As someone who grew up on an actual organic farm and did 4-H...*thank you*, " If you are interested in homesteading only because of how it looks or feels online, do not proceed unless you have enough money to pay actual farmers to do it for you on land you already own."
My parents didn't homestead, but my mom farmed and still has a huge garden and orchard.
Wanna "homestead"? Ok. Iowa farmland starts at about $11k/acre.
Farm work (not a gentleman's farm or owning 5 chickens) is dirty, hard, unpredictable work. As you said, it is really a lot of science and endless problem solving (farm equipment broke, local shop doesn't have the part, extra grasshoppers this year eating crops, no rain in August and corn is dry, etc, etc).
Fresh eggs, fresh vegetables and fruits, from-the-cow raw milk are the result of 5:30am wakeups in rain, sleet, or snow. It is more Carhartt overalls that smell like 💩 than milkmaid dresses.
I am typing this from my parent's farm, and it is beautiful here, and a wonderful break from Paris. But, good lord, farming is hard work.
My parents homesteaded before it was cool. Back in the 90s. Moved back to the Central Valley after my dad left the army. They leased the 3 acres of almonds then planted a giant garden, fruit orchard and 30 chickens. It was a fun childhood. But we eventually moved to a small town when my dad’s seizure disorder and working full time were too much. But, as you describe here, my parents love growing and caring for things so they still do that on a small scale in town, as do I. If you can’t afford acres and you still have to work full time, you can make your subdivision home a mini homestead. No one is forcing you to keep the lawn (well maybe the HOA but not in the back yard!)Turn that sucker into a plot of raised beds! You dont even have to post about it on instagram 😆 you can just plant peach trees in the front yard and give your neighbors bags of cherry tomatoes and eat way too much zucchini in the summer.
Yes, part of growing older is knowing yourself! I want to have several more children, cook from scratch, bake sourdough bread, write stories in my spare time, and read aloud to my family as much as I can, but I do NOT want to homestead. I saw my parents care for chickens and that was enough to put me off of it!
I've been working towards owning a homestead for a decade. After I met my husband and realized that homesteading was the type of lifestyle we both desired, everything we did was a baby step towards that goal.
We got married and had a small wedding we could afford out of pocket. We lived with my parents for almost five years while we paid off our student loans and bought our first house. Then we took all the overtime we could to pay off our vehicles before I gave birth to our first son. All the while I spent the time living in our tiny in-town house learning how to garden, can produce, and cook from scratch.
When my grandfather died and left my grandmother on their decrepit 15-acre farm that she couldn't handle herself, we offered to sell our tiny house near family to her. (The farm was too expensive for us to buy, unfortunately.) She bought our home, and we moved back in with my parents to continue to save money to buy land.
For the past year we lived with my parents, and I gave birth to our second son there. Fortunately, the day I went into labor we found a small 6-acre homestead with existing pastures and 5 buildings not including the house. It was affordable but far from where my husband works.
So we bought it, been here a few months. We've got our work cut out for us. But we figured we have a lifetime to make it what we want. It's not going to be easy, especially because I'm staying at home with my boys now.
But to get to this point, it has never been easy. People don't see the blood, sweat, and tears it takes to get where we are. I often felt stuck while our friends bought their houses before us and we were still living with my parents trying to pay off loans. Then the second time living with my parents, everyone I talked to who knew we were living with my parents with a toddler and heavily pregnant asked me, "How can you stand it?"
You have to learn how to be uncomfortable. And the small-scale experience I have with homesteading/subsistence living, you have to be uncomfortable with a lot of things. But the reward is so worth it.
I gave up on my homesteading dream a few years ago because I realized, having turned forty, that by the time I could buy the land and move I would be too old and too creaky (and my husband has acquired a bad back) to be able to handle animals, and it seemed wiser to be close to good medical care as we age.
I still grow vegetables, and can food, and will return to sewing when my babies are old enough not to be underfoot constantly. I keep the old ways as much as I am able to. But unfortunately HOA restrictions forbid me from keeping chickens on my suburban property, which frankly ought to be made unconstitutional.
Same, re: chickens. We even had a vote a few years ago to change the rule and the old biddies who were worried about coyotes/the neighborhood turning into a third world country won out. I was so mad!
Think this should just be extrapolated out to so many things. I thought I wanted to be an opera singer for nearly 2 decades. Turned out I mainly liked the idea of it and hated the reality. Narrowly escaped wasting thousands on training. Your advice to young women is spot on.
