Something is wrong. Something is really, really wrong. I could only see red on Thursday. That’s not me. So I took a little time off.

Our pastor spoke this weekend about James 1, being quick to listen, slow to speak and slow to anger. I tend to fail on the slow to speak thing but, generally, anger is not my issue. Not as an adult anyway.

Julie and I are dealing with some stuff. Over the last 8 months we have watched as our daughter was treated for cancer. One day, happy, healthy little girl. Then she had cancer. Nothing I could do.

Seemingly the next day she had a vacuum line running between two ribs causing her intense pain. Nothing I could do.

Then there were weeks of time when I was home with the other kids while Julie and our little patient lived at the hospital. And there was nothing I could do.

I was helpless as she threw up for days on end, helpless as her hair fell out, helpless during her surgery at Christmas. Compounding that, I was helpless toward the other beautiful children and scared parents we met in the hospital. A hospital for sick children. At Christmas.

We lost two kids we knew at Christmas. 7 children in the 8 months at the hospital. There was nothing I could do.

And I still had a job and livestock and bills to pay and dishes to wash and stuff to do.

And I was not dealing with it in a healthy way.

Mostly I would race through my chores then play Minecraft with the other kids. But it was all racing. It was all rush. It was all hurry. Fast food, Coca-cola, late nights, early mornings. I stopped reading. I stopped exploring. I stopped writing. I stopped doing. Because there was nothing I could do. I was trying to be a “good dad” but, really, I was just distracting myself from the pain and feeling of helplessness.

I have hit low points in my life. Lower, I hope, than most people sink to. I was not at my lowest point but I was not in a healthy place.

As I walked through that valley, that low point, I decided to maybe stop drinking so much caffeine and sugar. My blood pressure had been high and my sleep quality had been poor. This seemed like a good first step to resolve my near-constant headache. With the exit of Coca-cola, my headaches intensified for about 2 miserable weeks. Then I felt like an AA member. I could tell you the last time I drank a Coke. “My name is Chris and I am addicted to sugar and caffeine. I had my last Coke on Feb. 20, 2016.”

But I really just replaced Coke with unsweetened coffee. I had to fix that too.

I also stopped drinking alcohol. After I dropped coke I found myself drinking a beer or two every night. Maybe a glass or two of wine. That’s not an outlandish amount of alcohol for many people but it is for me. So I stopped.

And I stopped eating multiple handfuls of candy from the candy dish at work.

And Julie and I cleaned up our diet. Again.

But the things that were whispering at me before we screaming at me now. Oh. My. Gosh! It is amazing how quickly and easily I can be set off. And for no reason! I stewed for two days on a joke some idiot made during a conversation on Thursday. Fortunately, I kept my thoughts to myself but…I was not happy.

Do you remember happy? I remember happy. Happy was reading books and sharing them with you. Happy was taking pictures of growing grass and cow manure and wondering if I could make the grass or cow manure look better by changing my grazing management. Happy was raising chickens and pigs and cows and children and preserving my marriage and continuing my education and writing about it and wondering, myself, how I had time to do it all.

But that was before my daughter got cancer and there was nothing I could do but watch her suffer as the treatment continued. Watching alone, from the sidelines. Living a third or more of my life without my wife at home, the rest of the time working to ensure that she and our daughter could rest because being at the hospital is not restful. At all.

Our daughter’s treatments are behind us. It seems I was able to push all of my bags to the side while she was receiving treatment but now it is all washing over me. I should feel relieved but, really, I just feel tired. So tired. Old.

I picked up some bad habits over the last 8 months. I lost some good habits too. I stopped practicing my writing, for example.

I broke up with Coca-cola in February. In June I am going to get back together with my old friend the blog. I’m going to try anyway.

These feeling I am dealing with? The experience we have been through? That feeling of rejection and isolation a husband feels when (in his mind) his wife chooses a child over him? Substance abuse? Insomnia? High blood pressure? Depression? These things have ground me down in ways that are not always visible from the outside. All of those families I met in the hospital are dealing with this too. And nobody talks about it.

Find a way to reach out to a family in need, including the husband who is expected to be strong and not to cry and to go to work, and keep it all together and to just deal with it all like a “man”. And if you are in need, please reach out. If you don’t know who else to call, reach out to me. Believe me, I understand.

This will be a farm blog again soon. I promise.

