On Farms, Happiness, and Coming Full Circle

I grew up in a rural town in northern New York State, where the wide open spaces were dotted with farms and apple orchards, and summer breezes carried the scent of cow manure. Most of the time I remember feeling bored and anxious to begin a faster-paced, sophisticated adult life anywhere else. Many of my classmates didn't pursue higher education, but I broke ranks and won a scholarship to an elite northeastern college. When I left, I thought I was deservedly moving up and away from my small town, working class roots.

Years later as a young mother-to-be, I rented an apartment in an upper class suburb hundreds of miles away from my childhood home. I wanted my own family to live in a privileged suburb with tree-lined streets, manicured lawns and community playgrounds, where the high school offered advanced placement courses and graduates were accepted into the Ivy League.

Giving your children things you couldn't have in your own youth is one of the joys of parenting. Every painful childhood memory spurs an emotional evaluation of your own parents' successes and failures, and a desire to correct their mistakes, if only to secure incremental improvement between generations. Attributing every small success to something you're doing right is easy and natural, even if you have no idea what that something is.

When he was thirteen and a high school freshman, my son started to have panic attacks. He'd always seemed like a happy kid, but that year he'd start crying while dressing in the morning, and it would escalate to sobbing as I drove him to school. By the time we reached campus, he would be gasping for breath and pleading to go back home. I didn't have the heart to force him, so I would drive him back, where he'd stay - sometimes for days at a time - until he regained his confidence.

Whenever I'd ask what was happening he'd say, "I don't know, Mom," and stare off into the distance. I tried to be the stable, encouraging parent, but in truth, when the house got quiet at night, I would have a panic attack of my own. Why couldn't I fix this?

Tutoring, psychotherapy and concurrent prescriptions to stimulants and antidepressants had no effect - my son was miserable and failing ninth grade. I brooded a lot that year, about the effects of divorce on children, expectations of single mothers and memories of my own bewildering teenage years. I wondered if unhappiness was simply an unavoidable part of adolescence. I wondered if my son was clinically depressed, or worse.

At year's end, despite his poor grades, he was offered a coveted spot at a public agricultural high school thirty miles from our suburb, where the campus is a working farm and every student learns to ride a horse and drive a tractor, in addition to studying the basic academic subjects. There is no advanced placement, and many graduates go directly to work rather than attending college.

The first day of the new school year, we made the rush hour drive to campus, passing meadows which stretched to the horizon and an old-fashioned ice cream stand on the side of the road. As we stood there, breathing in the crisp air and surveying the grounds, I realized that strangely enough, we had come full circle. My son had wound up in the type of farming community that I was raised in, one that I had worked so hard to get away from so that he could have a better life.

That year my son learned to ride a horse, shepherd cows and deliver a newborn lamb. He made the soccer team, and he made new friends, and slowly, he got happy again. Maybe he just needed time. But it seems so obvious now, the rehabilitative potential of those things I rejected in the quest for something more worldly - the earthy scents of manure and fresh hay, the calming effects of having animals around all the time, and the joy to be found in devoting a part of each day to the physical world outside of one's own shelter, and one's own mind.

I still marvel that my son found his bliss in exactly the type of place I'd denied him.