The Inside Story: How We Became Homesteaders

I have a belief about life that continues to reveal itself as I make decisions.

My belief is this: Honest communication creates growth. I know this is not an earth-shattering discovery, but many of us do not operate in this manner.

We are often taught to hide the dirty laundry and just push through life.  

We push through to avoid humiliation, failure and comparison. But, as we push through without honest communication, what discoveries did we fail to uncover? What questions did we fail to ask? What successes never had a chance to take hold?

This post comes to you via my desire to be a good parent, which requires honesty. I want my children to be able to learn from my life’s experience. Also, this writing comes to you as a human, who is not perfect, whose toolset has never been complete.  Quality tools are essential. And when you do not have them, you end up making lots of repairs down the road. As I grow, my toolset grows, and my repairs are less.

So, what’s our inside story?

As I said in my last post, titled The Homesteader Who Wanted to Do it All, many of us don’t want to be dependent on a system that often creates more problems for us. Many of us have navigated a system that was rigged to support people who had a complete toolbox, the inside scoop, a support network of people and money, and a mindset that was already self-assured and ready to rumble.

If you have been someone who looked around, and saw other people succeeding, and wondered, what is wrong with me? Why am I not there? I hear you.

The inside story of why, my husband and I, want to “do it all” as homesteaders, originates from a list of things that occurred to us during our lives, that led us to find “trust” to be a difficult emotion to embrace ….and the remedy, simply, self-reliance.

Humans are often shamed for their mistakes. The glossy images on social media are all we typically see of people’s lives.  The truth is, we all make blunders, and most of us are simply searching for wholeness in body, mind and spirit. Mistakes are part of growth.

So here’s our story…..

I met my husband in 2005 and got married as a single, recently divorced mom with a five-year-old son. Darrin, my husband, was a newly established chiropractor.  I worked in public education. We met, married, bought a house and settled into an incredibly happy marriage, doing the best we could with “adulting” in our late thirties in an unpredictable economy.

As a professional educator, I was trying to navigate a public school system which was, and is, a challenge for any educators who try to do their best for children.  Simply put, the system is set up to make money for corporations, not to meet the development needs of children.

In a completely different world of his own, Darrin was navigating the nuances of running his own business. Being self-employed has a crazy set of rules that you must learn from the get-go – it’s a lot to navigate.

We had a second child soon after marrying and I quit teaching to take care of our two boys.  We lived in the suburbs, paid our bills, raised our family, and felt incredibly lucky to have found one another.

Shortly after we married the economy began to take a hit. The stock market crashed in 2008. We were still newlyweds with two children and very wrapped up in the day-to-day happenings of our lives. As the stock market crash began to hit home in our little world, we saw Darrin’s business take a huge hit financially and things began to crumble, fast.

Think – deer in headlights – that was us.

As small business owners, we were struggling with the tax requirements. We set up an installment plan to pay the IRS monthly, but the amount they requested was always too high for us to manage, along with our house and car payments.

The IRS, our accountant said at the time, loves to go after the little people. It’s easy money, an ATM machine at their disposal. We understood that we owed money because we had gotten behind; this was on us, but we didn’t understand how to catch up in a system that seemed to be hitting us from all sides. We continued to pay what we could, but that didn’t matter to the IRS. That particular year, we traveled to visit family for Thanksgiving.

In the car with our kids in tow, excited for Thanksgiving break, I got a text message on my phone. Our bank account was in the red, by the thousands – the exact “thousands” needed to pay the IRS in full.

They – the IRS – had emptied our bank account, which of course had very little in it, so it was crazy red. I tried to keep my composure and talk to my husband who was driving while our kids in the back laughed, excited about the road trip. My heart was beating fast and I was trying to communicate quietly without panicking. We had no money. We were already calculating in our heads, as we drove, the money required to get home after our Thanksgiving holiday. How much gas money did we need? As I write, I break out in a sweat just recounting this memory. And sure, it’s easy to say, yeah, ya dumbass – pay your taxes!!!! I hear you. We just couldn’t pay them, our mortgage, and everything else. We had made mistakes in an economy that was going in the wrong direction.  We were in a sinkhole, sinking faster by the minute. You can imagine the humiliation, the judgment, the shame, all pulling us further into that sinkhole.

We didn’t tell anyone.

Our house was next on the crisis list. The stock market crash was triggered by adjustable mortgage rates, and of course we had one. Our mortgage was becoming insane. We had two loans. We were the poster children for the Stock Market Crash of 2008, but we didn’t know it.  

As our income plummeted, we were hanging on to our house by sheer will. Every day I was making phone calls and trying to renegotiate payments with loan officers and debt collectors. Darrin worked all day at the office trying to build our small business.

