April: Growing Pains

April: Growing Pains

I’ve referred to the births of our family and Foxhole as synchronous experiences.  These past three years Rich and I have poured ourselves into two interwoven ventures…so much life and dependency and new energy and exhaustion.  Those same times that parents speak of…losing themselves in the beginning, very active phase of parenting AND savoring the immense revelation of something coming to life…can also be applied to creating a business/lifestyle of our own.

May and Jack are unfolding and finding themselves at the doorsteps of various rites of passage.  May can now use a knife for goodness sake.  And it’s easy to forget about ourselves…but we are too.  Becoming parents, seeing a business become solvent in year three, taking on a mortgage.  I’ve really learned the value of deep breaths!

The bittersweet bits of the kids’ younger years are the inevitable growing pains…first falls, cut teeth, a lack of words, learned limitations, encounters with their first mean kid.  I do think there is some sweet in there…seeing their little selves learn from these experiences and adapt and indeed GROW.  Hopefully we are helping them to find some tools they can use to work their way through painful times.  If there’s something I’ve learned, it’s that the painful times become less inevitable…more sidewinding.  When I examine that parallel I mentioned again…there are growing pains to be acknowledged for us too: less time for each other, financial stress, the hurt of watching friends or family experience hard times, the struggle to maintain balance of work/play/rest/parenting…yeah…a bit more sidewinding.

Reminding myself of our hopes for the kids, to learn and grow and move on from their painful experiences, that’s what I hope for ourselves too.  It takes more time to figure out some of those lessons than others.  This last year of wild growth for the business brought us almost to a breaking point.  Winter afforded us some good time to reflect.  We are looking through a new, more evolved lense now…it is up to us to set the pace and these precious early years of getting to spend our days with the kiddos…these little flower buds…they will pass.  Though the universe seemed to be telling us to ‘grow more now!’, I think what it was really saying was ‘you’re doing something good and people are responding.  When you are ready, there will always be more people to feed’.

Jack and I just celebrated a rite of passage…he is fully weaned and discovering the world of independence.  It is sweetly melancholic for me…he’ll continue to need me less and less as time goes on, but he will discover his own self reliance and begin to interpret life through his own authentic, beautiful lense.  And hopefully he will always come home to our table, and share his adventures and woes with us.  I think it took nearly four years, but Rich and I seem to have stepped through some sort of door of understanding.  We chose to be our own bosses for a reason: to live a good life, that bears goodness and feels good.  Let us not be the bosses that ask too much of their people.  All the sudden I like my boss a lot better.


FARM HAPPENINGS

  • The grass is green…dandelions are returning.  Floral jelly will be made this month.
  • More spring crops will be available for weekly ordering…pastries and baked goods will be less and less frequent as the growing season wears on.
  • Seedlings and potted herbs are in the works and will become available on the site as soon as they are sizable.
  • We are getting ready for farmers market season and also getting the hoop ready for its first summer planting of cucumbers and tomatoes.