Stacking, scraping, shoveling

The unexpected gift of chores

Always volunteering for the chores with the highest degree of danger

There is a family who lives around the corner from us whose lives are very different from ours. For one, their three young children, roughly the same age as my own, always appear to be working. The family owns and runs a small dairy farm, the kind that seems to make only enough money to pay for equipment repairs and little else.

I see them intermittently—sometimes during hay season when they come to cut and bale our fields, the kids riding inside the cab of their parents’ tractor, watching my kids blow bubbles in the yard through the dusty glass. Sometimes at the Memorial Day Parade in town where, this year, the 6-year-old girl handed my son candy from her own bag after another kid snatched a lollipop from his grasp. Just this week I drove past their farm, and all three kids were outside the barn in knee-deep mud, with shovels digging a trench to drain water. Each time I see them, they seem dramatically older, leaner, more adult-like, though they are only 10, 6, and 5.

Meanwhile, I’m desperately wishing to preserve my own children in early childhood. This, I understand, is an immense privilege. I don’t need their help. I’m not counting the days until they can shoulder some of the load. I want them to be little, to play and dream for as long as possible.

This has, of course, been a slow evolution over the course of many generations. My grandfather, the one who was born in the house that I live in now, was at work in the dairy barn as soon as he could grasp a milk pail. There was no rest, no play that he can remember. His daughter (my mother) was one of seven and manned the grill at her family-run golf course when she was seven. If she wanted free time she had to steal it—lingering on the walk home from school, sneaking away to a friend’s house. I’m one of four who had standard household chores but also chores related to my family’s small businesses—cleaning stalls, scrubbing water troughs, washing mirrors in the dance studio. Some of my clearest childhood memories revolve around feeling completely overwhelmed by chores, though my parents were careful to give us free time whenever they could.

And now here I am, on an old farm on its way to being a working one, with two small kids. My oldest, six, has tasks he’s meant to do, though we have not labeled them “chores.” I try to make them enjoyable (you can listen to a podcast while you empty the dishwasher!) or logical (if you pick up fallen branches around the house in this direction, you’ll be done quicker!) It feels (and sounds, as I’m typing this) absurd that I’m treading so carefully on this front, coaxing him forward with little breadcrumbs of encouragement, especially as, just next door, his peers are feeding cows before school. But I do have a point, or at least I think I do. I’m trying to magick a mindset.

My own relationship with chores, which has passed from the deep resentment of my childhood into something approximating pleasure, is the reason for all this careful coaxing. Why do I enjoy chores now, as an adult, when I didn’t as a child? Of course, it’s both pleasurable to take care of one’s things (that one spends money on), and pleasurable to take care of the people/animals one loves (and is responsible for). But it’s more selfish that, for me. I enjoy chores because they’re a break from the complex. Chores are discreet tasks that are capable of being completed. For the time it takes me to clean stalls, fill water buckets, distribute hay and blow the aisle, I can’t be expected to do anything else. In the time it takes me to sit quietly on the couch and fold clothes into neat stacks, I can’t be faulted (by myself, mostly) for not doing more. In a life that feels like an ongoing list of pending or to-be-completed items, chores can, if you squint really hard, seem like a gift.

Just this month, my six-year-old has volunteered to help me with chores during his free time, entirely unprompted. I wanted to shout from the rooftops when he asked, “Can I help?”

I was more emotional about the whole thing than I’d like to admit, but this is the place where I do just that sort of thing, so I’ll say it: standing across from my first grader as he pitched lengths of wood to me to stack made me want to fall to my knees in gratitude. Looking up at him as he pushed shavings down to me to, again, stack, made me want to weep with appreciation. He didn’t help for long, maybe twenty minutes, but it was enough for me to see that the fact that my husband and I work hard and uncomplainingly hasn’t been lost on him. That the way we’ve modeled doing our share and caring for each other and our animals and our garden is sinking in.

Of course, it’s far too soon to say, and there may soon be a time when we have our own dairy and we will need his help, desperately. But for now, I have that parent thing that sometimes blooms in your chest, that fizzes in your brain: pride for who he is now, and hope for the person he might become.