Comments on: Share Your Story

By: shannon

shannon — Fri, 08 Apr 2011 21:54:42 +0000

Rebecca – Your adventure sounds marvelous. I’m so happy for you! sh

By: Rebecca

Rebecca — Fri, 08 Apr 2011 10:48:15 +0000

I just finished reading the book, and it’s exactly what I am looking for. Probably, I am much older than most of you. I am 57 and divorced. However, 2 years ago, I made my house into a co-op house, where I practice cooperative living with other housemates–my son, his fiance, and two friends of my son. We are growing our own food: a little last year, a lot more this year. We are in a location where we can bicycle or walk to the store, the farmers market, the library, the park, to the museums; and most of us belong to various community groups. I am a writer, so I am plugged in to a writing group, a small literary press, and several book groups.

This year, we are looking for land–probably on the outskirts of Houston–although we have friends who are “homesteading” land within the city. They found land at a city auction and just had to pay the back taxes. We also have a mayor who is willing to let groups of people use abandoned land for community gardens and other public uses. So we have other friends who run a large community garden called “The Last Organic Outpost.”

My new adventure is that I am planning to leave my position as a senior English teacher and writing coordinator at a large International Baccalaureate high school . I have worked out a budget that I can live on (and still save money!); and I only need to make one-third the salary that I make now. I am nervous and anxious about this plan (on the negative side) . . . but on the positive side, I am excited. I already have an interview to teach college classes as an adjunct; and I have a lead on a steady part-time job at Whole Foods. If all works out well, I will have more time to spend on radical homemaking and writing (I’m a poet with several publications out).

In the co-op group I’m in, I have already taught some of my group what I know about canning, cooking, and sewing. And I am learning from others more about successful gardening in the subtropics, fixing “stuff,” and drying food.

It’s a late in life adventure and quite rewarding.

By: Zionsville Dentist

Zionsville Dentist — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 19:44:03 +0000

I’ve begun reading your book as I have (and have had for a while) a nagging senszation that a life full of modern conveniences masks the reality of what life really can be about. My husband and I have planned our first vegetable garden and are starting a small compost pile. While it may be a few years before we start raising chickens and goats (gotta ease into these things, you know) I’m looking forward to a transitional period in my life this growing season.

By: Lindsey Brother

Lindsey Brother — Fri, 01 Apr 2011 22:31:11 +0000

We’ve just bought a new home and in an attempt to ‘scale back our lives’ we’re growing vegetables and looking to live a more modest sustainable and green lifestyle. A friend recommended your book (so it’s on order from Amazon).

I think (and hope) that after years chasing, chasing, chasing we’ll be able to ‘just be’ and live with less stress and a guilt free conscious!

Can’t wait for the book to ship!

By: Michael

Michael — Fri, 01 Apr 2011 20:15:05 +0000

What fun reading these comments! Kelly said, “my husband has hated his corporate job for years & we’re now trying to figure out how to ditch it. this feels unbelievably exciting & totally terrifying @ the same time. i hope your book will give me some courage to continue this journey.”

I can relate to that in a big way. While I have yet to summon the courage to totally break away from the “rat race” I do find our little 6 acre “hobby farm” a pleasant and effective distraction from the artificiality of the corporate world. Caring for the horses, mowing lots of grass, preparing meals from food we grew ourselves–it’s the perfect antidote. I’m hoping to muster the courage to cut the evil umbilical and return to sanity full-time by the end of the summer. Thanks to all of you for your inspiring comments!

By: Angie

Angie — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 03:27:58 +0000

First, Shannon, let me say I LOVE your book. I got it from the library and finished it in a couple of days. Now my husband is halfway through and is already talking about buying a couple of copies – one to lend out to friends and one to give to our family (as a means of explanation).

Here’s our story. Matt and I have been married for 6 years. In that time we’ve picked up a lot of “hobbies” – sewing, crochet, knitting, woodworking, gardening, preserving, wine making, beer making, cheese making, bread making, and yogurt making. (For a while I joked that our hobby was collecting hobbies.) We’ve also become very interested in “food issues”. We cook most of our meals from scratch. Food that we don’t produce (like meat) are bought straight from farmers or from our food cooperative. In the past year I have also joined the board of our food coop and we have joined a maple syrup coop (a coop that joins together for the sake of building community through the shared work of making and enjoying maple syrup). Eventually we realized that what we were really striving for is something more akin to homesteading but with the limitation that we live in a townhome that we don’t own.

