Beyond the Homestead | Life in the Kingdom

I moved out of my parents’ house when I was 16. It was the summer of 1987, and three friends had rented a small apartment on Martha’s Vineyard, where they’d secured carpentry jobs. While all the beds in the apartment were taken, for a nominal fee I was welcome to the couch. I had little carpentry experience, but the Vineyard was really taking off, and work was plentiful. I was six months removed from leaving high school, and staying at my parents’ was wearing thin. So I packed up the VW Beetle I’d bought for $75—the one that ran off a gas can situated in the back seat—and went.

I got a job installing asphalt roofing shingles for a man named Ken. He paid me well and treated me horribly. Despite smoking copious amounts of marijuana, Ken had a volatile temper, and he yelled a lot. He yelled when the soles of my boots left marks on the hot shingles, so on sunny days I worked in my socks. He yelled when I asked him to bring me a bundle of shingles (I was on the roof, and he was on the ground, about to head up the ladder empty-handed), so I learned to never ask him to bring me anything. Often I’d overhear him yelling at someone else, which was almost as stressful as having him yell at me.

So I found another job, this time working for a man named Lee. A believer in the medicinal powers of garlic, Lee ate whole cloves throughout the day, accompanied by large chunks of cheddar cheese, which presumably improved the palatability while doing little to mitigate the odor.

“Do you have chainsaw experience?” Lee asked me.

I did not. “Yes,” I said. “Lots.”

So I went to work cutting trees for Lee, and it’s barely short of a miracle that I did not maim myself, or worse. Still, I was making more than what Ken had paid me, and Lee did not yell; back then, these compensations seemed worth the risk of injury.

I never thought much about the impact that my leaving home had on my parents. They must have worried, or at the very least been skeptical: I was so, so young, after all. It’s clear to me now that I wasn’t ready to be out on my own, and they too must have seen this. But in their wisdom, they didn’t try to stop me. They wished me well, waved good-bye, and watched me sputter out of their driveway in my old Beetle, the rear windows rolled down to vent the fumes from my makeshift gas tank.

My older son, Fin, is now almost exactly the age I was when I left for Martha’s Vineyard, and because of this, and because he just got his driver’s license and talks of buying a car and the places he’ll go, and because I’m a sentimental old fool, I think often about my sons’ impending departures. It’s the oldest cliché in the book to talk about how fast children grow up, but like most clichés, this one exists because it is true. It is almost unfathomable to me that my sons will soon be gone. I suppose it’s like this for every parent, though I also wonder if my family’s lifestyle choices—to work together on this homestead, to educate our children largely at home—have made me even more vulnerable to their leaving.

For nearly 17 years, I’ve spent the majority of my waking hours in the company of one or both of my children. On most of the days over all those years, we’ve eaten three meals together. We’ve built houses and barns (and lived in both). We’ve pulled near-dead calves from their mothers, thrown thousands of hay bales, split and stacked countless cords of firewood. We’ve buried a beloved dog. Like every family, we’ve bickered and fought, even yelled at one another with a volume and vigor to match that of my old boss. Of course, every family has their version of trials and triumphs, of rituals that make their lives meaningful, and while it’s true that some of my family’s rituals are no longer typical in 21st-century America, that doesn’t make us special. But these are mysons; this is my sense of hopefulness and loss and pride and uncertainty. Which is to say, it feels special to me.

It’s possible that one or both of my boys won’t choose to go. We have a beautiful piece of land, after all, and more than enough to share should they decide to stick around. I will be happy if they do so, just as I will be happy if they decide to leave and make their lives elsewhere. The latter scenario may come with more sadness, more missing, more wanting to know the small particulars of their lives that will be shielded from me by distance. All of that, yes. But I will be no less happy for them.

I frequently hear from parents who aspire to some version of our life on the homestead, and a big part of what they desire is the chance not just to raise their children but to be with their children. To grow and age alongside them, learning at least as much as they teach, and probably more. Without a doubt, this same desire has played a major role in many of my family’s decisions to live how and where we do, and despite the many challenges and worries over the years, I regret none of it. More than anything, I hope that through this life, we have instilled in our sons a degree of resourcefulness and self-knowing that will serve them no matter where they land. Still, I realize that it’s not entirely up to us, that our sons are their own people, with their own thoughts and feelings and ideas. They will make their own choices. Hopefully, some of these choices will be good. Certainly, some will not be. And so this is what I say to the parents who contact me: You should do what your heart calls you to do, whether it is for yourself, for your children, or for both. But don’t pretend it’s a guarantee of anything.

I didn’t stay on Martha’s Vineyard forever, obviously, and for a few years I moved in and out of my parents’ house, sometimes living with friends, sometime house-sitting for neighbors, always trying to figure out how my life should unfold. My parents (bless them) were supportive but never manipulative; they never pressured me to follow a different path, even when the one I did follow was fraught with error and foolishness. They seemed to understand that I needed to make my own mistakes, and then find my own solutions to those mistakes. That’s a hard thing for a parent to know; it’s an even harder thing to allow to happen.

By the time you read this, my boys will both have celebrated another birthday. They’ll be 14 and 17, respectively, one step closer to the life that awaits them beyond this homestead. And while it must be obvious by now that a big part of me is already grieving their departure, another part, equally big, can’t wait to see where their next steps take them.