February 6, 2016

Pere Marquette State Park

The locals say something that sounds more like Pierre Marquette. In fact, for years that’s just what I thought it was. A park for a French explorer named Pierre. Pere is not in our lexicon. Which is a little odd. The French were here at least until 1763 and left their mark on the landscape. James Fenimore Cooper wrote a little about the real estate changing hands.

We live in Illinois. Spelled with a silent “S” at the end. I live in Illinois but work in St. Louis (you say the “S” on that noun…unless you are Judy Garland). Well, not St. Louis, down the street from Creve Coeur. Little towns dot the landscape named Prairie du Rocher or Portage de Sioux. We are just up river from the place Lewis and Clark camped before their big adventure. The place where the Mississippi, Missouri and Illinois rivers all meet.

All these French labels surround us but to get here we drove through Jerseyville and McClusky. It’s all a big cultural mix up. The French were the first Europeans here….long after the Cahokians left. Some of the names the French gave stuck. But we don’t speak French. We don’t speak German either…but I grew up in New Minden. We don’t speak British either. It’s a big cultural mix-up.

Who was Pere Marquette? What is this place? Well, it turns out to have little to do with Pere Marquette. But that doesn’t matter. It’s a New Deal public works conservation area with a flashy name. Again, doesn’t matter. Marquette was here once, said “Hello” to the Illini people, boosted the morale of the troops stationed here then went to Michigan. It is a nice place to see bald eagles. There are cabins, there are rooms at the lodge. The pool is nice. The trails are challenging. The food is fried. The Wi-Fi is functional.

Julie and I come here often. That should sufficiently describe how we feel about it.

We stayed here on our anniversary in July. We had to enter through the back roads because the river was covering the highway. We got an inch of rain every day in June and the river, normally a series of ribbons in the distance, was a solid mass of swirling, muddy water with the accompanying mosquitoes. At that time we stayed in a cabin. “Cabin” is a loose term. It was a stone building with a shake-shingle roof divided into three air-conditioned, comfortable living areas. One queen bed, two bunk beds. Perfect for the family seeking a weekend getaway. We decided one night was not enough.

This weekend we are staying at the lodge for two nights. This is more like a hotel room. The Wi-Fi is more reliable in the lodge than in the cabin but the cabin was more comfortable. But the rooms don’t matter. There is plenty to do outside.

Or you can sit inside and edit pictures for Instagram. Please note the stack of books she is ignoring.

The place is packed this weekend with some sort of mom retreat. 100 or so moms comparing stories from the trenches, laughing at children who throw fits and stop breathing and grateful to have a weekend away from diaper duty. Are the kids with husbands or parents or ??? Based on the enormity of the diamonds on display I would suggest there are husbands somewhere. I wonder how they are holding up.

How am I holding up? We are years past diapers. But for 10 days out of every month our daughter is in the hospital. Julie is there with her. And I still have a job. And a farm. And three other children. And a marriage.

Julie and I found a break in the chemo schedule. It’s time for a checkup. This has little to do with missionaries sent by Louis XIV (Don’t say the “S”, the “X”, the “I” or the “V”), President Roosevelt, moms on retreat or children with life-threatening illness. The focus is simple. I love Julie. Julie loves me. But the busyness of our medical needs has prevented us from connecting. We are busy. Just busy. Busy all the time. And it is taking its toll.

Last night, in spite of the sound of free mothers roaming the hallways, Julie and I went to bed early. The we slept in a little. We ate breakfast at the little restaurant then took a long hike on the trails. The walk gave us time to talk. What are we each doing? What are the kids doing? What can we do to better meet their needs? What are our short and long-term goals? Are we still aligned in our goals? Why is it so hard to get rid of stuff in our house?

This isn’t just a chance to relax and take a nap. It’s a chance to relax, take a nap and finish reading a book or two. And to talk to my friend Julie.

Because we really need some time.

Make sure you are making time.

And for those who wonder, “How does this fit on your farm blog?” I offer this answer.

There is no farm without Julie.

What a difference a translation makes. Bear with me here. This is one of those posts presented without apology. We started 2015 with a  bang. And then September happened. I had big goals for the year, read a book a week, blog regularly, try to take over the world. I was unable to sustain the book reading pace once our daughter got ill. I find it is amazingly difficult to read in a hospital with the beeps and nurses and checking vitals and hoping we can find something she wants to eat today…

But now is not then. Now is now. And the requirements of today are not the requirements of yesterday. The vision of today is not the vision of yesterday. We are slightly closer to our destination. The path is more clear. In fact, this is a good time to stop and look. Are we going where we want to go? Have we gone astray? What’s the plan?

