Maybe We Were Doing it Right After All?

So one thing I’ve been thinking back to lately, is how we used to live. When I say we, I mean my immediate family, from when I lived in a household with my retired, much older father, my stay-at-home mother who was also a seamstress for what little local clientele were around, and my older brother, on a farm and acreage in the middle of nowhere in Northern British Columbia – an isolated logging town called Terrace.  We used to joke that we were born at the garbage dump (as it was a mere 3 minute drive away from our out-of-city-limits home), born amongst the bears who would scavenge the trash left behind.

I remember feeling stuck in so many ways, and always wanting to escape to the next part of my life. Away from the simplicity of the farm life, the antisocial isolation, and the daily living amongst the expanse of trees, hills, nature, streams, fields and tall grass. Our beautifully grown garden we tended so carefully to feed our family when there wasn’t snow on the ground (maybe 6 months max per year), and the animals we would raise from naming them at birth, getting to know them as they grew up, and then carefully slaughtering and eating them with enough to last us through to the next season, where they sat in one of our two large deep freezes in our unfinished basement. Plucking our chickens in boiling water in old oil barrels, collecting eggs from the chicken coop every morning, carefully trying not to break any of the goodies the hens had left behind.

And every meal, we would sit together as a family and eat. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and everything in between, except once we started going to grade school, and our days together were shorter. Often times, these meals were conducted in silence, or through tension that was as thick as a knife, while the evening news or a hockey game played on in the background. Regardless, this was how we lived – day in and day out. The monotony, and sometimes never-ending about-to-happen chaos, wracking my nerves, so that I’d be as still as possible and do my best not to disturb anyone or anything. Always following the rules, getting good grades, making sure I didn’t add anything to the mix that could cause a sudden upset and disturb the delicate balance of “quiet.”

And here we are again, in these moments where families are slowing down, required to cook together, eat together, clean together, and spend most of their waking moments within the confines of their homes. But they are no longer necessarily on a farm, with an acreage sprawled out, tending to their land and gardens, harvesting their goods, or raising cattle and other animals until it was time to lovingly turn them into our food.

And what I keep coming back to now is – maybe we were doing it right after all? What was the difference between then and now? I often think back on my childhood and the unsettling memories, and wanting to get away from being “stuck.” At the same time, I know I was deeply loved by both of my parents, very obviously by my completely selfless mother, and in more hard-to-understand and less visible ways by my anxious father.

Yet my brother and I were always close and took care of one another – we’d play our roles and knew how to take care of the land and our bounty so that we could feed the family and survive.

And here we are again. But the world is our land, and we’ve learned how to tend to it in a new way – based off of what we learned growing up and the appreciation of needing to do whatever necessary to take care of ourselves and our family unit.

So now? In this pandemic, or apocalypse, or whatever you want to call it? All I can think of is that maybe we were doing it “right” after all, and perhaps this is our chance to do it again, but better.

Photo credit: Rob Dumont