelligent female farmer, understood that people are not born knowing everything. “You don’t know what you don’t know,” she said, “until you know it.”
There’s a lot of grace in acknowledging that simple fact. Especially for the young homesteader who feels there isn’t enough time to learn all the things there are to learn, or that this current property can’t handle all the things you wish you could do. Perhaps you aren’t ready yet, for the responsibility or for the blessing. One thing at a time. Don’t despise your humble first efforts.
A few weeks ago, we visited my cousin and his wife and their three-day-old baby girl. Whenever I’m around a new mother, I can’t help but put myself in her shoes. I realize this isn’t the most helpful thing to do when visiting a new mother, but I kept my thoughts quietly to myself while I held their sweet, still splotchy newborn. My sister, mother of two, gave helpful advice about nursing while her own eight-month-old wiggled happily on the soft carpet at our feet.
I looked down my chin at the baby in my arms and imagined how I would feel if she were my responsibility. “Feeding a baby is easy,” I heard a little girl at our church say to a little boy. No doubt she has considerable knowledge about this, being one of seven herself. But here was a baby girl just learning how to nurse, fussing her way through her first few days, and just not having it right now. Maybe not so easy after all, not when you are the new mother and nervous about doing the right thing.
How would I ever sleep, I thought, knowing she might wake up at any moment and need me? How could I ever put her down, this jelly-like bundle that feels as if it will fold in half if I don’t hold her steady? Surely it’s true, that life is never the same after you go from a family of two to a family of three. You have to be so much more than just yourself; you have to be a little baby’s mother, before she even knows she needs one, and before you really know how to do it. Now that, I thought, is a lot of responsibility.
I had never thought much about mothering a newborn until my sister had her first baby three years ago, and I drove down to their tiny cabin in the mountains to help out for a few days. I remember holding him during the night and setting alarms on my phone to wake up and change shifts to help my sister lift the baby to nurse him in bed. It was the kind of night where you’re always getting close to sleep, but you never quite let yourself be overtaken, partly because you know you’ll be needed again in another hour or two and partly because you’re too wonderstruck by the new little life in your arms to think of sleep as a worthwhile pastime. I was so tired — though probably not nearly as tired as the rest of them in that house — but I couldn’t stop staring at his rosebud mouth, his button nose, and his little curled fingers. A real live person.
My thoughts had drifted from the wrinkled newborn sleeping in my arms, so perfect and so perfectly in need, over to my sourdough starter in a jar on their kitchen counter. Carried in my basket all the way from Ohio, that sourdough starter was the only thing I needed to keep alive. There were hundreds of animals back on the farm that depended on me, but it wasn’t the same thing. I was not their sole caretaker. The only thing that was really my responsibility was that little sourdough starter. A small thing, but a living thing, nonetheless.
How small our lives start out! What wide leaps we take over chasms of inexperience. Is there any way to prepare for such responsibility as mothering? Maybe, as silly as it sounds, I thought, I was preparing even then in my humble way. Still, I trembled to think of entering into something so sacred, so taxing, so staggering as motherhood with only my limited experience to draw from. Inexperience was more like it, since nobody can know how it feels to be a mother before it happens. But you can “mother” things. Does this help prepare you? I think it does. I also have an inkling that the everyday mercies of God are a big part of it.
“One who is faithful in a very little is also faithful in much…” — Luke 16:10
And so our little homestead expands to welcome these four little strangers. It can be called a homestead, I realized, and rightly so. The land we have to work isn’t much, and our animals are relatively few. I still have many, many books to read and questions to ask. It’s certainly still in the humble beginnings stage, but I can’t overlook the abundance this place has given us, nor the work that has been put into it. I think to do so would be ingratitude — ingratitude to God for giving us this place to live, and to my husband for how hard he works to make it a home fit for his wife.
Every year our garden produces a little more. My love keeps the berry bushes pruned, and they generously offer us their best, if we are willing to brave the briars. Eight chickens give us eggs as often as they feel like it. With the arrival of rabbits, we will soon have an independent source of meat. There is still a little jar of sourdough starter on the kitchen counter, teaching me consistency over days, and weeks, and years, and reminding me to take good care of what’s mine.
“For whoever has despised the day of small things shall rejoice…” - Zechariah 4:10
So much wisdom here, thank you!