Re: music, creativity, homesteading. As a professional musician and educator, I remember a teacher quoting Stanislavsky: “You should love the art in yourself, not yourself in the art.” Doing anything creative and unusual takes deep motivation, not just the desire to slap a label or brand on your identity. Do whatever because you will not be a whole person without it. Otherwise, move on and find something else.
I took a permaculture class several years ago from a community of homesteaders and they had very intense and difficult lives that I don’t think most people could handle.
It’s interesting because one their biggest sources of income was instructing others on different facets of homesteading (mostly in permaculture and construction) and because of this they had to have online presences. While these particular people were fairly honest about their lifestyles and didn’t romanticize or glamorize them online, there certainly exists an incentive to do so among people who use instruction as one of their income streams. In this sense their hobby was homesteading, but their actual job was teaching and marketing a small business online.
For the first couple years of marriage, I’d look at my husband on the weekend and say - let’s go visit a farm. I want to be in a garden. I need to pet horses! I felt like a cooped up sheepdog! I’d done enough brunches, parties, yoga classes, and it was starting to feel so empty. I had my mind set on 5 acres somewhere. But that didn’t happen. I slowly started getting competent in the little things - baking, cooking from scratch, broth making, seed starting, companion planting, etc. Now, my urban garden is more than enough for me (though I am plotting for some chickens!) Going from scrolling to doing was game changing for me. I’m a totally different person! The life and joy that the garden gave me were exactly what I was searching for.
I got really annoyed when Ballerina Farm started to gain traction because we were working as caretakers on a ranch up in very rural WY, and while everyone was falling in love with the "homestead" lifestyle I was like...uh, this is super stressful because there's cows that could trample my small children and we have grizzly bears in the backyard. Also, my house is never clean. Ever. We didn't stay in that job because our employers were legitimately crazy but we learned a lot.
We did move cross country to set up a family compound with cousins, and there are animals, but also day jobs. It's stressful and our weekends are eaten by fencing and equipment getting stuck in the mud, but that doesn't feel too surprising because I expected it to be that way. I think most of my idealism wore off when I started to catch on to the huge chasm between social media and reality. The lifestyle is both privilege and sacrifice but one that's important to us because we really want good food for our family. I also don't mind processing meat, and find watching snorting piglets to be therapeutic. I am enjoying the fact that I get to go visit the animals but my children do the chores and my primary job is managing the food around the place --even if that means I got told not to get any meat out to thaw because we need to dispatch some roosters. I get super annoyed with the aesthetic shtick. Like, where are your kids muddy boots and are you constantly annoyed by the egg bucket that cannot go anywhere else besides on your dryer, right next to the clean clothes? Do we just not talk about how much dirt comes into the house with the garden produce?
I grew up on a farm and understand how much hard work homesteading is and how little money there is to be made doing it. When I say that I want to homestead, what I mean is that I want to own enough land to where I don’t have neighbors. I doubt I’d garden or raise any animals on the land. And it is true that it is increasingly difficult to achieve that lifestyle. With more people around and a dwindling supply of land, affording the acreage is out of reach. If you do it, you have to have a good income separate from the homestead.
I think that’s common for men to want the physical boundary from neighbors that land provides. I actually know a lot of people who have land for that purpose and they do not work the land at all. Very common in mountain regions
Yes, I love the mountains: the darkness, silence, and cold weather. A lot of small mountain towns are seeing the billionaires start to push out the millionaires so it's getting more difficult to find land.
My wife wanted some land to hobby farm. I just liked the idea of some bush at the back of the property, and later to put a model railway on it. Never happened, alas
I connect with this so much as a writer and as someone who grew up on a farm!
I didn’t really enjoy farm life, always preferring to be inside with a book to anything outside on the farm. My favorite outside activity as a child was crawling up onto high spaces—barn roofs, etc—and looking out over the horizon, pondering my thoughts. And playing with our many cats. The rest was not appealing to me at all.
My husband would love to live on an acreage and have a little homestead, and it feels like a hard no for me. Our lovely friend group at church is all farmers and homesteaders; we are the only ones who live in town😄 So I apparently love the vibe of people who do that work—I’ve actually never really connected the dots that they are by nature (or desire) creative, outside-the-box folks! But I do not want to do it. I want to sit inside and read and write.
