As we close out our 16th year together, Fred and I are at a crossroads.
We started this journey on December 31. 2010, and rereading all the “year in review” posts, my God, were we full of hope and dreams! And it’s amazing to see how much we’ve accomplished.
We got our herd of American Milking Devon, trained 2 to be friendly, and even milked for a bit.
We’ve had dozens of piglets and magical nights in the barn helping sows give birth.
We’ve had thousands of chickens changing the landscape of our pastures and healing it.
I’ve nursed countless chickens, piglets, and calves, and spent hours with heartbreak.
I’ve spent endless hours just sitting still with it all, soaking in this life we created together.
And we created a community of the most supportive and caring customers we could have ever hoped for.
While we were building our dream life and farm, there was always something in the background–my in-laws.
My in-laws have been a part of our lives since day one. Living on their land, and then next door, and using their land to raise our animals meant we would see them every day, multiple times a day. And as their health began to fail, their care fell to us. We lived with them from 2019 to 2024, but before that, we had increased our time there with lunches and dinners and more check-ins.
Both my FIL and MIL had dementia, and when it was clear they were not safe to live on their own, we moved in. It wasn’t a move we made lightly, and in hindsight, we would have done it differently.
In the beginning, it was easier, but after my FIL’s fall 4 months after we moved in, I became the primary caregiver for them both. His dementia became much worse, and as a result of the stress, so did my MIL’s. So I had the day shift, making sure I was within arm’s reach of him to keep him from falling, and trying to keep my MIL from telling him to get things for himself. Caring for people with 2 different types of dementia was exhausting. It was a constant mindset shift of how to respond or interact. One thing worked with him, but not her, and vice versa, and it changed from day to day and sometimes hour to hour.
I had taken some classes and listened to hundreds of hours of podcasts and books to educate myself on dementia, caregiving, and end-of-life care, and passed it all on to Fred.
Fred had the night shift, and most nights he handled it all on his own. We had alarms set up in the bedroom, so when my FIL got up, Fred would wake up and run downstairs in the hopes of catching him before he ran out of the handrail alongside the bed. And almost every night, my FIL was grumpy when Fred helped him.
We did this for 5 months–me caring for him during the day, helping him shower, dress, living in the past with him, and talking him out of going to work in the city, and Fred half-sleeping all night, getting up to help him go to the bathroom, and managing his agitation. We cooked, cleaned, did the shopping, managed their finances, and tried to keep their life the same as much as possible.
My FIL had his wish of spending his last day at home on the farm he loved. My MIL’s dementia got worse after he died, but slowly leveled out as the stress subsided.
Even though my relationship with my MIL was never close, caregiving worked for us. We didn’t have the mother-daughter dynamic, so there wasn’t a hierarchy. I could get her to shower, take meds, or go somewhere with very little difficulty or pushback. Us being equals, along with the tips I learned about dementia caregiving, helped us work together.
Caring for my in-laws, the actual caring part, was easy.
The mental load of having one eye and ear on them and the other on our life was hard.
The lack of support and compassion for us from my SILs was soul-crushing.
Watching someone you love decline is hard. I get that. Making the caregiver’s life harder while they are caring for your loved one is something I will never understand.
Being treated with very little respect or compassion by my 4 SILs was the hardest part of caring for my in-laws. It could have been a time of coming together and connection, and it turned into words you can’t unhear, resentment, and eventually, no contact.
My MIL died with only Fred by her side, and we started our life back together.
It took almost a year for all the muscle memory of caregiving to subside. I finally stopped looking for sweet treats to buy them and perusing the home health aide sections for new gadgets. I could make meals with as much garlic as I wanted, stopped keeping one ear tuned to the other room just in case, and stopped waking up in panic to check on them.
In the midst of caregiving, you don’t see how much it affects your life and body. Everything revolved around them. The stress and mental load wore our bodies down. Dementia caregivers are 30% more likely to get depression and have serious chronic health concerns. I read somewhere that for every year of caregiving, you take a year off your own life expectancy.
As we wrap up year two post-caregiving, we are thinking about what we want to do with our lives. How do we want our last years to look?
I don’t know exactly when farming started to feel like work, but it did. I think some of it was because we had figured things out to a point where we weren’t having to innovate and revamp processes, and everything felt repetitive. Some of it was the consequences of 5 months of acute caregiving and 4 more years of chronic caregiving fatigue plus dealing with the family dysfunction, and the long, traumatic process of watching and helping my in-laws die. Some of it was not having my FIL there as part of our farming. And some of it may have been the natural course of life changes.
We always said that when farming felt like work, we’d stop. And here we are.
It’s hard to stop farming when this is what brought Fred and me together. This shared dream had us working together every day, working towards something we loved. We provided literal tons and tons of food to customers who count on our meat and eggs to nourish their families. And we love having the best quality meat in our freezer to choose from. We’re very spoiled!
But it’s time to take a step back and, as I call it, have a midlife reset.
We had an amazing 16 years of farming, but we want to figure out what the next 16 years will look like for us and make the most of it.
As of now, there are no plans to sell the farm, but we are downsizing production. We sold all but 5 of our cattle last September and butchered all of the pigs. Our layer flock had dwindled to 30, with no plans for replacement hens. This year, we will keep our broiler chickens in production on a much smaller scale and will likely skip 2027 as a chicken production year.
We said goodbye to our sweet Maxie last September, and our hearts have not recovered from that. Zeke is still out protecting the layers, but he is getting close to retirement due to arthritis, despite my best efforts with supplements.
We have been selling or donating equipment and personal items we no longer use or need. It’s hard to walk around the farm without dreaming of expansions and improvements, but to see it through the lens of simplifying and reigning it all in.
When I walked away from my life as an advocate, I felt lost. I was lost without a purpose and was afraid I would slip back into that now. But after a recent talk with my sister, I realized that sometimes the purpose IS to be lost for a while. In that uncertainty, you can open up to other possibilities you wouldn’t have been able to see or have otherwise, and have some of the best times of your life.
Fred and I built an amazing farm together. We will always have that, and if we choose to, we can have it again.
As we step back from farming, we are stepping towards a new adventure together. We still aren’t 100% sure what that adventure will be, but I know it will be exactly what we need. And it will probably involve a motorcycle with a sidecar.
I will still post here from time to time, and in the future, it may become a blog with different content depending on where our new life takes us.
There is no way to thank you enough for your support, love, friendship, and for being a part of our farming journey. We couldn’t have done it without you.
Enjoy some of our favorite photos from our farm life.
xoxo,
Serena & Fred
It’s been a long time in the making and we are excited to share our farm life with you!
A month ago at pick-up, I had a chance to chat with a regular customer about her health. After a BIG health scare, her doctor had her on a diet that didn’t feel right to her–physically and common sense-wise.
