Parent first, worker second, permie third?

I'm struggling with identity, time management, sanity, patience, and my day-to-day workload. I have so much vision, creative energy, and resources to turn it into reality, yet I feel constantly occupied by my more-important responsibilities.

My first role is a parent. I'm a proud father to 3 (soon to be 4) young kids, aged 4, 2, and 1. I love spending time with them, and work hard to make the outdoors a source of fun and enrichment, sharing gardening activities, building play structures, climbing trees, even just walking around and collecting items and talking about it. But I also change diapers, tend to injuries, work with meltdowns, cook meals, clean up messes, and the ten thousand other thankless activities that every parent deals with. My wife does all of this too, but even working together it's exhausting. Much of our parenting life is a tag-team, taking on all the responsibilities at once so our partner can experience a temporary reprieve.

I don't live in a village. I think it's sad that most people these days also don't, since we spent so much of human history tied so closely to our village and community. No, my wife and I each grew up in a suburban environment, we were repulsed by the idea of raising kids in the same, so we moved away from everyone we knew to make our own path. That was just three years ago!

My second role is an employee. My family lives in a house that we pay a mortgage for, we buy groceries, pay for utilities and grid services, vehicles, maintaining and replacing appliances, and occasional luxuries or conveniences. My wife is a wizard at sourcing free clothes and toys, which we almost never pay for, but still all of this costs a lot of money. I'm grateful that my skills in technology allow me a low-stress full-time job with a flexible schedule and ample pay, but even working remotely at a computer desk can be mentally and emotionally draining. When my work responsibilities end, my family responsibilities resume, with my wife exhausted from the day and my kids excited to see daddy.

My third role is a permie! At least I hope and wish and try to make it so. I spend time reading permies threads, planning my guilds, observing and working the land I've been steward of for three years, building, sharpening my tools, organizing my seeds, etc. With such limited time I feel like I'm constantly neglecting 90% of my garden - failing to harvest my apple tree before they hit the ground, losing the war on blueberries to the birds, suckers going unpruned, grass invading my mulch beds, etc etc etc.

The challenge here is that I sometimes get this feeling like I'm unable to spend my time how I want, forced to neglect my garden to service my duties. But in reality these priorities are truly what are important to me. I AM a good dad, I AM a good husband, and those are more important to me than how I tend my garden. I take some comfort in the priorities I've lined up, in selecting the parts of my life and garden to neglect, and taking the time to make wise decisions at every step. I also tell myself that this too shall pass - there will be a day where the mortgage is paid off, the kids are older, and my wife is done with pregnancies, and I ought to have more attention for the permaculture parts of my life.

I'm grateful I chose a strong wife willing to support and share my dreams. I'm grateful my kids are healthy and enjoy spending garden time with me, be it harvesting green beans, pulling dead branches, tasting apples, or playing hide and seek among the shrubs. I'm grateful that my land is fertile, water is plentiful, and my community is responsibly minded. I'm grateful my family and I don't have to fret over money.

I wish I had more help from friends, family, neighbors, a village, instead of my wife and I doing so much ourselves. I wish it were easier to care for my own needs when things get hard. I wish the world's insatiable thirst for money didn't consume so many of my hours per week. I wish the close friends I grew up with were willing to discard the suburban lifestyle we grew up with and come live closer to nature with me.

Hi Alan. Life is the art of the possible!

Many of us here have a foot in the working world and the homesteading world. It's a challenge, but both are needed to make our visions a practical reality. Adding children doubles the challenge. But children well-loved and well-raised are the future we need. Your homesteading work will stick with them deeply, in ways you won't realize right away. My 2c.

The challenge here is that I sometimes get this feeling like I'm unable to spend my time how I want, forced to neglect my garden to service my duties. But in reality these priorities are truly what are important to me.

How wonderful that you have and want to be first a dad, second an employee and third a permies.

I see that permaculture can be in all parts of life.

It can be in your role as a parent and in the role as an employee.

I gardening is your priority after these why not incorporate gardening into those roles?

Do you spend time in the garden with your kids?

Do you have plants at your workplace?

See how easy that sounds ...

You are a Permie as a parent and a worker--Permaculture is a part of your lens for evaluating and making decisions, even when you aren't in the garden. All that you have written about the choices that your family makes prove that, loud and clear!

Having young kids without a village is without a doubt what is making this hard. It's not just you--ask my sister with six children under 12 to back you up on the struggles and challenges. My hat is off to all of you, for sure!

i feel this, alan.

and while in the thick of young-child time, i’m not sure i have any answers.  i’ve found that if i want to feel progress on the those outdoor parts of the home system, some (or most) of those times i get tagged out by my wife and have a minute to come up for air, i either walk around and see if there’s immediate tasks to plug into, or i check a running list i keep of various-sized projects that i want to start or keep up on. if that’s the only time i can carve out, i’ll try to use it.

i agree that it’s temporary:  that as the kids (just one in my case, but still) get older and more independent, some of that ‘parent’ time that’s just spent putting out metaphorical fires can turn back toward more of those permie-type projects, and the number of those projects that the kids can be involved in will increase, too.

i too grieve what i feel the loss of the village/more communal living in much of the western world. some such places still exist though. perhaps there’s an intentional community that would feel closer to that ideal?