Ok, you're convincing me that I'm right I should not be homesteading (not that I was ever confused about that. I'm the kind of person who complains about being on a beach because there's sand. I do NOT deal well with rough textures or strong smells, as one would find on a homestead. I got rid of half of the previous tenant's plants, and kept the really healthy ones out of guilt- but you bet I'd never willingly add to this collection). But I should be writing. Because god knows I spend way too much time on this platform (among others) writing long comments. Even with a bunch of kids and lots to do, somehow I still manage to vomit out hundreds if not thousands of words a day. Maybe this one won't turn out very long. That'd be an outlier. Might as well spend some more effort and craft them into actual essays.
Yes to the sacrifices! We alll have to make choices about what to prioritize and how to manage those priorities given our own circumstances; and the vast majority of us will never get everything we want. But each of us get to choose how we focus our energy, and we reap what we sow.
An old friend from high school and I had always dreamed of being writers. A couple decades later I'll occasionally hear from her and she'll either ask me point blank to set up a phone call between her and one of my editors, just cuz, or she'll tell me that she'd really like to be a writer 'like me' but that being a mom of young children is just too time-consuming. (Our kids are literally the same age. One time I finally pointed this out to her and she suggested she must like spending time with her kids more than I do). Anyway, every time she and I do this little song-and-dance, I arrive at the same place you've so eloquently described here. I ask - so, what are you reading? How often do you journal? Because I have done these things and still do them just about every hour of the day. For every piece I publish there are easily 10 that no one cared about, or that I never even submitted. I think social media did this to us - the "exhibiting" of ourselves has become way more important than the "being."
“One time I finally pointed this out to her and she suggested she must like spending time with her kids more than I do).” LOLOLOL
Classic girl behavior. Yeah, you’re a writer because you just are a shit mom. I’ve heard that one so many times. Your house is clean because you must be a shit mom. Your husband likes you because you must be a shit mom. Etc.
In the end, we are what we do. Not everyone has to be everything.
Also, women who are happy to be mothers and nothing else are fortunate. Women who are happy to work and do nothing else are also fortunate. Happy people are fortunate.
People who do more than one thing are often unhappy just doing that one thing, and so they are driven to do more. That’s not necessarily something to envy because if you can be happy focusing on one thing, that can be blissful.
I recently learned that a SAHM I know (who writes essays and poetry and publishes frequently) had her husband watch the kids at night so she could do book clubs, had her husband watch the kids while she went on writers’ retreats, had her husband watch the kids while she traveled to conferences, and so on. It was no longer a mystery to me how she managed to care for her kiddos and home and write at the same time - she, uh, doesn’t do it all.
Usually, if something isn’t quite adding up…. there’s invisible support behind the scenes, whether financial help or family help. I have no doubt you are not an exception to this rule.
Speaking for myself here, yes my husband and I raise our children together. I think this framing here is a little strange, to be honest. Every time I'm home alone with my kids, I'm not framing it as "I'm taking care of the kids right now so that my husband can work." If I were to put words to it, it would be "I'm taking care of my kids right now because I'm their mom." My husband does lots of things during the work day that isn't directly career-related - he gets his hair cut, gets his oil changed, has lunch with friends, etc. Even in those moments we don't think of it in a transactional sense, like "Ok, I'll agree to stay home with the kids because you've decided to pursue a life of regular haircuts." It's just... parenting.
In my kids' baby and toddler years, I literally wrote at night (usually starting at 10 pm until around midnight) while they and my husband were sleeping. Now I write when they're at school. Sometimes if I'm reading a book that's not graphic or violent, I literally read out loud while they're hanging out with me. There are moms who talk about "wishing" they could read and write but who choose not to. They are not any less moral than I am, they just don't want to do their life this way. I could do more writing and reading if I wasn't their mom, but that's about the worst life I could imagine.
someone may want to to write novels like john irving but they don’t want to to write one sentence at a time on individual index cards and pin them to the wall and slowly craft a story from end to beginning like he does. they may want to write like stephen king but they don’t want to be holed up and hunched over in a small bare room writing and rewriting the story until it finally sings.. if they did, they’d already be doing it! great point.
As someone who grew up on an actual organic farm and did 4-H...*thank you*, " If you are interested in homesteading only because of how it looks or feels online, do not proceed unless you have enough money to pay actual farmers to do it for you on land you already own."
My parents didn't homestead, but my mom farmed and still has a huge garden and orchard.
