The Biggest Mistake

We had not been farming ten years when my father in law got a hip replacement. He was otherwise healthy and the bone grew back properly, so he was eventually able to work again. But when you are over 60 years old it is never the same kind of physical work, even if you do stay out all day and come home dirty.

The year before, the year during, and the year following his hip surgery, my FIL did little outside work of any kind. My children were barely big enough to push bales in front of the cows, and they did that, and fed the baby calves, too. I helped my husband with some of the other work. I am not big or strong, so I never was much help. But we did it all without Grandpa.

When he was feeling better, he finally reasserted himself, or at least believed he was in charge again, although it was evident to any outsider that he was not managing the farm but puttering with his hobbies. I believe in hobbies, but it doesn't mean you're participating in income-producing work that is supporting your family.

The year before he had his hip operation, FIL and MIL signed papers with the Brother Twin and his wife to put their trailer on two acres at the top of the hill, a very nice spot for a house. They couldn't own the two acres, not only because there was no public right of way, but because in our state you can't just build homes on farm land unless you're actively farming. For those ten years the labor of my husband and children paid the mortgage and the taxes on this property, the digging of the well, the pump, the electric lines up to the property edge, and laying the bridge over the ditch. FIL was laid up and did not contribute much financially. But we were not consulted in the signing of the 50-year lease. It went without saying that MIL and FIL would leave at least half the term of the lease with my husband and me to be landlords to. Maybe they thought they would never die.

Brother Twin had been asked by FIL to farm two years previously. He worked for six months. The youngest sister remembers it, how he wanted banker's hours and for no one to tell him what to do. Finally my husband told his father that he would no longer work under those circumstances. Brother Twin began working for someone else. All of the misfortunes that befell him and his family in the next twenty years were blamed on my husband.

After a dozen years they moved a nicer mobile home to the top of the hill, paid out of Brother Twin's wife's inheritance (since Brother Twin quit working for two years when he got his own inheritance) and as the children eventually left home, they came back again to live as unmarried adults with their own fatherless children. My in laws would not let the married children and their families live there, but the other grown children and moved in even as their mother, now educated and employed, moved out. Brother Twin simply refused to function as a leader in his home.

After more than twenty years of unsightly and unsanitary waste, misery, legal problems and unhappiness at the top of the hill, my mother in law admitted that signing the lease was her biggest mistake. But they did not make him live up to it.

What I didn't understand was that for all the bluster and braggadocio, the rebellion and resentment of the Brother Twin was a cover for a need for safety under the shadow of his father and his older brother. Fear still keeps him, now a grandfather, from wanting to have a life of his own and to lead his children into independence.

When MIL passed away, and the ownership of the property came to my husband and me, we asked Brother Twin to abide by the terms of the lease, which resulted in accusations of our lack of Christian charity.

There are some standards that must be upheld, or you are in the hole digging. Because this has been allowed to continue for 25 years, does not mean it should continue for another 25. The sane sisters are in agreement, and the lease is terminated, to the dismay and bitterness we expected, but still in the hope that some day they will realize they have been set free from too many decades of living in slums of spirit of their own creation.