As a Farm Kid I Developed a Trauma Bond With the Land

Thanks so much for your generous tips! The white house made me afraid. Grass grew beneath the stairs leading up to the door. The wet, rotten steps sagged under their own weight. I feared something ravenous with fangs and claws waited in the shadows.I didn't want to go.“Come on,” my aunt urged. She was my dad's sister. She made me afraid too.She pulled on my arm like it was a leash and I was a dog.“Quit being stubborn, I said come on!”So I moved, reluctantly, one foot forward dragging the toe in the sand. She trotted up the rickety stairs, they flexed and whined. She was large.I looked down. I'd learned already it was best to look down. Eye contact gave them permission somehow, or maybe it was power. If you could look away they wouldn't do anything, though sometimes they grabbed you and forced you to meet their eyes.Demons in human form have the power to suck the life out of you. Even now there are men I don't want looking at my daughters.But back then I had the body of a boy and the spirit of a cautious animal.The white house was the first stop, but soon we’d be in the fields. Everyone had to pitch in. Our self-worth was determined by our usefulness.If you couldn't work, you couldn't do your fair share. If you couldn't do your fair share, you were a drain on the family.Farm life is hard. There's not enough to go around. There never is. The kids work. The kids drive tractors. The kids handle shovels.I remember my hands broken open and bleeding. I learned not to pop a blister because the raw skin beneath got torn up too quickly. We weren't allowed to wear gloves.“If I give you gloves, you'll spend all day playing with them. Just get to work. Your hands will toughen up soon enough.”To my surprise, they did. Our skin became leathery and we lost sensation in our fingers. We lost the delicate touch of childhood.They mentioned the term child labor at school, but we never thought it applied to us. Making kids work all day in the hot son was something we took pride in. It was part of our trauma bond with the land and our personal identities and our families.“Come join me son, remember the highs and forget the lows. That's what we've been doing for generations.”“What about those that never grow strong enough to do their fair share?”“They're drowned. They're tossed into a hay baler. They're run over by a tractor. They're dropped on their heads. They fall out of a truck.”This really happens to farm kids. The stories are buried in the news in the back pages. The old farmers shake their head, gnaw on a piece of grass, and say, “That's just the way of things, there's nothing that could have been done.”It's a life lived up against the wall. Sometimes you have to sacrifice your own children to keep egg prices low.At least they're not socialists. Except for the government subsidy checks, but they work hard for those, so that doesn't count.I can still smell the dust in the air.My aunt left me at the house with my other aunt, the one who'd married her illiterate student from the days she taught in Kentucky. He came to the door without a shirt and looked at me.“Can you take him?”“Aren't you supposed to watch him?”“Yeah, but I got something to do, it'll only be a few hours.”My uncle pinched my bicep. I made sure not to look him in the eye.“Kind of weak,” he said. Then he turned around and waved over his shoulder. “We'll get that worked out today.”Auntie released the leash and my arm dropped. “Well, go on then.”So I went, into the darkness, into the house my animal spirit told me not to go. The floor boards flexed. They kicked up dust. There was no finish. The walls were plain white and seemed in danger of crumbling to bits.The kids, and there were many, all had one precious thing hidden somewhere in one of the rooms. Maybe it was a tiny snow globe about the size of their fist. If they ever had a moment to spare, they’d gather up their magical thing and stare. But you couldn’t let anyone catch you dreaming, oh no.Eventually, the precious thing would be found and destroyed. Then they’d be adults.I caught the mark of a stain on the wall and I imagined it must be from a broken snow globe hurled in rage.“Let's get to work.”On that day, I worked with my cousins. I had a shovel. I wore tennis shoes. The ground was hard. I had to jump on the shovel to get the point into the earth. Jumping on the shovel hurt my feet. The wood of the handle was rough and hurt my hands.We worked all day until the sun set. My aunt returned to gather me up by the leash. I was taken home to my farm, and I was glad to be there because I knew I wouldn't be made to work as hard as my poor cousins.I'd seen that other people had it worse, so I was grateful. Gratitude means you’re not allowed to aspire to something better.It took me five decades to recognize my story needs to be told. The profit of my labor never went to the house with the crooked boards. My labor somehow went to a distant mansion I'd never see. Even with a day of free work, my cousins got no reprieve. They still lived in danger of being fed into the baler if they could no longer achieve.The old farmers squint to read the obituaries.That’s where the story ends.The enduring injustice and the hard work has robbed them of the will to protest.“That’s just how it is.”The only tears they might have cried, dried up like the liquid of a cracked snow globe, long, long ago.These are men who learned not to meet the gaze of a predator, so now they refuse to look up at anything at all. Instead, they cultivate their trauma bond with the dirt where they know their bodies will be returned.You all make this newsletter happen! Thanks for your sponsorship! I have payment tiers starting at as little as twenty dollars a year.Upgrade at 30% offUpgrade at 40% offUpgrade at 50% offUpgrade at 60% offI'm so happy you're here, and I'm looking forward to sharing more thoughts with you tomorrow.My CoSchedule referral linkHere’s my referral link to my preferred headline analyzer tool. If you sign up through this, it’s another way to support this newsletter (thank you). Get full access to I'd Rather Be Writing at walterrhein.substack.com/subscribe