What a season y’all
A couple weeks ago I made a post on one of my private facebook groups, Abundance+, because I’ve often found it to be a supportive platform to voice long and seemingly incremental progresses towards homesteading goals. I’d commented and posted a few times previously, about this or that, bouncing ideas off more seasoned gardeners and picking brains for new ideas, but I posted this one in the form of a “season” recap because that was easiest for my brain to churn out.
This season of life that I’m in seems never-ending. We welcomed our son in early March, our first baby, in the thick of Covid, and with both sets of baby’s grandparents in tow we continued our daily grind. It was clear from the get-go that my postpartum experience was going to be rough, but I’m glad we didn’t understand how bad it would feel to go through this season of life beforehand. We’ve needed the blind hope to keep us going.
When I posted my season recap on this group, I was completely unprepared for the response. I was expecting a couple “good job!”s and “Keep at it mama!”s, but what I found over the next couple weeks was an outpouring of response about my story. The nature of the telling, the content, what it inspired in their own hearts, all of it. To the tune of 64 heartfelt comments.
These comments included a gracious invitation from Dr. Chris Boman, Pediatric and Prenatal Chiropractor and host of The Healthy Perspective podcast, to guest speak on his podcast. I was a bit flabbergasted and TOTALLY STOKED, so I immediately accepted.
Three days later we were facetiming and recording our conversation about the nature of mindset change when you’re thoroughly in a season of never-ending crisis, and how that relates to a sense of self-value. I don’t want to give away any spoilers, but I did want to share the initial post I made that inspired my connection to Dr. Boman and the celebration amidst the pain that I’ve been holding dear in my heart since. Yea it sounds sappy, but every fraction of joy I can snatch and stash in my heart makes a difference right now.
So here’s the post…plus some added pictures and comments from present-day Jessica =)
This was a huge year for me.
In January I created my business - all the back end stuff, website, cards, stickers, licenses. I invested a total of $1500 into my business.
This was when I decided to revamp my webpage, and use it as a blog too.
In February I signed up for my town’s farmers market, and had no idea what would sell but I could bring sourdough bread, eggs, and plant starts. I planted the majority of my seed stash that had been sitting in a box in my closet for years.
I grew two batches of starts - one as a test, the second to fix the inevitable mistakes I made with the first batch.
In March I had our son Hugo our first baby. December 2019 and January 2020 I’d had two surgeries for a scary partial molar pregnancy, and realized I was at high risk for severe postpartum depression.
We couldn’t believe he came out with hair, I was bald till I was three!
In April we realized, yes, postpartum was going to be a very long road of recovery for me. I started seeing doctors and working with therapists. One of my permits, the more expensive one, stalled and selling bread at the market was out.
Five days after his birth Hugo needed to go back in to the hospital because he was horribly jaundiced. My milk took five full days to come in, and he lost 11% of his body weight during that time. Eight weeks after that I had surgery to correct an extremely painful anal fissure, brought about by the birth and exacerbated by my postpartum anxiety and postpartum ocd. I looked like this every second of every day for months.
In May I started the farmers market season two days after a minor surgery to correct a painful complication likely from the birth. I took oxy for the first time in my life, rather than miss my first day. Only brought plant starts, because so many other vendors brought their eggs. Even duck eggs.
Mine and Hugo’s first market day. I had no idea if we could really do it, and asked my mom to come help because I’d just gone through outpatient surgery and my energy was very very low. My goal was to do the market season WITH my baby, to try and make the space for the mama-baby bond I hadn’t yet felt.
By June I was selling over $100 of plant starts per week, and I couldn’t believe I was actually doing it. I’d signed up to share my booth with another first time vendor, also named Jessica (it was a sign) and I’d already managed to pay off my half of the market fees and accumulated a couple hundred dollars worth of profit, and a handful of repeat customers. It was also the time when my postpartum started to get so bad I wound up staying at a hotel for three days to separate myself from our baby, at the very strong suggestion of my doctors.
