I WALKED AWAY FROM EVERYTHING – JUST ME, MY HUSBAND, AND SIX KIDS IN A BEAT-UP MINIVAN
People thought we had completely lost it.
Six kids. Two adults. One dented minivan packed with mismatched rain boots, half-broken board games, and a bread machine I’d never actually used. We had no real plan – just a plot of land two hours past the nearest grocery store and a shared idea that maybe, just maybe, we could build something that actually meant something.
We weren’t ranchers. I’d killed a cactus once. But life in the suburbs was hollowing us out. My husband was picking up extra shifts every week, I was buried in dishes and schedules and noise, and the kids… god, they were growing up so fast it scared me. Tablets, carpool lines, drive-throughs, meltdowns. Repeat.
So one night we sat on the kitchen floor surrounded by permission slips and overdue bills, and I said, “Let’s just go. Let’s start over somewhere else.”
I still don’t know why he said yes. But I’m so glad he did.
The property was rough. The back fence was mostly collapsed, there was a broken chest freezer sitting in the side yard, and the well pump failed the first three days so we were hauling water just to do the dinner dishes. The two youngest cried constantly. The older ones acted like we’d personally ruined their lives. But slowly – real slowly – something started to change.
We managed.
How We Got Here in the First Place
The house we left was a four-bedroom in a subdivision outside Columbus. Beige carpet. A homeowners association that sent letters about our garbage cans being visible from the street. A neighborhood where everyone was friendly enough but nobody actually knew each other.
We’d been there eight years.
In eight years I learned the names of maybe three families on our block. We waved at people. We made small talk at the bus stop. We went inside and closed our doors and watched television until we fell asleep.
My husband, Dave, is a project manager. He’s good at it. He’s the kind of person who can hold seventeen variables in his head at once and stay calm while other people lose their minds. But calm started looking a lot like numb, somewhere around year six. He’d come home and sit at the kitchen table and just… stare at the mail. Not read it. Just stare.
Our oldest, Carrie, was thirteen when we left. Then Marcus, eleven. Bea, nine. The twins, Seth and Danny, seven. And then Rosie, who had just turned four and had opinions about everything, including which shoes the dog should wear if the dog had ever worn shoes, which she didn’t, because we didn’t have a dog yet.
Six kids, and I couldn’t tell you what any of them were actually interested in anymore. They had activities. They had screens. They had things scheduled for every afternoon and half the weekends. But I couldn’t have told you what Marcus was curious about, or what made Bea laugh until she couldn’t breathe, because I was too busy driving them somewhere or feeding them or refereeing whatever fight had broken out in the backseat.
That night on the kitchen floor, I was crying before I even finished the sentence.
Dave looked at me for a long time. Then he said, “Okay. Let’s figure out where.”
The Land We Bought Without Fully Understanding
We found the property online, the way you find all terrible and wonderful decisions: at midnight, when your judgment is soft.
Forty-two acres in eastern Tennessee. A farmhouse that the listing described as “full of character,” which meant the porch sagged and the kitchen still had the original 1960s fixtures and the bathroom had been remodeled at some point in the late eighties by someone who loved the color mauve. There was a barn that leaned a little to the left. A creek that ran along the back of the property. Pasture that hadn’t been properly grazed in years, so the grass was tall and tangled and full of things we couldn’t identify.
We drove out in February to see it. It was cold, overcast, and the road to the property was unpaved for the last mile and a half. Dave got out of the van and stood in the driveway for about ninety seconds and said, “I think we should do it.”
I’d been to maybe four open houses in my life. I had no idea what I was looking at. I walked around the side of the house and found the broken chest freezer just sitting there, lid open, half full of rainwater and leaves. A bird had built a nest in it at some point and then apparently abandoned that plan.
I thought: we are absolutely going to do this.
We closed in April. Moved in the last week of May. The kids finished out the school year first, which felt responsible, even though by that point Carrie had told approximately forty people at her school that her family was “going off the grid,” which was not entirely accurate but also not entirely wrong.
The First Month Nearly Ended It
I want to be honest about this part, because most people who write about leaving their old life behind skip straight to the part where they’re standing in a field looking peaceful. They don’t talk about the part where you’re sitting on a cooler at nine o’clock at night because you have no furniture yet and the kids are sleeping on air mattresses and someone is crying in the dark and you genuinely cannot tell which child it is.
The well pump. That was first.
Day one: no water pressure. Day two: Dave and our neighbor Gary, who we’d met exactly once, standing over the pump housing saying things like “huh” and “that’s interesting” and “I wonder if – ” Day three: we were hauling water in five-gallon jugs from Gary’s place, which was a quarter mile down the road, to do the dishes and flush the toilets. The kids thought this was hilarious for about six hours. Then they stopped thinking it was hilarious.
