Stay at Home, Mom

Stay at Home, Mom
A love bug

If a kid is lucky enough to have a good mom, I'm pretty sure they have this plea running through their head: "stay at home, mom".  I grew up in a pack raised by a 'stay-at-home mom'...a woman who was putting in more than full-time hours to make sure we were alive and well and that we were being exposed to the world gently and thoughtfully.  She is a mom who never impressed on us that she was doing 'work' at all...but that she was just fulfilling some purpose in life.  I'm not quite sure what magic is in her that all of us kids felt attended to and as if we weren't sharing a mom with four other little girls...which we were.

On paper, farming has positioned me to be a great stay-at-home mom candidate.  I work from home doing wholesome work that is meant to be shared.  In our modern-day reality, I am on the computer or phone marketing our goods, off making deliveries here and there, and often times my head is in the calculation clouds...planning how to puzzle piece our work together for the week, trying to remember what packaging, seeds, etc I need to restock when I get back to the computer, or recalling what notes I need to pass on to Rich to keep these wheels of our business turning.  Like all parents, I have a lot of balls in the air.

And although I am here in the flesh with our little ones, sometimes I feel their desperation for my full attention is asking me to...stay at home mom...be here right now with us.  In order to mitigate the potential damage of working from our home, I'm working on compartmentalization.  When I'm working, I'm working.  And as I just heard someone put it, I'm working not to work.  So when my must-do tasks are done for the day, it's time to put it aside...mentally and literally.  


And so...I'll stay at home, a place that for us is an amalgamation of nest and business, thankful that we chose to grow veggies on the OTHER side of the barn from our house...so that I can't look out at the acres of space that could always use more love and attention while I sip my coffee at the breakfast table.  The field...by far our neediest child.