Blink twice, and your four year old will be fourteen--I know, because mine is!  It really does go by fast.  When they are little, and you are doing everything for them, it seems interminable;  give it another few years and your kids--while still your main priority--will be doing things for themselves, and for the family.  Get them started on doing chores now:  folding/putting away laundry, tidying up after themselves, helping cook and bake, etc.  It pays off in the future!

I work, and I have a four year old as well;  for the first few years of her life, my beloved garden went on the back burner.  It was hard to accept, but having done this already, I also knew how short a time a few years really are.  The more independent she grows, the more time I can indulge in gardening.  But also I know to treasure this time while she's little because once past, it's gone forever.

Douglas Alpenstock wrote:Hi Alan. Life is the art of the possible!

Many of us here have a foot in the working world and the homesteading world. It's a challenge, but both are needed to make our visions a practical reality. Adding children doubles the challenge. But children well-loved and well-raised are the future we need. Your homesteading work will stick with them deeply, in ways you won't realize right away. My 2c.

Thank you! I feel the same way, and I hope you are right. I am doing my best to live to my ideals and enjoy the moment with my kids.

Anne Miller wrote:
I see that permaculture can be in all parts of life.

It can be in your role as a parent and in the role as an employee.

I gardening is your priority after these why not incorporate gardening into those roles?

Do you spend time in the garden with your kids?

Do you have plants at your workplace?

Indeed! I certainly try! We spend time together thinning, harvesting, weeding, digging, appreciating, playing, and one of my goals in designing the garden is for it to be a place of play for kids as they grow up. Still, there are many tasks where sharing the experience means I get less work done than if I were by myself. Some delicate or heavy or design-y parts of gardening are very hard to share. I do participate in the community garden at work and keep plants on my desk, plus a few stealth plantings that I check up on, so yes I do try to live this part of my life throughout the rest. I still can't escape the feeling that the part of me that wants to garden all day suffers a lot of neglect.

Rachel Lindsay wrote:You are a Permie as a parent and a worker--Permaculture is a part of your lens for evaluating and making decisions, even when you aren't in the garden. All that you have written about the choices that your family makes prove that, loud and clear!

Having young kids without a village is without a doubt what is making this hard. It's not just you--ask my sister with six children under 12 to back you up on the struggles and challenges. My hat is off to all of you, for sure!

Thank you very much! I like the thought that my permaculture way of thinking can permeate through everything I do.
Your sister must have her hands full! Over a decade of being outnumbered, my goodness. I guess it is survivable.

greg mosser wrote:i feel this, alan.

and while in the thick of young-child time, i’m not sure i have any answers.  i’ve found that if i want to feel progress on the those outdoor parts of the home system, some (or most) of those times i get tagged out by my wife and have a minute to come up for air, i either walk around and see if there’s immediate tasks to plug into, or i check a running list i keep of various-sized projects that i want to start or keep up on. if that’s the only time i can carve out, i’ll try to use it.

I try to do the same... but it is so exhausting!!! I feel like an automaton going from task to task. I have a lot of projects that are just 'out', on a table or on the wall with the tools in a box nearby, and if it remains unfinished when I decide it's not a priority, I put the whole thing away in a labeled box somewhere. My home and my mind both accumulate the clutter of unfinished projects and the lists always get longer.

Sometimes I wish I just kept one simple hobby like watching TV that I could plug into anytime I didn't have work to do. But not really.

greg mosser wrote:i agree that it’s temporary:  that as the kids (just one in my case, but still) get older and more independent, some of that ‘parent’ time that’s just spent putting out metaphorical fires can turn back toward more of those permie-type projects, and the number of those projects that the kids can be involved in will increase, too.

i too grieve what i feel the loss of the village/more communal living in much of the western world. some such places still exist though. perhaps there’s an intentional community that would feel closer to that ideal?

Yes, it's my hope too, I think once everyone is around elementary school age, when I can park the car and the kids can get out by themselves, my role as parent will feel less demanding. I hope. I know it will be exhausting and hard in other ways too.

Intentional community... I've read on the intentional community forum here, and it's a super interesting idea. But it's also terrifying to me. I moved to a 10-acre homestead, and I really like the roots I'm putting down here. So keeping that and starting an intentional community feels like inviting strangers to come live with me. I know there's more to it, but that initial terror has so far kept me from making any sort of action on an intentional community.

G Freden wrote:Blink twice, and your four year old will be fourteen--I know, because mine is!  It really does go by fast.  When they are little, and you are doing everything for them, it seems interminable;  give it another few years and your kids--while still your main priority--will be doing things for themselves, and for the family.  Get them started on doing chores now:  folding/putting away laundry, tidying up after themselves, helping cook and bake, etc.  It pays off in the future!

I work, and I have a four year old as well;  for the first few years of her life, my beloved garden went on the back burner.  It was hard to accept, but having done this already, I also knew how short a time a few years really are.  The more independent she grows, the more time I can indulge in gardening.  But also I know to treasure this time while she's little because once past, it's gone forever.

Boy, this hits me hard. They will grow up and be teenagers any day now, won't theyy? They won't be enchanted by everything I do, calling for daddy in their baby voices.

I definitely try to live by that strategy of getting them used to contributing to the household and being a part of the responsibilities. I think it's working great! But still, a 2 year old is not going to start carrying their own weight now, no matter how eager and involved and positive they are about helping with chores. So this is another avenue of investment, another good reason to make all the right decisions and work extra hard right now. And sometimes I just need a nap...