It wasn’t all bad, that poor rural place. Though money was scarce, you would have had your basic needs met because we knew how to grow and build things.
― Sarah Smarsh, Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on EarthI am grateful for my early life, and I wouldn’t wish it on any child.
― Sarah Smarsh, Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on EarthThe women I knew were always talking about how their nerves were shot or they were at their wit’s end or the end of their rope. The men who apparently played a role in putting them there were faces marked out or torn away in buried photo albums I exhumed from the farmhouse’s wooden drawers – unnamed feminism revealed, maybe, by women refusing to throw away perfectly good photos of themselves in which unkind men could simply be erased.
― Sarah Smarsh, Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth
I knew I would like this book before I started reading it. I learned about Sarah Smarsh from her essay “Poor Teeth,” on how “the underprivileged are priced out of the dental-treatment system yet perversely held responsible for their dental condition.”
Sarah Smarsh grew up in a farming family thirty miles outside of Wichita, Kansas. As a young girl, she decided she would do everything she could to avoid the fate of nearly every woman in her family: become a teenage mom and end up with an abusive partner.
The bulk of the book is told by Sarah to her unborn child – the child she might have had if she’d not had the loving grandparents who raised her, or the support of teachers who nurtured her potential and provided encouragement. Even though she felt loved by her family, she knew not to ask for things because “somewhere, someone else has it worse” and to “work hard and be grateful for what she did have.”
Her story weaves between her own experiences and those of her mother, her grandmothers, and her great-grandmother, who protected their children as well as they could while enduring terrible working conditions and abysmal home lives with abusive spouses.
Unlike the relationship between her maternal grandfather with her mother, Sarah’s father encouraged and supported her. It was perhaps one of the greatest gifts, she thought, that her mother inadvertently gave her a home in which she need not fear her own father or grandfather.
I don’t know how to describe how I feel about this book other than the overwhelming feeling of being seen. I grew up in a very rural area but my family did not rely on farming or labor-intensive work for our livelihoods. We had monthly trips to the city to go to the “good” supermarket, to hit the mall, and to maybe even see a movie and get Chinese food. The rest of the time, the other kids and I got ourselves to school, to volleyball or football practice, and to evening youth church meetings at our church or a friend’s church. We spent long weekends with kids who lived on their family’s ranches, or ranches of the families where their parents worked, wandering the pastures. We were expected get up early and help feed the animals our classmates raised for 4H. We learned at a young age how to shoot a 22, how to drive the ranch pickup, which wasn’t street legal but was perfectly good for chores and hauling whatever needed to be moved within the confines of the property, and how to look out for snakes before jumping into the creek or racing through the scabby cedar trees that proliferated wide expanses of pasture.
The descriptions of the isolation of living miles outside of town, of being the “new” family in a community defined by cliques and nepotism, and of seeing first hand the difficulties and hardships endured by girls forced to grow up too quickly resonated with me like nothing else I have ever read. By a stroke of luck, I grew up solidly middle class. In fact, it was not until I was in my early adulthood that I realized how very wealthy and privileged my upbringing had been. I love the childhood experiences I had, and I do not take them for granted because they shaped the person I am today. It is also no coincidence that I am childless by choice. I saw the struggle and work expected of teenage moms and their moms, and was directly and indirectly threatened of what would happen if I got knocked up, as if this was a fate I couldn’t wait to bring upon myself. The shame and contradictory messages from church and community leaders only confirmed my fear and fueled my desire to become financially and geographically independent as quickly as I could.
I am so grateful for the role models, especially the strong women who taught me, by example, how to work hard to get what I wanted. How to not let anyone, or any partner, define my worth. And how leaving home does not mean betrayal, even though sometimes it felt like it (and still does). And, as an adult, I’ve come to understand that I had an extremely strong safety net that was unique for my circumstances.
Content warnings for domestic abuse, spousal abuse, and child abuse.