Once Upon a Farm

by Rory Feek

  My conservative Christian faith was the first part of me to judge Hopie. To want to push her away. To withhold love from her. And she could feel it. See it in my eyes. And in that moment we had a conversation without any words.

  Am I still going to get to be . . . , her eyes asked, around my baby sister? It’s the question that she was probably the most worried about. That, and Will you . . . still love me?

  My eyes were hardening around the edges, just like my heart.

  Probably not, they said, as I looked away. More ashamed of what I was thinking than of what she had shared with me.

  A few minutes later she went her way, and I went mine. I was shocked, and then again I wasn’t. I had had a dream in Indiana. A dream about this. Or something close to it. And I had called Heidi and asked her about it. And being the big sister she is, she said I didn’t have anything to worry about. Looking back now, I see she was protecting Hopie. And me. Hopie because this is not how I needed to find out about something so important. And me because I had enough on my plate to worry about at that moment. That was in the last two weeks before Joey passed away and our hearts and minds were working full-time just to process all that was happening there, let alone what might be happening somewhere back at home.

  I put it out of my mind. Sort of. I returned to Joey’s side and pretty much stayed there until the drive home two weeks later and the following funeral here at the farm. But it had stayed with me. In the back of my mind. While I held Joey’s hand and she took her last breath, and it followed us home in the truck that night when we made the long, cold drive from Indiana to Tennessee.

  And here we were. And there it was. The truth.

  The truth that she could not . . . that she would not . . . tell her mother. No matter what. Hopie wouldn’t hurt or scare her, and it would’ve been a lot for Joey to process there at the end. It would’ve been tough on her anytime, but in those last months and weeks, it probably would’ve been especially hard.

  And so Hopie kept the truth to herself, just like she always had. Sometime during that time at the kitchen table, she told me about how she and Wendy had met and how there had been other girls. Other relationships. But she never told Joey and me. Instead, she went along with us rooting for her to marry our friend’s older brother or date some guy that she and we knew wasn’t right for her, for different reasons.

  I can honestly say that in all those years before this, it had never occurred to us. To Joey and me. Not really. That doesn’t mean we didn’t think about all the possibilities of why Hopie was so awkward around boys when she was younger and was awkward still even in her twenties. But we never seriously gave it a moment of thought. We just kept praying that God would send her the right man, someone who would treat her well and love her for who she is.

  And He did. Only it wasn’t a man. It’s Wendy.

  On our anniversary this year, Hopie called me. I was pulling into a restaurant to have breakfast with two of my buddies after dropping off Indy at school, and my cell phone rang.

  “Hold on, guys, it’s Hopie . . . she’s calling to wish me happy anniversary,” I told them. And she was. And she wasn’t.

  “Guess what?” she said with so much excitement in her voice she sounded like she was in the car with me. “Wendy asked me to marry her . . .”

  Silence.

  No, actually there wasn’t silence. I loved her too much to do that to her.

  “Congratulations, honey!” I said. “I’m so happy for you.” And the truth is, I was. And I am still.

  A lot has happened in the year and a half between those conversations. There’s been some growth and some aha moments. Mostly on my end. We’ve had some hard conversations. A dinner once, where I asked Wendy about her past and what her plans were for the future. I fired questions at her for an hour, and she answered each one honestly and sincerely.

  “I love your daughter,” she said. And she did. I could see it in her eyes. And she is a good person. No, she’s a great person. She’s not kind and good just to Hopie, she’s that way with everyone. And theirs is, strangely, a normal relationship. Hopie is the emotionally secure one in the relationship, and she encourages Wendy not to hold things in and to get out of her comfort zone. Wendy encourages Hopie to be more than she thinks she is. To be all that God made her to be.

  Hopie is a Christian. She loves God and wants to honor Him. The same way she wants to honor Joey and me. But if you ask her about the rules of the church and their stance on people who are gay or lesbian, she will be quick to tell you, she doesn’t agree. Just like she’d be the first person to stand up for a little girl with Down syndrome when other kids try to tell her she’s less than they are.

  Hopie has made me rethink everything I’ve ever thought when it comes to some things. And in other ways I’m still right where I always was. First off, I’m not the judge. That is not my job. I’m Hopie’s father. My job is to love her. She gets to make her decisions in life. All of them. I can approve or disapprove, but it’s her life, and she has a right to live it as she chooses.

