KiHack

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One of the things that deeply hinders me in my success with work with caregiving and with blogging is having been sheltered too much. My journey in adulthood is to find what I reaffirm and cast off what I do not, so that I make my life mine and not someone else’s. I get tired of having to explain to people why I do not have experience in X, and 10 years ago explaining how I grew up was okay, but now at 32, it sounds cheesy.

I grew up out in the boonies, several miles out of a small town. This small town, you could walk the length of in about 10-15 minutes, and with 1000 people, it was like everyone knew everyone. The next town was so small that if you sneezed, you would miss it. When Wal-Mart came to the other slightly larger town, the county got its first stop light.

Our church had 50 in attendance, sometimes 75 when everyone was there. I was highly religious until the age of 22. I read the whole Bible through that year and I had huge problems with the violence in the Old Testament, being that I am very empathic and sensitive. As a child I hung out with the older people, as a teen I tried to convert everyone. We hardly even went out of town even to the town 30 miles away because the farm lifestyle we had did not afford us much money for gas.

We didn’t have money to go to any cultural events, and definitely did not have money to go on vacation. I went to the church’s school in a one room school house, which on peak years, had 15 to 17 students, all in different grades. I hardly received any vaccinations except the ones that were required to attend that school.We never listened to the radio and never subscribed to the newspaper, and didn’t get involved politically and in the religious framework I was in, the world was going to end soon.

As a child I read a lot of books but didn’t get many invitations from my classmates because we were so different and were poor – to the tune of $8,000 a year for a family of four. The expectation of the religion is to encourage people to be vegetarians and not to wear makeup or jewelry and that whatever the “world” does is wrong and not to follow them.

In addition, some of the things my dad held was not to celebrate holidays because they came from pagan origins, he didn’t believe in TV or microwaves, said margarine was basically hydrogenated nickel, wouldn’t let us kids eat packaged food (and harassed my mom for 2 YEARS after she bought us kids some packaged things for a campout because it would be more convenient).

When I moved out, I told a friend, “I am going to have a party with all my friends, and have processed food, not just processed food, but HIGHLY processed food!” I had never been given an explanation for why it was bad…. it just was always prohibited.Our religion prohibited eating pork. Dad wouldn’t let us have sugar or fry anything. He didn’t let us have pop, and he stood at the end of the table at church potlucks and I could swear it was so that he could monitor that us kids did not snatch any desserts. We didn’t have ice cream except for frozen pureed bananas with carob (tasty!).

Up until my 9th grade, we wore dresses because dad felt women should wear dresses (till I finally rebelled and mom and my sister followed in my footsteps). The first time I ever heard the F word was in a private school in 11th grade - a school from my church that was in the city. Our religion discouraged coffee, sex outside of marriage, smoking, drugs.

We didn’t have a TV in the house till I was about 16, and only for videos, which were carefully selected to contain family values. We were educated not to swear and the first and only time I heard my mom say “Damn it!” I was shocked. We were educated not to use prescription drugs, and until I was 16 when I got a bee sting and had to go get an emergency epinephrine shot, I had never been to a clinic or a doctor.

In the first years on the farm, we lived in the house as it was being built, and only left it for a year when a family friend said she would report us if we continued to live in a halfway finished house. We didn’t have indoor plumbing, but used an outhouse, till I was about 12. We didn’t have a phone until I was 17. We had only one vehicle and planned trips carefully so as not to waste gas. Up until I was 20, I really had no idea of all the cruelty that happens in the world, and was pretty traumatized by coming across a book when I was helping a friend sort her very aged dad’s things .. a book that talked about chainsaw murders. We weren’t allowed to read Fairy Tales or any fiction at all. So here I am. I’m 32 and it’s starting to sound cheesy that I have this habit or that habit because that’s the way I was raised. It has to come from me, what I am doing.

But in the years 11 since I declared my independence, I haven’t had time to figure out what other people are doing - I got my 2 college degrees done, and a couple AmeriCorps terms, and then I fell ill from burnout, which also afforded me no chance to figure out what the rest of the world does. It’s now 2008, I live three and a half hours away from my parents where I can pierce my ears and eat red meat and them not know about it, and I am now just beginning to figure out what everyone else does as I meet more and more caregiving clients.

Every day is a journey in something new to tackle: city driving, cooking chicken, using a microwave, using A George Foreman griller, listening to violent movies at work, listening to bad language from clients, seeing people who eat packaged food and how poor of health they are in, being able to AFFORD to go to a doctor and dentist and have preventative health care and dental work done, subscribing to Netflix to see some movies, getting my ears pierced, eating red meat at medical recommendation to see what it will do.

So now I look like the bad girl, but it’s only because too much repression can be a bad thing and I need to make beliefs mine and not someone else’s. I think too much commercialism goes on at Christmas, but I do appreciate Christmas lights no matter if holidays came from pagan origins or not. I don’t eat sugar because I respect my body and don’t want to be a diabetic or lose my teeth. I tasted pork sausage but I respect my arteries and don’t want to clog them with all that fat, and I still feel a lot of empathy for animals. I’ve almost tackled city driving, and I had to learn how to make chicken thighs in the George Foreman griller today.

Where it hurts me is that I don’t have the experience in my field of caregiving like others do. But where it helps me is that I had a background in healthy outdoor living and fruits and vegetables (instead of packaged food and drugs) and I returned to that quickly when packaged food did me in. It’s a toss up. If I had children, could I protect them but not shelter them to this extent? The comments about being sheltered get irritating at times, and other times I just laugh them off. “Did you see such and such on TV?” “I don’t have a TV.” “You don’t have a TV? Did you just crawl out from under a rock?”

I try at times, when I have to see TV at work, to get acquainted with what other people see, but it either doesn’t interest me or else it’s downright irritating or stupid or incorrect and full of prescription drug propaganda and I have better things to do with my time.

But the overdrive continues on trying to play catch up on what other people know. Friend: “You don’t know who Cher is?” Sheesh. Hello?!? While TV was happening when I was growing up and I wasn’t watching it, I was out in the garden breathing fresh air, weeding, picking tomatoes, mowing the lawn, fixing the lawn mower, planting flowers, and changing irrigation pipes. I saw kittens be born many times, and cared for baby goats. We took walks out in the wilderness, and I learned the names of wildflowers. We watched the birds. We planted trees and watched them grow. In the Spring we planted tender plants out in the fresh new plowed soil. We slept under the stars and watched the meteor showers in August. We had water fights with the neighbor girls. I fed the neighbors’ animals when they were gone.

This is the one experience that I have in life: connection to nature. I come into the city and I try to work as a caregiver, and there’s this unspoken but many times spoken expectation: you MUST have a microwave, you MUST have a TV and must know all the famous people and care about what they are doing, you MUST believe that aging just happens and you can’t control it.

My dad is turning 65 this July and works 12 or more hours a day out in the field in his 6 acre market garden during that season. He takes no prescription drugs. His mother, somewhere around 96 years old, plays violin, does yoga, rides a bicycle, eats natural food, and only recently stopped driving. But belief that age is changeable, malleable, is not what society predominately thinks. If life is about working for 40 years, retiring on 40% of what you make, and then shriveling up old and decrepit all the time and wetting your pants, just shoot me now and get it over with!

But life’s quality depends on habits, and that’s perhaps one of the greatest things I got from this sheltered upbringing that continually brings me frustration in the working world.

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