Wanna "homestead"? Ok. Iowa farmland starts at about $11k/acre.
Farm work (not a gentleman's farm or owning 5 chickens) is dirty, hard, unpredictable work. As you said, it is really a lot of science and endless problem solving (farm equipment broke, local shop doesn't have the part, extra grasshoppers this year eating crops, no rain in August and corn is dry, etc, etc).
Fresh eggs, fresh vegetables and fruits, from-the-cow raw milk are the result of 5:30am wakeups in rain, sleet, or snow. It is more Carhartt overalls that smell like 💩 than milkmaid dresses.
I am typing this from my parent's farm, and it is beautiful here, and a wonderful break from Paris. But, good lord, farming is hard work.
My parents homesteaded before it was cool. Back in the 90s. Moved back to the Central Valley after my dad left the army. They leased the 3 acres of almonds then planted a giant garden, fruit orchard and 30 chickens. It was a fun childhood. But we eventually moved to a small town when my dad’s seizure disorder and working full time were too much. But, as you describe here, my parents love growing and caring for things so they still do that on a small scale in town, as do I. If you can’t afford acres and you still have to work full time, you can make your subdivision home a mini homestead. No one is forcing you to keep the lawn (well maybe the HOA but not in the back yard!)Turn that sucker into a plot of raised beds! You dont even have to post about it on instagram 😆 you can just plant peach trees in the front yard and give your neighbors bags of cherry tomatoes and eat way too much zucchini in the summer.
So true. You don’t need much space to make a paradise
Love the concept of making one's suburban yard a tiny homestead. :)
It's the best! 😊
It’s such a great solution for people who don’t want to live on a farm. I grew up on an organic farm and now live in Paris.
There are so many ways to make life work, no matter where we are :)
Yes, part of growing older is knowing yourself! I want to have several more children, cook from scratch, bake sourdough bread, write stories in my spare time, and read aloud to my family as much as I can, but I do NOT want to homestead. I saw my parents care for chickens and that was enough to put me off of it!
I've been working towards owning a homestead for a decade. After I met my husband and realized that homesteading was the type of lifestyle we both desired, everything we did was a baby step towards that goal.
We got married and had a small wedding we could afford out of pocket. We lived with my parents for almost five years while we paid off our student loans and bought our first house. Then we took all the overtime we could to pay off our vehicles before I gave birth to our first son. All the while I spent the time living in our tiny in-town house learning how to garden, can produce, and cook from scratch.
When my grandfather died and left my grandmother on their decrepit 15-acre farm that she couldn't handle herself, we offered to sell our tiny house near family to her. (The farm was too expensive for us to buy, unfortunately.) She bought our home, and we moved back in with my parents to continue to save money to buy land.
For the past year we lived with my parents, and I gave birth to our second son there. Fortunately, the day I went into labor we found a small 6-acre homestead with existing pastures and 5 buildings not including the house. It was affordable but far from where my husband works.
So we bought it, been here a few months. We've got our work cut out for us. But we figured we have a lifetime to make it what we want. It's not going to be easy, especially because I'm staying at home with my boys now.
But to get to this point, it has never been easy. People don't see the blood, sweat, and tears it takes to get where we are. I often felt stuck while our friends bought their houses before us and we were still living with my parents trying to pay off loans. Then the second time living with my parents, everyone I talked to who knew we were living with my parents with a toddler and heavily pregnant asked me, "How can you stand it?"
You have to learn how to be uncomfortable. And the small-scale experience I have with homesteading/subsistence living, you have to be uncomfortable with a lot of things. But the reward is so worth it.
*you have to learn how to be uncomfortable*
Yes.
I gave up on my homesteading dream a few years ago because I realized, having turned forty, that by the time I could buy the land and move I would be too old and too creaky (and my husband has acquired a bad back) to be able to handle animals, and it seemed wiser to be close to good medical care as we age.
I still grow vegetables, and can food, and will return to sewing when my babies are old enough not to be underfoot constantly. I keep the old ways as much as I am able to. But unfortunately HOA restrictions forbid me from keeping chickens on my suburban property, which frankly ought to be made unconstitutional.
Completely unconstitutional 👎🏼
Same, re: chickens. We even had a vote a few years ago to change the rule and the old biddies who were worried about coyotes/the neighborhood turning into a third world country won out. I was so mad!
