TRAD: Chapter 31

I didn’t know what to expect when I stepped back into the house I grew up in, but it wasn’t a party in full swing. Well, maybe a party wasn’t the right word for it. There was no alcohol or dancing, of course, but the mood in the kitchen was more jovial than one would have thought for having our mother in critical condition. Over twenty people crowded around the long table we’d sat at daily to do homework and read our Bibles.

Our mother, on the brink of death, and everyone was laughing, passing around food and drink. It was another contradiction I wasn’t prepared for as I walked inside and took stock of the people I hadn’t seen in over ten years. I fought the itch to get out my phone and post something as Martha.

She’d become my security blanket when I was anxious, and right now, that anxiety was off the charts. But seeing everyone, I realized that even in her sickness, our mother had done something incredible: she’d gotten us all under the same roof again.

The Chambers siblings. One of the biggest families at our church (beat only by the Petersons, who had fifteen kids). We were known throughout town, not as individuals, but as a collective unit. But we were individuals: Seth, Bess, Asher, Abigail, Miriam, Joshua, Lydia, Sarah, David, Able, Caleb, Noah, and me, Hannah.

The noise died down when Sarah and I walked into the brightly lit kitchen. It was like stepping back in time. The cracked linoleum floors, the religious cross-stitch framed on the walls, the peeling, faded maroon wallpaper offset with wooden paneling. It smelled exactly the same, like homemade chicken stock and fresh cinnamon, and I wondered if Bess had been keeping up with house chores while Mom was in the hospital.

Suddenly, I was eight and learning multiplication at the same table. I was thirteen, doing my devotions before chores. I was eighteen, crying because I didn’t want to court Silas. I was 21, walking out of the kitchen and never coming back.

I wasn’t sure what kind of reception we’d get, but smiles broke out on all of the faces. It wasn’t just my siblings, it was their spouses and their children, people I’d never met but knew everything about me, welcoming me home.

Noah, the brother who was closest in age to me, wrapped me in a bear hug. “So glad you’re back, Hannah. I missed you.” We looked so much alike, people thought we were twins. I wanted to do everything with him.

I hugged him back, and memories of us together came rushing back. Running through the hay mow. Making forts out in the fields, hiding from our older brothers when they called for Noah to come help with chores. Sitting in the back of our 15-passenger van on the way to church, giggling as we bounced over bumps and potholes.

It was funny how I’d forgotten the smaller moments over the past ten years. It wasn’t that I was seeing it through rose colored glasses, but I could see it through a different lens now.

“Good to see you too.” And it was. As I looked around, I was amazed to see how everyone had changed in the years I’d been gone. As the youngest, some of my older siblings were in their 40s, and their kids were getting older. People were greying, a few of my brothers were putting up a losing fight against receding hairlines, and there were plenty of children I didn’t recognize or even know had been born. Guilt shot through my chest at that.

“How’s New York treating you?” Noah asked me, pushing his glasses up on the bridge of his nose. “I’ve been following the articles you’ve written. They’re good.”

I looked at him in disbelief. “What? How?”

He laughed. “What, you think we don’t have internet here? This is Wisconsin, Hannah, not the moon. We all have phones. They’re even smartphones, if you can believe it.”

“I mean, Mom and Dad didn’t have internet or cell phones when we were growing up.”

“Han, that was years ago. They have reluctantly moved into the modern age; even they have cell phones now.” He said this sarcastically, but his eyes twinkled. “Whenever you publish an article, I send it to the sibling group chat.”

“There’s a sibling group chat?” Not only was I shocked at this reveal, but I was a little hurt that I wasn’t in the chat. But then again, why would I be? I’d opted out of everything in this family, including group chats.

“Yup,” he said. “We’re missing two members. Happy to add you if you want.” I very much wanted to be added, to be included in whatever sibling bonding had been happening without me knowing. None of this helped my conflicted feelings, the way I shied away from entering the house, but wanted to race in and hug everyone at the same time.

