It will be worth it...

 You think when you go off-grid, in an RV, on 9 acres with your family that it'll be all family time and joy and fun. You think about sitting in the hammocks, around a fire-pit making smores, and sharing stories that you never did back in the city. You think about cutting down trees with your son, and taking walks with your daughter, and cuddling up, the entire family and watching horror movies, because now you live in the woods and that makes it so much better. And don't get me wrong. All of that happens. 

But what you don't get told, is how hard everything is. What they don't tell you is, even though your monthly bills go down, your daily bills go up. The gas into town and back skyrockets because before, I could drive all over the city and not spend as much in gas as we do on one trip to town. They don't tell you how much less space you have to move around, so people get grumpy when someone spends even one more second in the bathroom than someone thinks they should. When in reality, it's not about the bathroom, its aggravation caused by something different entirely. They don't tell you that everyone wants their own space eventually, but there just isn't enough of it inside to get your own actual space. 

The constant chores, the constant needing to do something but wanting to rest, the constant need to make money but not knowing where to start, the constant need to want to see progress but not seeing progress and feeling down. I had huge plans for this land and seeing it look the same the last few weeks has been eating at me, gnawing at my very soul, even when I knew deep down that it would take time, but knowing I should be doing something but not knowing what to do, almost makes me physically ill. 

There are times when I need to step outside and take a small walk, just to clear my head. Try not to cry, even when I know that sounds silly. Homesteads weren't built in a day. Ranches weren't built in a day. Nothing great was built in a matter of weeks, but something inside me tells me that if I were any good at this, and if I was going to succeed, that I'd be further along. There's a voice inside me telling me that I'm failing. Not just failing myself, but failing my husband, failing my children. They deserve better. They deserve to live in a farmhouse, with giant tubs and a huge kitchen. They deserve to read books on a wraparound porch and walk out to stables with horses and drive up a road that is nicely graveled or paved. They deserve the world and instead, I have this nagging feeling that I am letting everyone down. It hasn't even been six weeks yet, and while I know having those things at this point would have been completely unattainable, I can't help but feel a sense of guilt that I haven't done more for them. 

I think as a mother, guilt is one of the strongest feelings we ever feel. As a wife, as well. I feel guilty when I'm not spending time with my husband, and I feel guilty when I'm not doing things with my children. I feel guilty when I'm not doing things to better our lives and then I realize instead of doing anything for myself, all I've done is sit in a pile of guilt and made myself sick. 

However, I look at this land, from the window that I'm typing this out and I realize that people want me to fail. People told me that I'd fail, that I wasn't meant for this life. That it was too hard and that I didn't understand what hard work was. People didn't understand why we chose this life, this state and this town. "Why would anyone want that for themselves? Why would anyone want to work harder than they have to?" is what I got asked. And I remember thinking back to that quote... "The hard is what makes it great." Everyone wasn't meant for this and a lesser woman, and a lesser family would be giving up. 

But I want to take this land from scratch and turn it into something beautiful. I want to take this wooded, undeveloped land and turn it into something my kids can be proud of. I want to look back in a year and say, "Wow! We really did it. Can you believe that?" And then do it again in five years. My goal was never to be better than someone else or work harder than someone else. My goal is to work harder than I've ever worked. To be someone I've never been. To do something that people think about doing, but don't have the chance to do. That takes effort. It takes grit to work harder than you have to and make something out of nothing. We could have bought a house on land that was already maintained, but that's someone else's work. It wouldn't have been ours. I know, that with every ounce of progress we make, we put our all into it. Blood, sweet, tears, and 100 % of us went into this. 

So doing what we do, is not easy. Regardless of the cute pictures I post on social media, it's hard. There are times when I wonder what kind of hell I got us into. And there are times when I wonder if we will ever see any kind of progress. But then, there are moments when I watch my son cut down trees with an axe (which, if you've never done it, is much harder than it looks) and there are times when I see my daughter, completely unafraid to be outside, at night, in the woods with just a flashlight, knowing she couldn't even be out in the front yard at our old house when it was dusk. And I watch my husband learn new ways to bond with the kids and really be there for us and be present in the moment. And I know that things will eventually fall into place. 

Our fences will get built. Those trees will eventually be cleared, and our dream will be built. Pastures will be formed, and animals will be placed. Great things take time and until then, learning to embrace the hard will be a new normal for me and trying not to feel guilty will take me some time. And until then, I will learn to ignore the negative thinking telling me I wasn't built for this and instead, I will focus on what I can do to make this the best and most welcoming homestead, that not only feeds our family but is truly a gift to the community as well.