it is hard for me to pinpoint exactly when we officially became homesteaders. was I a homesteader when I lived in an apartment in a city and walked my pregnant belly and my toddler half a mile to the community garden to deposit our compost once a week? were we homesteading when we taught our foster kids how to plant tomatoes beside the driveway every spring? maybe I wasn't official until I baked my first loaf of bread from scratch or botched my first batch of cheese. did the homesteading life start when we moved to the country and hung up a clothesline? when my husband finally started listing "farmer" as his full-time occupation?
the "when" of a homesteading journey can be a little tricky. there isn't a checklist to go by or an official act of initiation in this game. and everybody's definition is a little bit different. I can think back to my ambitions when we first started being the weird ones in our extended family. those ambitions certainly did not include using an electric dishwasher on a daily basis. we were going to live off the grid, in the woods, off the land, in the moment! it was going to be hard and satisfying all at the same time. and once we started, it was going to be full steam ahead, no turning back, carpe the homesteading diem!I guess I don't have to tell you things didn't quite work out the way I'd envisioned. our needs changed, our visions changed, heck, the world around us just seems to keep changing. but even if the "hows" and the "whens" are hard to nail down, the "whys" of this life are still crystal clear to me. and the "whys" we have settled on leave room for me to use my dishwasher.
we homestead for two main reasons: to make our life slower and simpler, and to prepare ourselves for having to undergo major lifestyle changes as the world around us changes. we want to enjoy our day-to-day as a family (and as individuals, too) and we also want to have the skills we need if there suddenly is no more electricity or if buying food large scale is no longer an option. I want to have the skills I need to keep my family safe, warm, and fed if the grid were to disappear tomorrow. I want to know we can eat from our own yard if there is a natural disaster and food deliveries to local stores stop. so we homestead not only to provide a slower pace of life for ourselves, but also to practice for whatever may happen next.
here's how I justify my dishwasher under those "whys" of homesteading: I know how to wash dishes. I have mastered that skill through years of practice both as a kid and as an adult. I know that my kids would not be emotionally rattled if our dishwasher was suddenly removed from our lives. and in the day-to-day realm, it makes our life simpler to run a load of dishes through the dishwasher than it does to wash them by hand. I get more time to play chess with my son and to draw with my daughter as the dishwasher hums along in the background. all the time I am not washing dishes by hand can be used to whip up a pot of soup for supper, collect kindling in the yard, or read up on peak oil cozy by my wood stove. to me, the dishwasher is a keeper for those very reasons. and if the dishwasher goes kaput tomorrow, we probably wouldn't pay to have it fixed. we can certainly live without it. but for now, electricity is cleaning my dishes.
the biggest lessons in homestead for me haven't been the skills I've accomplished or the food I've preserved or even the relationships I've forged through this lifestyle change. the most important lessons for me are the internal ones: learning to detach from an intended outcome and just see what happens, learning to be gentle and kind to myself as I figure things out, granting grace to myself and my family as we all learn together. and sometimes that grace requires a little help from my dishwasher.
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