Working With Parents

Today is Take Your Child to Work day here in my county. Lots of my students have filled out a form to give them an excused absence so they can accompany their parent(s) to work. I realized as I was checking them off a list, that every day was Work with My Parents day when I was a kid. That is farm life.

We'd start out working together in the barn, milking the cows. If it was a school day, I'd even be "working" with my dad because he drove the bus. When we got home from school, it was back out to the barn. If it wasn't school, then after breakfast, we'd be working with our mother by doing the dishes and sweeping floors and dusting. Or if you were a "big kid" by then, you'd be outside either hauling rocks or bales--depending on the season. There was a brief respite between rocks and bales when the crops were growing, but Daddy learned to fill that in with picking up rocks from the alfalfa (which arrived there via the manure spreader because scooping up "fertilizer" from the piles always included some rocks from the ground around it.) Or Grandpa would be there to enlist us in fence painting or gate painting or cleaning up junk.

It was all perfectly normal to spend your time working. After all, our parents were never off-duty--why would a child old enough and fully capable get to lay around? Once a co-worker asked me why I didn't just say "no" to all that work. I was taken back: we'd have never even considered just watching and not helping. We were all in it together. Work wasn't something that interrupted our "real" lives--it was real life. We saw a direct correlation to what we did and the food that we put into our mouths.

I did not choose the farm life when I became an adult and neither did any of my sisters. However, we are all grateful, every day, for the lessons we learned and the skills we acquired. I rarely find the need to milk cows in the life I've led as an adult, but I constantly use the skills I learned doing that to stick to a drudge-filled job until it is finished. We learned that going to work with our parents.