Think this should just be extrapolated out to so many things. I thought I wanted to be an opera singer for nearly 2 decades. Turned out I mainly liked the idea of it and hated the reality. Narrowly escaped wasting thousands on training. Your advice to young women is spot on.
Re: music, creativity, homesteading. As a professional musician and educator, I remember a teacher quoting Stanislavsky: “You should love the art in yourself, not yourself in the art.” Doing anything creative and unusual takes deep motivation, not just the desire to slap a label or brand on your identity. Do whatever because you will not be a whole person without it. Otherwise, move on and find something else.
Really important points you make!
I took a permaculture class several years ago from a community of homesteaders and they had very intense and difficult lives that I don’t think most people could handle.
It’s interesting because one their biggest sources of income was instructing others on different facets of homesteading (mostly in permaculture and construction) and because of this they had to have online presences. While these particular people were fairly honest about their lifestyles and didn’t romanticize or glamorize them online, there certainly exists an incentive to do so among people who use instruction as one of their income streams. In this sense their hobby was homesteading, but their actual job was teaching and marketing a small business online.
For the first couple years of marriage, I’d look at my husband on the weekend and say - let’s go visit a farm. I want to be in a garden. I need to pet horses! I felt like a cooped up sheepdog! I’d done enough brunches, parties, yoga classes, and it was starting to feel so empty. I had my mind set on 5 acres somewhere. But that didn’t happen. I slowly started getting competent in the little things - baking, cooking from scratch, broth making, seed starting, companion planting, etc. Now, my urban garden is more than enough for me (though I am plotting for some chickens!) Going from scrolling to doing was game changing for me. I’m a totally different person! The life and joy that the garden gave me were exactly what I was searching for.
I got really annoyed when Ballerina Farm started to gain traction because we were working as caretakers on a ranch up in very rural WY, and while everyone was falling in love with the "homestead" lifestyle I was like...uh, this is super stressful because there's cows that could trample my small children and we have grizzly bears in the backyard. Also, my house is never clean. Ever. We didn't stay in that job because our employers were legitimately crazy but we learned a lot.
We did move cross country to set up a family compound with cousins, and there are animals, but also day jobs. It's stressful and our weekends are eaten by fencing and equipment getting stuck in the mud, but that doesn't feel too surprising because I expected it to be that way. I think most of my idealism wore off when I started to catch on to the huge chasm between social media and reality. The lifestyle is both privilege and sacrifice but one that's important to us because we really want good food for our family. I also don't mind processing meat, and find watching snorting piglets to be therapeutic. I am enjoying the fact that I get to go visit the animals but my children do the chores and my primary job is managing the food around the place --even if that means I got told not to get any meat out to thaw because we need to dispatch some roosters. I get super annoyed with the aesthetic shtick. Like, where are your kids muddy boots and are you constantly annoyed by the egg bucket that cannot go anywhere else besides on your dryer, right next to the clean clothes? Do we just not talk about how much dirt comes into the house with the garden produce?
I grew up on a farm and understand how much hard work homesteading is and how little money there is to be made doing it. When I say that I want to homestead, what I mean is that I want to own enough land to where I don’t have neighbors. I doubt I’d garden or raise any animals on the land. And it is true that it is increasingly difficult to achieve that lifestyle. With more people around and a dwindling supply of land, affording the acreage is out of reach. If you do it, you have to have a good income separate from the homestead.
I think that’s common for men to want the physical boundary from neighbors that land provides. I actually know a lot of people who have land for that purpose and they do not work the land at all. Very common in mountain regions
Yes, I love the mountains: the darkness, silence, and cold weather. A lot of small mountain towns are seeing the billionaires start to push out the millionaires so it's getting more difficult to find land.
My wife wanted some land to hobby farm. I just liked the idea of some bush at the back of the property, and later to put a model railway on it. Never happened, alas
I connect with this so much as a writer and as someone who grew up on a farm!
I didn’t really enjoy farm life, always preferring to be inside with a book to anything outside on the farm. My favorite outside activity as a child was crawling up onto high spaces—barn roofs, etc—and looking out over the horizon, pondering my thoughts. And playing with our many cats. The rest was not appealing to me at all.
My husband would love to live on an acreage and have a little homestead, and it feels like a hard no for me. Our lovely friend group at church is all farmers and homesteaders; we are the only ones who live in town😄 So I apparently love the vibe of people who do that work—I’ve actually never really connected the dots that they are by nature (or desire) creative, outside-the-box folks! But I do not want to do it. I want to sit inside and read and write.