In this same time we’ve also been struggling with making this lifestyle work with our careers – with my career, actually. I am a PhD student who would be looking at an academic career. As Shannon and others here have already pointed out being an academic looks great from the outside but when you’re in the middle of it you realize what you have to give up – namely, a lifestyle we can’t bear to give up and all those things that give us quality of life, like time to spend with family and friends. I’ve spent almost my whole time in graduate school seriously torn about what to do. I couldn’t see how to make this lifestyle work with my career and yet I also couldn’t bring myself to give it up. For his part, Matt has been walking a fine line. He has been amazingly supportive – giving me the time to figure out what I want and pushing me to not give up simply because I’m stressed – even though he has wanted this simpler lifestyle from the beginning.

The last year and a half has really solidified our position though. We had our first child (now 11 months, where did the time go?) and had no less than 6 deaths in the family – most recently my mother. Several things happened. 1)Our quality of life went out the door. 2) We found ourselves compromising our beliefs. (Who has time for home-cooked, organic meals when you’re juggling two 50+ hour work weeks and a small child, while dropping everything and driving across the county every two months for a funeral?) And 3) we got serious about reconsidering what we want our future to looks like. So now I’m on a leave of absense while we take time to regroup and decide what we want. Although we are making ourselves wait to make the final stay-or-quit decision, we are also seriously trying to figure out how we move ourselves to be full-time radical homemakers.

This book has really helped us formulate what we want and has given us confidence that it can be achieved. We’re just not sure how to get there. If any of you are still reading this, I would love to hear how you made the switch. If you don’t live near family, don’t have family land and support, and have only modest savings how do you get a homestead, build a community, and leave the “regular” workforce?

By: jenuineyoga

jenuineyoga — Wed, 12 Jan 2011 12:50:51 +0000

RuralAspirations: Thank you for this post. I didn’t go for far into a career (I stood on the brink of more schooling and backed out), but our realizations are parallel: being home is as good (and better) than being “out there.” Your blogs are full of books and references I have recently found (Ken Robinson, Grace Llewelyn), so it’s like reviewing my own process over the past year. I’m a new homeschooler (late 2010), learning to knit, and living in a small town suburb. If I lived anywhere near you, I would love to visit and pick your brain. Thank you for blogging!

By: RuralAspirations

RuralAspirations — Tue, 11 Jan 2011 06:42:11 +0000

Hello Shannon. I was thrilled to hear about your book as it describes my life and values to a tee. I have a PhD and was on a great career track as a research scientist when I had children and quickly realized that their time with me would be short and I wanted to make the most of it. I left my career to devote myself to mothering and homemaking. After living in big cities for a while my husband and I formulated a plan to buy some land and start a small homestead. I needed to learn how to be frugal, and in doing so discovered the philosophy of Simple Living. We fulfilled our dream last year and now own 4 acres of land which we are slowly turning into a homestead. I learned the joy of making bread and cooking healthy meals from scratch. I knit, garden, and enjoy long forest walks with my dog and my kids. I have found an immense sort of fulfillment in being a homemaker and mother to my homeschooled children, more so than I did with my career. Though I loved science, I felt that being with my children and creating a loving, healthy home for my family was deeply worthwhile in a way my career could never be. It was wonderful to see your book and know that there are so many others out there doing the same thing. I think perhaps women had to take back their right to career and all the trappings of success before we could truly appreciate the deep peace and joy that comes from being a homemaker.