If you read Habakkuk 2:2 in NKJV it says:

Write the vision
And make it plain on tablets,
That he may run who reads it.

But if you read it in the Message translation it goes like this:

Write this.
    Write what you see.
Write it out in big block letters
    so that it can be read on the run.

So this is what we do. We write it out.

A year is about as far out as I can plan as confirmed by a book I am currently reading called Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction. It is good to have some notion of what is beyond that…a destination maybe 5 generations out…but if you try to plan too many years ahead you trip over the stuff in front of you. Minor deviations cause major problems.

So vision for a year…keeping in mind that our year went swimmingly for the first 8 months then was entirely derailed. Well, our year went swimmingly for 3 months then my job changed and our year was changed radically. So maybe a year is too ambitious. But let’s plow ahead anyway.

If things go as planned we should have 10 calves this year. That’s a lot of calves. In fact, it may be too many. It may be a 10 too many. Our goal for 2016 is not expansion, it is retrenchment. We need to do better. We need to be more efficient. I don’t need more cows. I need better cows. I need better fences and more access to water and improved pastures. I need to repair buildings and wiring and equipment.

Our goal is not growth. Our goal is to repair and replace our infrastructure. The South perimeter fence, the wells at both houses, the shed roof between the silo and the cattle barn…all things we need to repair. I will spare the reader the complete list but until these things are finished we are in a holding pattern.

But there is more. I can’t handle additional cattle until I remove about 18″ of manure from my barns to return to our pastures. Until I frost seed 5 pounds of red clover and one pound of white. Until I remove inner fencing that causes frustration, erosion and large weeds next to the clover field.

So that’s part of my to-do list. But this isn’t about the what. This is about the why. We need to make everything easier and better. Not bigger.

But some things have to grow. We have to continue experimentation. I have no idea which of my solutions will be accepted by the market. People seem to like our eggs. They seem to like cattle raised entirely on grass. How about non-GMO pork? You can’t sell non-GMO pork from piglets that were raised on GMO feed. You have to be non-GMO from farrow to finish. Can we farrow non-GMO piglets to sell as weaners?

Dunno. Let’s find out.

People do seem to like our eggs. Heck, I like eggs too. But let’s talk about what I don’t like. I don’t like Silver-Laced Wyandottes. As a reader, Eumeaus, suggested SLW tend to be flighty and don’t lay well in winter. We still have about thirty 4-year old New Hampshires laying around a dozen eggs a day. Our hundred-or-so year old SLWs are laying 6. 2016 features the return of NH pullets to our farm. I suspect I’ll buy pullets rather than hatch eggs because I need 150 or 200 pullets. That would be 400 or 500 eggs. I don’t have that kind of capacity.

Broilers. I don’t know. Usually we are first to market with our broilers. We get chicks on Valentine’s day and harvest them before buffalo gnats hatch. If you want a fresh bird for a beer can chicken on Memorial day we are your source. Then we shut down until August. But our daughter’s chemo treatments will last until April.

I think we will try. Maybe not hundreds of chicks. Maybe dozens of chicks. I think we will encourage our older children to completely own the operation. They can pay us to process birds with them. They can earn the money. This is, ultimately, the direction we want to go anyway and the oldest will turn 16 this year. It is time. But it is up to him. I will encourage him to spread his wings but I won’t push too hard. Maybe there will be no broilers this year.

Books and I are still good friends. I may be reading as many as six right now. I got a stack of books for Christmas along with gift cards from friends that were used for even more books. Stacks of books. I suspect we now have half of P.G. Wodehouse. I’ll try to return to journaling my reading so you can play the exciting home game. A notable book I did not journal this year was The Richest Man in Babylon. It won’t take you long to read and it is stuff you already know but it might enhance your own vision of 2016.

There is more. Much more. But these are the portions of our vision that seem appropriate to share with you. It is where we expect to go. Things happen but this helps us to focus. 2016 we rebuild infrastructure. In 2017 we take over the world. (And by “take over the world” I mean prepare to send a kid to college.)

Write out your vision. Write it out in big, bold letters so you can see it as you run past. Hang it on your fridge. Post it on your monitor. Make it the background on your phone. Record yourself saying it and listen to the recording. Your vision is your vision. You need to block out all the noise and focus regularly on it. You are going somewhere.

So get going.

