Out of the fire I will arise like a phoenix, my soal cleansed by the flames.
If I hadn't got knocked up, I probably never would have married a farmer...It was not something I had ever thought of becoming. I probably would have moved back to BC with my parents and went back to school. But I did marry a farmer and have been a slave to it ever since. If you get the impression that I hate farming you would be correct. I never realized until lately just how much I hated it. Perhaps if we could find balance, but we haven't. The scales tip in favour of the farm verses self. There does not seem to be one bit of my life that is not ruled by the farm. I know you are shaking your head right now but let me explain...You see.. I took to farming like a duck to water...I was always an outdoors kinda girl, and tomboy really. I like fresh air, birds, trees and animals so it should have been an easy fit. Farming in itself was only part of the problem but its lifestyle paired with my type A personality and being an overachiever had set me up for a miserable life of choices I wished I could make again, because I believe I would chose differently now knowing what I know.
My parents moved back to BC the day after my wedding, and I was 18, pregnant and married to a man 23 years older than me. I knew no one and my mother in law, disliked me, I was not the type of girl she wanted her 42 yr old Ukrainian son to marry. I didn't speak Ukrainian, I didn't know how to cook (other than toast and eggs), I didn't know how to garden or drive.... She constantly spoke in Ukrainian in front of me to him and he argued back....and so between the two of them I was molded into the perfect little slave girl.....and I worked very hard to learn it all, because I thought he would be happier about being married to me (because he was sorry after awhile that he had) and I thought that his mother may come to like me if I became more like her...so I learned to speak Ukrainian to a fashion. During that first pregnancy, I learned to put in a garden, raised 300 broiler chickens, learned how to drive not only a standard shift grain truck, pickup truck and tractor but mowed 5 acres of lawn, learned to cook, embroider, crochet and knit as well, we milked ten cows (I managed 3 he did the rest) I fed 150 pigs and helped clean the barn with a shovel...I am surprised that my first son wasn't born with a pitch fork in his hand. Our tractors had no cabs so when our son was born in early Sept. within a week I had him in a snugly chair in the truck and pulled a single side hay rake behind while we went around and around the hay field turning the hay so it would dry. I was exhausted by the end of the day and when the baby woke during the night I was the only one who got up...my husband would roll over and shake me and say "baby's crying". I wasn't breast feeding due to an infection while in the hospital after the Cesarean, so he could have gave the bottle but that wasn't his "thing". I had three pregnancies in my life, my first son, a miscarriage and then my second son.
As time went on, I felt the need to prove my worth. I felt my position was precarious and I never felt completely secure. That home was to become the one place in my life up until then that I had lived in the longest. I worked so hard, to be what he wanted me to be, but it kept changing. I tried to behave older, because he was, dressed like a middle aged woman instead of a young one, did things the way his mother had because that's how he liked them done. I picked rocks in the field until my nose bled and my legs cramped all night long and would be back out there the next day picking again...and the one thing about rocks is that you never get rid of them...the frost just keeps pushing more out of the ground every year. My hands would be so stiff I couldn't straighten my fingers out for days. But it was a choice I made. I had to be the best farmers wife I could so that he would let me stay and love me more....I made myself indispensable. I later regretted that. Because I was forced to make a choice, be the perfect helpmate or the perfect mommy. I chose wrongly. I know it for a fact. How stupidly I threw away my sons needs. I chose to be in the field working, doing jobs that would have got done without me. My son spent a lot of time by himself. Time that I should have spent with him teaching him and sharing experiences with him. So I cheated him and myself and now in my later years I regret that very much. The farm work was never done, will never be done but it continues to consume my life. It sucks the very soul from me.