We got the pump fixed on day four. It cost eight hundred dollars we hadn’t planned for.
The back fence came next. We had this idea, before we moved, that we’d get chickens pretty quickly. Chickens seemed manageable. Chickens seemed like a reasonable first step. But the back pasture fence was down in three sections, and until we fixed it there was no point in putting any animal back there that we actually wanted to keep.
Dave and Marcus spent two weekends on that fence. Marcus is eleven. He is not, by nature, an outdoor kid. He’d been a video game kid, a Legos kid, a kid who could spend four hours building something on a screen and show you every piece of it. He came inside after that first fence weekend sunburned and filthy, with a blister on his right hand and a look on his face I hadn’t seen before.
I asked him how it went.
He said, “Dad let me use the post driver.”
I didn’t know what a post driver was. I still barely know what a post driver is. But Marcus knew, and he was proud, and that was the first time I thought: maybe we didn’t ruin their lives.
What the Kids Actually Did
Carrie hated it for exactly three weeks.
She was vocal about it. She missed her friends, she missed her room, she missed her school, she missed having a Target within fifteen minutes, she missed everything, and she was going to make sure everyone knew exactly what had been taken from her. She spent a lot of time on the porch with her phone, texting people back in Columbus, narrating her misery in real time.
Then she found the creek.
I don’t know what happened exactly. She’d gone down there by herself one afternoon, just to get away from the noise of the rest of us, and she was gone for almost two hours. When she came back she was muddy up to her shins and she’d found some kind of freshwater crayfish and she wanted to know what it was. Dave looked it up. They sat at the kitchen table together for forty-five minutes talking about it.
She still missed her friends. She still had hard days. But the creek became hers. She started keeping a notebook.
Bea adapted faster than any of them, which surprised me because Bea is my most anxious kid, the one who needs routines and advance warning and at least three days’ notice before a schedule change. I thought she’d fall apart. Instead she attached herself to the barn like it was her personal project. She’d go in there every morning and just poke around. She found a box of old canning jars on a shelf. She found a rusted hand plow. She found a coffee can full of old bolts and spent an afternoon sorting them by size, which is the most Bea thing that has ever happened.
Seth and Danny were feral within forty-eight hours. That’s the only word. They stopped wearing shoes. They came inside for meals and sometimes not even then. I’d find them at the edge of the tree line doing things I couldn’t fully see and decided not to investigate too closely. They were fine. They were better than fine.
Rosie wanted a goat. She had decided this before we even moved. She would not stop talking about the goat. She described the goat in detail. She had named the goat. The goat’s name was Gerald.
What We Actually Built
By August we had six chickens, a repaired fence, and a kitchen garden that was mostly kale and one very aggressive zucchini plant that produced more zucchini than any eight people should ever have to eat.
We did not yet have Gerald.
But we had something else. We had dinners that lasted two hours because nobody had anywhere to be. We had evenings on the porch where the kids just sat with us, not because we’d asked them to, but because there was something out there worth watching, the light going down over the pasture, the way it turned the grass that particular color just before dark.
Dave stopped staring at things. He started looking at them instead.
I started sleeping through the night, which I hadn’t done in years. I don’t know exactly when it happened. One morning I woke up and realized I couldn’t remember the last time I’d woken up at three a.m. with my chest tight about something I couldn’t name.
The bread machine, which had survived the move wrapped in a beach towel, finally got used. I made a terrible loaf of bread in it. Then a slightly less terrible one. The third one was actually good, and Rosie ate half of it standing at the counter before I could stop her, and I didn’t try very hard to stop her.
We weren’t ranchers. We still aren’t, not really. We’re eight people learning how to do things we don’t know how to do, in a place that doesn’t make it easy, with a fence that still needs work in the northeast corner and a porch that’ll need to be rebuilt before winter.
But last week Marcus fixed a section of that fence by himself. He didn’t ask for help. He just did it, and then came in and ate dinner and didn’t mention it, and I only knew because I walked past it the next morning and saw the new posts.
I stood there for a minute looking at it.
Gerald arrived in September. He was smaller than Rosie expected and meaner than any of us expected, and he ate the corner of a tarp Dave had left out, and Rosie loves him more than she has ever loved anything.
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If this one hit close to home, pass it along to someone who’s been thinking about something like it. Sometimes people just need to know it’s possible.
For more wild family tales, check out The Security Guard Leaned Down and Told My Daughter Something I Wasn’t Ready For, or read about when My Brother Was Laughing in the Next Room While His Girlfriend’s Family Watched. And if you’ve ever had a kid get in trouble, you’ll relate to My Son Got Called to the Office at the Community Center and His Defense Made It Worse.