The farmers market was one of the only times I felt like a human being. At home I was struggling to connect with anybody, and became more of a danger than a caregiver to Hugo. The picture on the right is of the amount of hair that I was shedding daily, huge handful sized clumps, all plastered to the shower wall of the hotel I stayed in for three days while my amazing partner caretook full time. I wish I could say it helped or fixed my postpartum struggles. What it did do was allow me to not feel violent towards my son, that’s it, but we made that progress work.
In July I started delivering starts and bread to whoever wanted them, and to my astonishment, people really wanted them! I kept going to my doctors appointments (some virtual, some physical therapy) and my body continued healing.
I sold about a loaf per week for $5 a loaf. It wound up connecting me to additional buyers for my starts and seeds, but it was worth it just to get me out of the house once a week. Plus, sourdough breadmaking is a cheap form of therapy IMHO.
August was slow, as far as money goes, but it was also the month I reflected most on what had worked and what hadn’t so far and what changes I could make. I took $500 of my proceeds and bought a GOOD upright deep freezer for our garage. Regulars came to see Hugo, even if they weren’t buying from me, and told me to keep going
The lack of sales in August really let me sit back and take a look at what I’d created. I found myself wanting to document my experience through video and pictures more, as writing was still really hard. I wanted to write but I couldn’t finish my sentences before my brain went totally blank. Pictured above are my thumbnails from my Rye Harvesting video and my Postpartum Resources video on my youtube channel:
In September I realized I might actually get through this market season. I took $200 and bought 48 lbs of grass fed organically raised beef from my friend who had purchased 1/4 cow and offered to go in on it with me. I immediately stuck it in my freezer, and with the salmon fillets my dad had caught for us my freezer was suddenly 3/4 full of good fresh (frozen) food. It was bittersweet, and I was exhausted.
This was such a fun evening. We opened up Katy’s garage, laid out all the meat from the boxes she’d just picked up from her local butcher, and divvied up the cuts per what we knew we wanted, and what I wanted to try out. I can’t even COMMUNICATE the texture difference between the best store-bought organic meat I can find at the store, and THIS STUFF. This meat is vastly superior, and the fat is like actual butter in texture and flavor. I didn’t know it could DO that.
October was over in a flash. Just two market days in October, and in between them a six day road trip from Sedro to Palo Alto California so we could avoid airports - just me, my mom, and my baby, the hubby had school he couldn’t miss. He’s getting certified to be an EMT at the refinery he works in, and I’m so so so proud. In California I got to introduce my grandmother to her first great grandchild, Covid be damned.
In just the span of 10 months I’ve flipped our family’s food supply on its head, and mine is still spinning from it. My goal was to take that $1500 investment and grow a business that could feed our family for a year in the most literal sense, and I can’t tell if I fell short or massively beyond that goal. Gardeners in my community know my business by name, if they don’t know me personally now, and I’m “in” with a farmers market that DOUBLES food stamp money that people bring in. You bring in $40 of food stamp money, you get to spend $80 at the market on everything from fresh produce to plants to seeds to plant your own garden. Nothing made me happier than giving away extra plant starts to anyone kid who wandered too close to my booth.
I don’t have words to explain the feeling of having so much food, and knowing it all has quality I can’t even PAY for in the stores. Store-bought produce and meats taste flavorless and stringy to me now. I’m totally totally ruined. This holds an extremely high value in my home and heart.
All this to say: it’s really nice to have a space to share these types of personal victories, and to know there’s other people who care as deeply as I do about food here’s a pic from my last market day (today). I was this week’s featured vendor and I might just frame the little print out I’m so proud.
This picture was taken October 13th, on the last day of the Sedro-Woolley Farmer’s Market season. Our market is quite small, maybe 20 vendors at the very most, but usually closer to 10, and still brought about incredible change in my family and in the lives of the regulars who I developed working relationships with. It was truly surprising to me just how much I had tried to belittle my own impact both in my household and in my community, because this wasn’t my idea of “large scale change”.
LESSON LEARNED.