Would I ever stop feeling this way, like I was torn between two worlds? There was a part of me that felt settled back on the land I’d been born on (literally, I’d been born at home), and the way I wanted nothing more than to be back in my studio apartment with Jordan or Danny.

“Yeah, add me. I have FOMO on the chat. And I have a new article coming out tomorrow,” I said. “I hope you like it.” Another question gnawed at me. “If you’re all seeing my articles, how come no one reached out to me? My email address is always at the end of every piece.”

Noah sighed. “When Sarah left, she made it clear she didn’t want us to contact her.” I remembered this. When Sarah moved to New York to marry Connor, after she told our parents what she was doing, she’d left them a letter detailing why she’d gone and requesting they not try to look for her. My mother was so angry, she crumpled it up and threw it in the trash, then told the rest of us that if she heard we’d talked to her, we’d be in big trouble. “Then, when you left, it kind of pushed her over the edge. She told me it was easier to pretend you didn’t exist. And….” He trailed off.

“What?”

“It’s not that we forgot you existed, please don’t take it that way. But when you left, all of us were deep in the weeds with our own families and jobs, and the farm. Dad was getting older, and all of us boys were pitching in more to make sure he didn’t hurt himself. We cared about you, we never stopped, but we had a lot going on.”

It felt like I’d swallowed a rock. Doesn’t every youngest child have a complex about people forgetting about them? And now someone had said it to my face. It stung, knowing they’d gone on with their lives, not worrying about me.

“We knew you’d be with Sarah,” he said, seeing the look on my face. “If we thought you were in any danger, we’d have tried to look for you. But we knew you two were always so close and you’d be safe with her.”

“So you just let your baby sister high-tail it to a city she’d never been to and hope Sarah would take care of her? Sounds exactly like the way things have always been around here.”

“Don’t be mad,” Noah said, and his eyebrows furrowed. I could never stay mad at him, not when he stole my one doll and hid it up a tree where it stayed all night, and not now. “When your articles started coming out, we knew you were okay. And we could cheer you on from a distance. I always knew you’d come back, I just didn’t think it would be under circumstances like this.”

I wasn’t completely absolving them of their abandonment, but I realized the phone worked two ways. “I guess I could have called or emailed or figured something out too,” I said.

“Besides, aren’t you living the life you always wanted? Working at a fancy magazine and having your name in headlines?”

It was a byline, but I wasn’t going to correct him. “It’s a good life,” I admitted. “I’m happy in New York.”

“We’re all glad you came home,” Noah said. “Back where you belong. I’m gonna go get something to drink. You need anything?”

I wasn’t sure he was right. I didn’t belong there, not anymore. But I shook my head and moved on to the next nearly identical conversation with a sibling I hadn’t spoken to in a decade. When I surfaced to take a breath, I walked out the back door and sneaked off to the barn to check out the cows. I called Lottie on my walk over.

“How’s your mom?” She said right away.

“Not great,” I replied, pushing open the door that led to the barn. The smell that hit me, a combination of manure, hay, and the mix of grains, brought back a thousand memories, and it was almost oppressive. I was full-up on memories. The cows lowed as I entered, and as I walked, I patted their heads. “I’m back home right now, doing chores.”

“I hear that,” she said. “Cute.”

“Something like that,” I said, remembering the backbreaking amounts of labor I’d done feeding and caring for these cows. It had to be done no matter how hot it was outside, when the barn was like a sauna, or how cold it was in the winter, the wind whipping snow into drifts we had to shovel away from the door.

It bothered me how people who’d never been on a farm before romanticized it all, and maybe that was another problem I had with the trad wife homesteaders on social media, the ones with all the help in the world. “No breaks, even on days like today.”

We chatted for a while longer, about Lottie’s miscarriage and what her next steps would be. I was glad to see she was feeling more positive these days, and told her as much.

“This sounds cheesy as hell,” she said. “But it’s because of you. Your attitude about everything has been really helpful in this situation. I don’t know if I could have gotten through it without you.”

My heart warmed. It was nice to be needed.

chapter 30

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