I wasted my sons childhood, working cattle and driving tractor, I will never get that back and the farm work is still here...the same work every year. My second sons short life is a foggy memory for me because I was so overwhelmed with work, an 18 month old toddler, a sick new baby, a garden to seed, chickens to raise cows to milk, pigs to feed, a husband to feed, laundry, cleaning, shopping, helping in the field, working the cattle, calving cows, and trying to find time to sleep. I was ill, after the second Cesarean and tubal ligation. Bled for over a year straight before they did 5 D&C's in one year. But the farm still demanded its share of my life. And then my baby was gone and life took an even sharper turn for the worse. I was expected to do more and more of the work, my husband was drowning his unhappiness with a bottle. He told me numerous times that I wasn't the woman he had really wanted to marry. But that she was already married....I spent years wondering who she was...if we actually socialized with her and her husband and I just never knew it. I slaved for nearly 17 years on that farm and felt I had a vested interest in it...after all I had devoted my life to its betterment. Thought I had earned my keep and contributed to our families livelihood. But I was constantly told that when he turned 65 he was going to sell it all and then he would ask me what I was going to do for money......my name was not on any of the land, I didn't even have my own bank account....One year, I had three jobs at once besides the farm work...I worked at the drive in theatre for our neighbours, I was the janitor and maintenance person for our local community hall and I was chambermaid at a motel in town. The money I earned I had to use for my sons school things, clothes, and incidental things for the house...if I needed bigger amounts of money for anything, like my chickens or my lawn mowers I had to ask him for it and many was the time I was told we didn't have it, only to watch him go to town for an evening with his buddies, come home with the latest playboy and hustler magazine and a carton of cigarettes. He went on trips to Mexico and Vegas with his friends and sister and family, while my son and I stayed home because he had school and someone had to look after the cows. When he drank he would take our son in a head lock and force him to look at me while I drove us home from some place...and say, your mother is a stupid bitch, she doesn't know a god damned thing, she's fat and ugly. I hated him. By the time he died, I hated him and my son was just like him, mean and disrespectful. Once on the way home from his sisters, a 3 hour drive away, in the winter with his mother in the back seat of our car....he started a fight while he was drunk and tried to steer the car in the ditch, when I swore at him and told him to stop, he punched me in the side of the head and then took the keys out of the ignition while the car was still hurtling down the highway at 100km per hour and threw them out the window. The steering locked up and we nearly rolled. I turned in my seat and started hitting him, and when I was straddling him on his seat I shoved my finger in his face and spit out "if you ever do something that f'ing stupid again when my son was in the car I'll kill you, you bastard". His mother and our son were crying in the back seat...and I got out and walked to the back of the car....I was so angry I could barely breath...I cried and I was shaking....but eventually I got back in and asked my mother in law to pass me my purse...I reached inside for my own set of keys and finished driving home....I dropped my mother in law off at her house in town and asked her to keep my son for the night...he was 9. I drove to the farm and parked the car in the garage....my husband had passed out again so I left him there...I took his lighter and the keys out of the car...rolled the window down so he would get some heat from the garage furnace and went inside....sometime during the night he staggered inside and turned on the overhead light, grabbed me by my hair, my little dog defended me and bit him, after he dozed off again I took my dog and slept in the car myself... That was what my life was like.... I had no friends, they were all his friends from before he met me....I never had time to make friends. My family all lived in another province and I was totally alone.
But he died, without my name on anything it all had to go through probate, he had no life insurance or credit insurance but lots of debt....I had to sell half the purebred herd to pay it off, when the bank called the loan because I had no credit rating and they did not think I could keep the farm going.
My Dad wanted me to sell and move to the coast...and I probably should have...but I wouldn't have met R then and that would have been a great loss. Although he is also a farmer and I am still enslaved to the farm.
Farm work is never done, it doesn't pay well anymore and there are so many more things to go wrong. It consumes you if you let it, and we have. I hate the farm...
I see people who work for a wage and they have a life, go places, visit, leisure time. We just have work....the farm and more work and I feel like I will die here, working. As long as I live on the farm I will feel compelled to work, it is part of my DNA now...and as much as I have grown, learned and absorbed I am still that kid trying to win my place in the world, earn my keep, show my worth and earn love. When R suggested hiring the neighbours son to help him work the calves, it sent me into a tail spin....that I would be so easily replaced, when I am not able to perform my duties...childish I know, but it is how I felt. That I was not indispensible after all. A host of long buried feelings came to light with that announcement. Things I thought I had dealt with years ago or perhaps had hoped to never have to deal with. Ridiculous of course, but you feel what you feel. Reason with yourself all you want but the phsyci is a funny thing. I can't do the work but I won't give up my place. As long as I live on the farm I will feel the need to do the work, even though it will slowly kill me. Stress is my biggest enemy. I used to handle the stress better but with my spirit at low ebb, I am in jeopardy.
When i met R I owned my own farm, my name finally on the titles. I made the decisions, good or bad. But after a year of driving back and forth from his place to mine, we both got sick and run down and I was asked by him and his mother to sell and move to their place....and sadly I did. I gave up the home I had made my own, the home I had lived in for the longest of my whole life til then. I had a farm sale, emptied the house and when I walked through it for the last time, the house where my children were raised and where I my self had grown up, my feet echoing on the hardwood floors, I cried. For I did not know what I was moving toward, or perhaps I did, more farming, a mother and father in law that looked down their nose at me and my son, I felt like a tresspasser, and although I had been promised that my name would be put on the land titles of their farm to compensate for giving up mine...it didn't happen until they both passed away....All those years they just came making excuses....I know they thought R and I wouldn't stay together...and one of the reasons they gave for not making the changes was my son....my father in law once said to me " your son is like an indian he used to have work for him, you shouldn't pay him until the job is done, or you'll never see him again". R did argue with them that they had promised, but that is as far as he ever took it, trying to avoid unpleasantness....
I know about compromise. I always compromise.
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