One of the wonderful problems we are struggling with is being sure to say “Thanks” to folks who support us. And I mean “support” literally. We want to thank the people who are holding us up. This is a problem for us for several reasons. First, we just forget. Or we get busy. So many people approach us with so many different helpful things it’s just hard to remember it all. Let me give you a few examples just from yesterday.

Our local community hosted a benefit dinner for Wendy. During that dinner families in our community came together to make and serve soup, wash dishes, sell t-shirts…who did this? Not any one person. The whole town. One of my dad’s brothers calls me every Sunday at noon while he has lunch with my grandma. He is just calling to check on our daughter. He called during the benefit yesterday. Mom’s brother came to the benefit yesterday. He made it a point to relate to our daughter personally by comparing chemo stories. How do I say thanks for all that and remember the person who took out the trash?

The second reason it is a problem is because we need to make the best use of the resources shared with us. We have to be good stewards. Our daughter is a sick little girl. She is getting the best medical care in the world and the best medical care in the world is not cheap. And insurance doesn’t cover gas, food, wear and tear…you get the idea. So, as Mrs. Reid patiently explained to me yesterday, we really need to be focused on making sure our finances are sound and our daughter is loved, not on writing and sending thank you cards.

So what do we actually do?

We care for our little girl. That’s what we do. But the time will come when our opportunity will change. The time will come when we are helping to host a benefit dinner for another family in need.

I reached my saturation point Sunday afternoon. It was all too much. Too many families missing football. Too many people making soup. Too many people stretched in a line out the door. Too many dishes being washed. Three generations of two separate families were easily identified on the front lines yesterday and I had no idea, really, who else was involved behind the scenes. So I asked. And I started to say thanks. And it was all deflected.

The universal response was, “It’s wasn’t me!”

Ugh.

“Oh, no. I didn’t order the t-shirts. That was all so-and-so.”

“No, we are just carrying bowls of soup. Those folks in the kitchen are the ones working.”

Then, to compound the issue, someone said, “Chris, what you need to do is keep writing your blog.” There are things I do that I don’t fully understand. My blog is one of those things. I sometimes don’t know why I do this. Maybe to publicize my own ignorance.

I started a blog because I wanted to learn how to write. But I wanted to learn how to write because a friend made a time investment in me through phone calls and emails. She wanted me to grow. To explore. To learn and to share. She encouraged me to write. Four years ago she passed away. Four years ago I began my blog. Linda Brady Traynham deserves all credit for that. But she was just one person. One influential person. And every time I write I remember the friendship we shared…even if only briefly.

Remember where I was yesterday…beyond saturation. Too much blessing. Too many people. Too many unknowns. And the straw that broke the camel’s back, if I can be the camel in this metaphor (and I think I can), is someone deflecting praise and complimenting my blog when I just want to say thanks to somebody. Anybody.

Heck, I’ll say it to you. Thanks.

Thank you for reading this. Thank you for understanding. Thank you for praying. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for showing my daughter your own chemo port so she doesn’t feel like a freak. Thank you for giving us gas cards. Thank you for ordering t-shirts. Thank you for understanding when I need time off. Thank you calling on Sunday. Thank you for asking her if she wakes up without feeling rested. Thank you for the plush kitty and blanket. Thank you for the knit hats, the window paint and the balloon animals. Thank you for bringing your service dog to Children’s hospital so it can jump up on her bed and give her some snuggle time. Thank you for washing your hands. Thank you for making us a lasagna. Thank you for the puzzles and paints and stickers and friendship bracelets and books. Thank you for broccoli and cheese soup. Thank you for baking cookies with the other kids, taking them to youth group and helping them with the chores. Thank you for picking me up at the car repair shop even though it made you late for work.

Julie and I are so thankful.

The only way we can see to repay your kindness, though it is not expected of us, is to serve our community. To look for opportunities to serve and encourage in the future. Either to ease the burden on another family in need or just to make an investment in a new friend as Linda did with me. We see so much need at Children’s Hospital. But those needs exist here at home too. There are people in need right here. People who need help caring for a sick child and people who need to be encouraged to try something scary like actually hitting the publish button. I can do those things. And that, I think, is how we say thanks.

But we also just say it.

Thanks.

And Mrs. Reid, the blog is almost free…other than the hour it took to write this early Monday morning and the annual domain registration. This was a lot easier than sending a bunch of cards. Thanks for the reminder.

7:25am addition:

Thanks also to my dad, my cousin and my cousin’s son who helped me bring the cows home from a night’s adventure after the deer knocked down the fence.