We watched friends and neighbors walk away from their houses during this time. We had just met a neighbor five houses down. I really liked them and was looking forward to having some new friends. I gave them our baby stroller and other various baby supplies we no longer needed, and then suddenly, one morning, the neighbors were gone. Their house was empty. They packed and left in the night. This had become the norm. The new house constructions two streets over came to a halt – it was this bizarre landscape of house scrapes – total emptiness, messy concrete slabs that stayed for years – a ghost street. Life was scary, but we had to carry on and smile, show up for our kids and try to make things work.

In the meantime, also in 2008, I was trying to get health insurance as a stay-at-home mom. But, without my teaching job, I no longer had easy access to health insurance. If you’re self-employed, you’ll know what it’s like to try to get good health insurance as an independent contractor. We now needed insurance for four people.

As I jumped through the hoops to apply for health insurance for our family, I was told that I could not be insured due to my c-section with my second child. However, I was told that if I got sterilized, the company, Golden Rule Health insurance, would happily insure me.

Mic drop. I was not a dog or a cat to be spayed.

But there’s more.

Next, I was told that my youngest child was simply too small to be insured.

I’m sorry, wait…..what?

Little did I know at the time that our child was small due to a gluten allergy that was attacking his ability to thrive. Little did I know that some day I’d also be researching a food system that is also set up to fail us and make corporations money.

Life was becoming ever so challenging.

However, I was raised not to share my dirty laundry. I began to discover that this strategy was not working for me. I needed to talk to people. I needed help. I needed to understand why things were unfolding as they were. I needed honest communication.

I started to tackle things. For me, this was the beginning of my homesteading mentality truly taking hold. I didn’t know it at the time, but I know now. I began to fight systems that were failing me so that I could survive, and so that my family could thrive.

These were the truths:

We were broke.

We couldn’t get health insurance.

We might become homeless.

I began to talk. I began to share my stories.

I started by filing a state complaint against the Golden Rule Health Insurance Company. People took notice. An advocacy group called me and said they’d fly me to D.C. to testify about my health insurance issues. I had 48 hours to prepare.  I was flown to Washington D.C. and spoke at a senate committee hearing focused on pre-existing conditions. I had no idea that a c-section was a pre-existing condition. I barely knew how to file for health insurance or navigate a political landscape. However, that committee hearing I spoke at, sharing my truths? It worked.

After Golden Rule Health Insurance Company was shamed on Capitol Hill, I got health insurance, for all of us.

I started looking into our home loan situation. I was mind blown by what I was discovering. For anyone who went through this stock market crash as a new homeowner, I know you understand what I’m saying. The confusion about our home loans, the double speak, the lies, the realization that we might be homeless, was terrifying. I couldn’t get a straight answer from anyone on why our loans were literally impossible to pay. When we signed on the dotted line, we simply didn’t understand what we were getting into.  We were told, this is a fabulous deal, and you absolutely can manage this – sign!!!!!!

They lied. We were buying our first house. We trusted the process. We signed.

I spent hours, days, weeks, months, navigating this mortgage world trying to understand something that is still, to this day, not understandable. Why? Because it was rigged, to benefit a few.

One day I got a piece of mail that looked like junk mail. I almost threw it out but decided to open it.

It was an offer to renegotiate our mortgage – for a price of course – our debt load increased. We avoided being homeless.  House saved. We had shelter and we were safe…as safe as we could be in this system.

Talking, sharing, exposing what was occurring in our lives saved us. Honest communication helped us grow, and I like to believe, helped others.

Granted, talking about being sterilized like a cat at a Capitol committee hearing was not fun, but it was fruitful to say the least.

I share these stories for one reason. We all find our path to homesteading – and some of us find it due to challenges in life that led us to look inward, and then turn outward, to question a reality we are told we must believe is accurate and true.

It is frightening, terribly frightening, to raise children in a world in which the systems you believe will support you, seem determined, in many cases, to take you down.

Should we have been smarter? Richer? More frugal? Or wait, is it possible, that perhaps, the system is rigged against us?

You be the judge.

But I’ll say this again – honest communication creates growth. A rigged system needs exposure.

As a child, I was told never to share my dirty laundry; I disagree. It is my experience that people learn from hearing about others’ attempts in life and there is no shame in sharing struggles. It is ridiculous to assume we are all simply bouncing through life finding our way to secure a homestead, or any lifestyle, that feels whole to us and allows us to thrive. Challenges happen to everyone and everyone makes mistakes.

Do I like the system today? No. That’s why I homestead. We have found peace as homesteaders.

Will there be people out there who take joy in hearing about our struggles? Of course. There is good and there is evil in this world. And people who take joy in another’s downfall are simply unhappy people.

My concern is people, like us, who are passionate about life, and are finding their way and trying to find answers. I believe this post will resonate with some of you. And when the world around you goes silent and seems like one huge gaslight, keep pushing forward, communicate your fears, your questions, your concerns, so that you may build and grow.  Just know, I’m clapping for you, and I’m guessing a lot of homesteaders out there are clapping too. There is such beauty and solace in homesteading. I see you. Well done, my friend.