Farm Wife, You Are Not Behind

This one's been on my mind for a while now—especially this time of year. So let's talk about it.

There are some lies I think farm wives are especially good at telling ourselves.

Not big lies.

Little ones.

I should have gotten more done today.

Everyone else seems to handle this better than I do.

I should have made him something better than a sandwich.

I should have packed his lunch.

I should be helping more.

The house shouldn't look like this.

I should be able to keep up.

And maybe the biggest one:

Everyone else is doing a better job at this than I am.

I don't know exactly when we decided there was a right way to be a farm wife.

Maybe it happened long before social media. Maybe some of it was handed down to us from generations of women who worked incredibly hard and rarely talked about how hard it actually was.

And maybe social media just gave us more people to compare ourselves to.

Because now, on any given day, you can open your phone and find a woman delivering a hot meal to the field in cute containers while her kitchen appears to be clean, her children are smiling, and apparently nobody in her family has needed a clean pair of jeans that are currently at the bottom of the laundry basket for four days now.

Meanwhile, you're standing in front of the refrigerator at 11:37 wondering whether sliced turkey and a bag of chips counts as lunch.

For the record...It does.

Somehow, Food Became Part of the Scorecard

This is especially close to my heart because I make recipes for a living.

I believe deeply in the value of feeding our people.

I've built a whole lot of my work around helping farm families figure out what the heck we're going to eat when life gets crazy.

But here's where I think we get ourselves into trouble:

Those are not the same thing.

A hot roast beef sandwich delivered to the field can be love. A cold ham sandwich can be love. A bag of snacks tossed onto the buddy seat because that's literally what you could manage that day can be love.

And sometimes your husband is a grown man who is perfectly capable of making his own lunch.

Revolutionary. I know.

The lie is that if we cared enough, we'd always do more. We'd have planned ahead and meal prepped, kept the freezer stocked and the cooler packed, remembered the forks, and somehow known whether they'd end up in the north field or the south field by 6:00, even though they didn't know that until it was time to move.

We Keep Moving the Finish Line

This isn't only about food.

Maybe you didn't bring lunch because you were working your own job, or running kids to practices and appointments, or paying bills and doing laundry and answering emails and picking up parts and helping at school and getting groceries, or doing approximately 47 other things nobody notices until they don't get done.

Maybe you're working on the farm. Maybe you're working off the farm. Maybe you're doing both and you are simply exhausted.

And somehow, at the end of the day, instead of looking at everything we did, we find the one thing we didn't do and use it as evidence against ourselves.

The laundry isn't folded. I didn't cook. I didn't help enough. I forgot to send that form. I haven't worked out all week. The kitchen is a disaster. I didn't get out to the field today. Everybody else is keeping up.

Lie. Lie. Lie. Lie. Lie.

We keep moving the finish line and then wonder why we never feel like we've arrived.

Who Exactly Are We Trying to Keep Up With?

This is the part I've been thinking about lately.

Who is this imaginary farm wife we're all trying to be?

Is she raising little kids, or teenagers, or is nobody left at home anymore?

Is she out driving the grain cart herself, running her own livestock, maybe doing both?

Does somebody help her clean her house?

Is she also caring for aging parents on the side, or running a business of her own?

Is she quietly stressed about money, the way most of us are and none of us say out loud?

Does she have family close enough to actually lean on?

Does she get eight hours of sleep?

And, I have to ask this: Does her husband actually tell her what time he'll be home for supper and then show up?

Because if that last one is true, I would personally like to meet her. 🤣

We compare one tiny piece of someone else's life to the entirety of our own.

Someone posts the beautiful harvest meal. We don't see the three loads of clean laundry on her bedroom floor.

Someone else is driving the grain cart every day. We don't see that she wishes she could make it to more of her kids' activities.

Someone has a spotless house. Someone has a freezer full of meals. Someone looks put together every single time you see her.

Good for them.

Truly.

And here's the part we skip past too fast, even if she is all of those things. Even if somewhere out there is a farm wife with the clean house and the full freezer and the husband who's always on time for supper...

That still isn't proof of anything about you. It's just her Tuesday. It was never a scorecard you were supposed to be keeping.

Maybe We're Asking the Wrong Question

Instead of asking:

Did I do enough today?

Maybe the question is:

What did my family actually need from me today? How did I love my family well?

Some days that's the casserole. Other days it's you making the parts run, or sitting in the bleachers, or holding down everything at home so somebody else can stay in the field. Some days it's simply you, sitting down and actually listening.

And some days, everybody eats the cold sandwich and carries on.

That's not failure. That's just what adapting looks like. And if there's one thing farm families have always been good at, it's that.

Let's Quit Keeping Score

I will always give you recipes.

I'll give you freezer meals and slow cooker dinners and field meal ideas and anything else I can come up with that makes feeding your people a little easier.

But I never want you to look at something I've made and think:

I should be doing that, too.

That's not why I'm here.

I want you to see an idea and think:

Oh, that might make my life easier.

And if it doesn't?

Skip it.

Because you do not need one more person handing you another thing you're supposed to be doing.

Especially during the seasons when you're already carrying too much.

So maybe this harvest, when that little voice starts up again telling you, "You should have done more. You should have planned better. Other farm wives manage this."

I hope you recognize it for what it is.

It's one of the lies we tell ourselves.

You don't have to earn your place in your family by how much you accomplish in a day. You don't have to prove you love someone with a hot meal. And you certainly don't have to farm-wife like somebody you follow on Instagram.

Make the casserole when you can. Pack the sandwich when you can. Let him make his own sandwich when you can't.

And if today was a sandwich-and-chips kind of day, let that be enough. You are not behind.

Made with love,
Deanne

Years ago, I wrote Farm Wife, I See You as a reminder that the work you do matters, even when nobody notices it. Maybe this is the reminder that needs to come next: you don't have to do all of it to be doing enough.

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