It’s all messed up. Inside, I mean. Let me explain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up.

I should focus on my relationship with God, my relationship with Julie then my children. But that’s not what we’ve got. We are certainly on our knees. No doubt. But then I think it’s our little girl. She is our primary focus. So our marriage is suffering…in some small way that’s hard to pin down. And our other children are feeling neglected.

We are out of whack.

Summary behind us, let’s go into the long-winded Chris Jordan blog post thingy.

There is nothing I can physically do to help my daughter. She is wrapping up 6 days at the hospital. I can’t help that. She cries in the morning because she wants to be home. She cries in the evening because she wants to be home. But she can’t be home. We can’t fix her at home. We can’t fix her at all. We have outsourced the fixing to the people most knowledgeable in the subject matter…possibly in the whole world. But I don’t feel that’s enough. Our doctors are hard working, knowledgeable, polite and, even, humorous. But they aren’t God.

And, yes, I believe in God.

And I believe God knows all about cancer.

So I pray. And Julie prays. And since there is nothing else for us to do, we pray a lot. This is a good thing. Our level of dependence on God is at 10…the highest it has been in years. And that’s good. Because that dependence is eternal. Forever. It won’t end. But sometimes, when life is calm, it is easy to forget.

But now we remember. Every minute of every day.

But the next priority is my relationship with Julie. Those kids we created? They will get hitched and move out within the next 10 years. My covenant with Julie is for life. That’s a long time. And we married early.

That lifelong agreement…that lifelong covenant…that life sentence I agreed to is kind of a big deal to both of us. But it seems like something we are just doing right now. It’s just a familiar pattern and we are going through familiar motions. Like brushing our teeth. It’s mechanical. Make coffee, eat breakfast, kiss. It’s just a daily pattern. We are working on momentum.

But what if we lose momentum?

Then what?

Is that what happens to empty nesters? A couple realizes too late that their marriage has lost momentum…that they have been focused on their children for decades and now have little in common with the stranger across the sheet.

I don’t know. I’ve never been an empty nester. I can tell you things were certainly different before there were children.

And I can tell you things were different in August.

But then September happened. And now my daughter is ill and spends a third of every month in the hospital and the balance of the month sick or recovering from the medicine. Julie is with her every step of the way.

And that’s where Julie should be.

But the most important human relationship we have is our marriage.

Our little girl will grow up. The cancer will go into remission, she will grow, she will be strong, she will move into a home of her own.

So will the other kids.

But Julie and I will finish out our life sentence. We would like to continue to grow closer for the next 60 years but if things continue on their present course, if we continue to coast through our days without putting any effort into our relationship…well, people that go neglected begin to feel rejected. Unwanted. And, eventually, begin to consider alternatives.

The other kids are people too. People feeling neglected…

Our kids work hard. Their contributions need to be acknowledged. That 15-year-old manling is a feed sack carrying, hay bale lugging beast. He also plays guitar, enjoys video games, sports, time with friends, hunting and desires the attention of a select few young ladies.

He also had a birthday in the last week.

Where is his cake? Presents? What have we done to make him feel special?

Not enough.

It is not a question of “if”, it’s a question of “when?” When will he begin to express resentment? Some level of that is natural, normal…even important. He will want to spread his wings. That’s part of growing up. But the hospital is intensifying the pressure. How can I teach him to monitor his own emotional state as he is dealing with a sick sister, staying with grandparents, schooling himself, completing farm chores, helping with housework and, generally, sucking it up when I don’t have time/energy/ability to model it for him?

Or for the other two kids?

I don’t have any answers here. I don’t think there is anything you can do to help either. I think I, too, just have to suck it up. Go short on sleep. Renew my commitment to Julie and do so in front of the kids so at least they have the security of a stable household. That manling and I need to chat. Just chat. Even if his responses are single syllables. I have to show an interest in all of the children. Maybe work with them to find things all of us can do to help mommy rest and to help little sis to feel better. Or celebrate our evenings home without mommy by eating junk food and watching movies. I don’t really have specifics but I know I have to take an active role in building positive relationships in our home.

Because that’s my job.

I heard two women talking in the hospital. One was expressing herself publicly and was quite animated and energetic as she said, “I can’t respect a man who won’t do what a man should be doing.” I really don’t know what she meant but it sounded bad.

This is what I should be doing.

I pray.

I love and honor Julie.

I care for my children.

In that order.