By: Margaret Albee

Margaret Albee — Sun, 19 Dec 2010 23:54:49 +0000

Dear Shannon and so many others!
I am only 46 pages into your book, which was recommended to me by a friend who knew what I was fighting for. I absolutely love it! I cannot tell you how many times I have said out loud, “Hallelujah!” because finally someone was speaking the exact words I have been trying to articulate to my friends and family and partner for years, and honestly, most recently to myself…I have been trying to re-convince myself that what I wanted and what I was striving for was good and right and enough, because I had been pushed off the road so many times. I keep thinking, I will write to you when I finish the book, but I just can’t wait, though I am eager to hear what you have to say (I hope something) about the radical homemakers who are trying to figure it out on their own as single moms.
Here is my story in a nutshell, and I would love to elaborate further later:
I am 28 years old. I left college at 22, with two years under my belt and a lot of traveling in the middle. I couldn’t see my way clear to spending over a hundred thousand dollars on an education, so that I could have a career and hire a nanny (which I had been for years) when I knew what I truly wanted was to be a mom and a farmer and a writer and a radical homemaker (I just didn’t have such a wonderful term for it then!) I really had no idea how I would work the logistics out, especially financially, but I figured I had a good start with a boyfriend who was going on to medical school. So we moved onto my parents land and put up a tipi. Pretty soon, it became clear that the medschool bound boyfriend actually wasn’t at all supportive of my plans (he didn’t want to be the sole bread winner, and didn’t count growing and making the bread and children as contributing, he was embarrassed by my “lack” of education and career plans, him coming from a family where everyone has a PHD and no one stays home with the children, and he basically thought children were better off in daycare as soon as you could get them there, say nothing of having the time to grow and cook your own food! Well, we didn’t have time to sort out these differences of opinion because by the age of 23 I was pregnant. I fought tooth and nail to stay home with our daughter. He had a meager income while also fulfilling his pre-med studies, but I insisted that we could get by with one little car (for him, not me), the heat turned way down and a very simple life, with a little help from my family. The trade-off for my being a stay-at-home mom, was that I had to leave my family’s land where I was going to farm, move into the city and live an apartment in a 5-story building with no “outdoors”, be without a car, and get absolutely no help on the home front. Since I was home all day, my partner would not lift a finger when he arrived home for anything domestic or childcare related. The message was I asked for a fifties life, and I got one. He earned the money, and shouldn’t be expected to do anything else, while I was just home all day “playing and getting together with my friends”. He didn’t appreciate any part of my homemaking – not the nursing and taking care of our daughter, not the wholesome food, not the cozy house, not the fact that he wasn’t paying for childcare, nothing. When our daughter was two and a half, I was pushed to go back to school, so that I could “start to contribute to our family.” He didn’t pick up the pieces – our meals fell apart all too often because I didn’t have time, our house was a mess, our daughter was in daycare. I hated being in school. I did it for two years to finish He wouldn’t marry me without a degree, even though i still planned to be a full-time mom and farmer. I was terrified to lose his financial support, even though he didn’t give it without a price, and even though it wasn’t much yet, I knew his eventual doctor’s salary would support my homesteading. I was sort of a wannabe radical homemaker trapped in a Betty Friedan domestic drama. With half a year left of my degree, my daughter’s father left, devastating to me, but I know in the end a blessing in disguise because our values are so different. In our relationship, my values and my certainty that someone had to take care of home and community, as you said, and try to change the world from the deep insides out, were all but crushed. I did, though, get my degree in Sustainability Studies and Community and International Development, focusing on sustainable agriculture and entrepreneurship. I have returned to being home with my daughter, now 4 1/2, almost full-time (her father is now in medical school and fairly MIA both physically and financially), and I work on a farm for food barter 2 days a week. I am much happier again, to be fulfilling what I feel is the most important job in the world, taking care of a little one and making her feel loved and nourished body and soul, teaching her about taking care of the earth. Though I am scraping by, not without help from my family, that old community support that I feel is so important and cyclical, and people so don’t want anymore. I am now trying to rethink my homesteading plans to also bring in some money, with some food sales and food and farm and self-reliance education (bed and breakfast style homesteading vacations…) I am looking for property to buy with my mother, and striving to keep my passion alive this time, and stay true to my goal of being fully present for my daughter while I build our life, while I provide for us more with my labors than with my money. Your book is truly proving to reawaken my spirit, and breath a sigh of relief into me that I am not alone in what so many think are crazy backwards thoughts, despite the fact that I think women like me are providing such strong and positive role models for our daughters. I hope as I read on, I will discover some stories of single moms who have figured out ways to do it themselves without that other person earning at least some income, because that is definitely the road block sitting on my shoulder so often, saying, you just can’t do this alone. And I hope to tell you more of my story as I rebuild my life to be a truly radical homemaker, as I search for land, start my farm, and try to figure out how to make ends meet, put my daughter through a nurturing school, and really be there for her as the only parent who really is.
Thank you so much for sharing your wisdom and care with so many people like me, and hopefully some who weren’t brave enough to go against the modern grain.
Meg in Vermont

By: Mario

Mario — Sun, 24 Oct 2010 15:53:14 +0000

Fabulous book. Well written and superbly researched. As a board member of the Northeast Organic Farming Association in New Hampshire, and a rural farmer and [male] homemaker, I’m anxious to get you to NH to speak and share your wisdom.