Also, science was and continues to be my very least favorite subject! It all tracks😂
Ok, you're convincing me that I'm right I should not be homesteading (not that I was ever confused about that. I'm the kind of person who complains about being on a beach because there's sand. I do NOT deal well with rough textures or strong smells, as one would find on a homestead. I got rid of half of the previous tenant's plants, and kept the really healthy ones out of guilt- but you bet I'd never willingly add to this collection). But I should be writing. Because god knows I spend way too much time on this platform (among others) writing long comments. Even with a bunch of kids and lots to do, somehow I still manage to vomit out hundreds if not thousands of words a day. Maybe this one won't turn out very long. That'd be an outlier. Might as well spend some more effort and craft them into actual essays.
Yes to the sacrifices! We alll have to make choices about what to prioritize and how to manage those priorities given our own circumstances; and the vast majority of us will never get everything we want. But each of us get to choose how we focus our energy, and we reap what we sow.
Yes! We Reap What We Sew!
An old friend from high school and I had always dreamed of being writers. A couple decades later I'll occasionally hear from her and she'll either ask me point blank to set up a phone call between her and one of my editors, just cuz, or she'll tell me that she'd really like to be a writer 'like me' but that being a mom of young children is just too time-consuming. (Our kids are literally the same age. One time I finally pointed this out to her and she suggested she must like spending time with her kids more than I do). Anyway, every time she and I do this little song-and-dance, I arrive at the same place you've so eloquently described here. I ask - so, what are you reading? How often do you journal? Because I have done these things and still do them just about every hour of the day. For every piece I publish there are easily 10 that no one cared about, or that I never even submitted. I think social media did this to us - the "exhibiting" of ourselves has become way more important than the "being."
“One time I finally pointed this out to her and she suggested she must like spending time with her kids more than I do).” LOLOLOL
Classic girl behavior. Yeah, you’re a writer because you just are a shit mom. I’ve heard that one so many times. Your house is clean because you must be a shit mom. Your husband likes you because you must be a shit mom. Etc.
In the end, we are what we do. Not everyone has to be everything.
Also, women who are happy to be mothers and nothing else are fortunate. Women who are happy to work and do nothing else are also fortunate. Happy people are fortunate.
People who do more than one thing are often unhappy just doing that one thing, and so they are driven to do more. That’s not necessarily something to envy because if you can be happy focusing on one thing, that can be blissful.
I recently learned that a SAHM I know (who writes essays and poetry and publishes frequently) had her husband watch the kids at night so she could do book clubs, had her husband watch the kids while she went on writers’ retreats, had her husband watch the kids while she traveled to conferences, and so on. It was no longer a mystery to me how she managed to care for her kiddos and home and write at the same time - she, uh, doesn’t do it all.
Usually, if something isn’t quite adding up…. there’s invisible support behind the scenes, whether financial help or family help. I have no doubt you are not an exception to this rule.
Speaking for myself here, yes my husband and I raise our children together. I think this framing here is a little strange, to be honest. Every time I'm home alone with my kids, I'm not framing it as "I'm taking care of the kids right now so that my husband can work." If I were to put words to it, it would be "I'm taking care of my kids right now because I'm their mom." My husband does lots of things during the work day that isn't directly career-related - he gets his hair cut, gets his oil changed, has lunch with friends, etc. Even in those moments we don't think of it in a transactional sense, like "Ok, I'll agree to stay home with the kids because you've decided to pursue a life of regular haircuts." It's just... parenting.
In my kids' baby and toddler years, I literally wrote at night (usually starting at 10 pm until around midnight) while they and my husband were sleeping. Now I write when they're at school. Sometimes if I'm reading a book that's not graphic or violent, I literally read out loud while they're hanging out with me. There are moms who talk about "wishing" they could read and write but who choose not to. They are not any less moral than I am, they just don't want to do their life this way. I could do more writing and reading if I wasn't their mom, but that's about the worst life I could imagine.
This is absolutely true.
someone may want to to write novels like john irving but they don’t want to to write one sentence at a time on individual index cards and pin them to the wall and slowly craft a story from end to beginning like he does. they may want to write like stephen king but they don’t want to be holed up and hunched over in a small bare room writing and rewriting the story until it finally sings.. if they did, they’d already be doing it! great point.