A while back I was the target of some crunchy flaming, as some of you know. Apparently people don’t believe I actually do all the crunchy things I’ve written about and shared here on the blog and it became this debate/ venting session for all of them. Anyway, one of the comments made was…
Does she work or is the blog her full time gig? How does anyone will an actual job have time to do all of those things? All I do is cloth diaper and I feel like it takes 9 million hours a month (it doesn’t. It just feels that way). I can’t imagine doing all of those other things, too.
My “full time gig” is my family and the homestead and did you know you can actually sustain yourself and your family if you do it right? For those inquiring minds, before we had kids, we both did work conventional jobs… we also lived in an area with a much higher cost of living and a shorter growing season.
When we moved to Indiana and I got pregnant working was less of a priority (and a necessity) so I fully committed to making the sustainable life of my dreams more of a reality and we learned many things along the way. Now I am a working stay at home mom. Specifically, I am a virtual assistant to several clients across the country as well as a freelance website developer. I just don’t feel the need to flaunt my status as a working stay at home mom (since that isn’t the focus of the blog) you know?
It’s crazy how obsessed most people are about what your “actual job” is… why do so many people feel they need those actual jobs anyway?!
Because they are slaves to the economy and the retail driven society we live in.
If you feel you have to work each day just to make your life a possibility and that without work you couldn’t live the way you want to you are a slave. We are choosing to gradually move away from this “slavery” in our home.
We eventually discovered that while all the shiny stuff and the consumer driven mentality is exciting, it’s really just unnecessary and it is trapping us in a life we don’t enjoy living. If we do nothing but shop like good consumers of course we would need to work more! There would be zero time to stay home with my kids, to make my crunchy lifestyle feasible and to sustain my family with the homestead… Plus, working outside the home for someone else isn’t what we deem the most important work we could be doing in our lives.
What if you could just care for your family, your animals and your home and that actually fed and sustained the family? What if you were in control of how much your finances ruled your way of living? It’s possible and lots of people are still living this way… you just have to look closely to find them (hint: it wont be at the mall!). I know dozens of people that make a home-cooked meal, from scratch most every night for their families, who raise chickens and garden to feed their family, who make their own cleaning products, cloth diaper and even homeschool. It really isn’t that crazy or unheard of right?! Didn’t someone just say…
Sweetheart, you are on a bandwagon, that doesn’t make you “less conventional”.
Bandwagon (or not) aside, it’s really not that hard to get back to a more simple way of living. It requires lots of lifestyle adjustments and it takes time to really get comfortable doing it all though. So it’s not for everyone and not everyone will be able to make it work but it is what we have going on here.
We aren’t where we’d like to be by any means but we have managed to accomplish lots to get us closer and it’s freed up time for me to provide more of the life I want my family to have.
And if all this intrigues you, be sure to subscribe to the blog because many very BIG changes are on the horizon that I’ll share here on the blog just as soon as we can make the news public!