  And as far as the church goes, I am not the judge there either. My faith says that it’s wrong. That it’s wrong for me. And so I will live my life trying to live what I believe. But Hopie’s faith is her faith. It is between her and God and no one else. You and I can try to judge her and condemn her or anyone else, but, honestly, we don’t have any right to cast the first stone. At least, I don’t. Not with all the stones I’ve thrown in my life.

  And so we are going to have a wedding here at the farm. Around Halloween is what I hear. And I’m going to be excited about it. It will be a special day for someone who is special to me and her someone special. That is all I need to know.

  I choose to love her. To love them. Period. End of story.

  One Plus One

  . . . sometimes equals a thousand.

  It was the spring of 1988, and I had just returned from six months of an overseas deployment in Japan and had been away from my baby daughter Heidi for more than half a year and was so excited to be home.

  When the Marine Corps shipped me out to Iwakuni, an American air base in the southern part of Japan, Heidi was nine months old. When I got back, she was almost a year and half. I had missed her terribly, and all I wanted to do was spend time with her and play catch-up on being a daddy.

  The last thing I wanted to do was have another baby. Especially because Heidi’s mom and I weren’t doing so well. It wasn’t that things were terrible, they just weren’t great. And I’m not sure that she, nor I, were positive that this was going to last. Still, we were hopeful and had no plans to make any big changes in our life.

  It turns out that God did, though.

  “Congratulations, you’re pregnant,” the doctor said.

  We were in Charleston, South Carolina, an hour’s drive from the Marine air base where I was stationed at the time. We tried to act happy when we got the news, and in some ways we were, but another part of us was just caught off guard.

  “Are you sure?” I asked. It didn’t take a clinic full of doctorate diplomas on the wall to know that he was.

  The drive home and the weeks that followed found me heavy in thought. I was nervous about having another child. At least, having one right then. We had issues of our own to work on, and I was just starting to get used to being a father to one little one. I selfishly didn’t want to have to divide my time between two. I didn’t want to divide my love. Thankfully, though, I didn’t have to.

  Not long after that, a friend told me something that I’ve never forgotten. “When a second child is born (or a third, etc.),” she said, “a parent’s love doesn’t get divided . . . it multiplies.” And she was right. That is exactly what happened.

  When Hopie came into this world, my heart was like the Grinch’s on Christmas Day. It grew what seemed to be ten sizes larger. Hopie didn’t get a portion of the love that I had left over from loving her sister, Heidi; she got a whole new batch of love that seemed to magically appear in our lives the
morning she did.

  Born Sarah Hope Feek, the little girl we’ve always called “Hopie” is almost thirty years old now, and I cannot imagine a life without her in it. So smart and beautiful and kind and full of love. Just like I can’t imagine one without Heidi or their baby sister, Indiana. They are what makes life life for me. I live for their names to show up on my cell phone and for the evenings we get to share dinner together at our kitchen table. When they dance to the “Hokey Pokey” in the living room with their baby sister. And I hear them sing her to sleep at night . . . me parked on the bottom step of the stairway that leads up to her room and mine, listening and grinning ear to ear.

  Thinking back to the time when Hopie was born, I am reminded about how worried Heidi was when Joey and I got the news that we were going to have a baby. Heidi was beyond upset. Even though she was in her late twenties and a grown woman, inside was a little girl who was scared. A part of her was afraid that our love was going to be divided. That Joey and I might love her less and the new child more because she was going to be a part of both of us.

  I remember Joey and I holding her as she cried and me telling Heidi the story about how love doesn’t get divided; it only multiplies. And magically, just like with Hopie, it happened again.

  Heidi, like Hopie, loves Indiana so much, they can hardly stand it. Like I live to see and hear from them, they live to see the baby’s face on FaceTime or a new video or picture of her coming in via text from her papa.

  Life is funny like that. What scares us most, in the end, brings us the most joy.

  Joey is the ultimate example of that in our family. She didn’t want kids. Didn’t want to be a mama at all. Ever. The math didn’t add up for her. Too much pain, time, responsibility, hassle, work, etc. . . . you name it. The numbers didn’t work. And, of course, they don’t. Having a baby probably always sounds bad on paper. But the magic of it is when they come. Then the numbers flip. You suddenly have more time, patience, energy, understanding, and especially . . . love.

  Joey loved being a wife and a daughter and a friend and all the other roles she played in her life, but the role she loved most . . . was being a mother.

  I am the same way. I suspect every parent is.

  My College Years

  Four years of living, loving, and learning.

  I made one visit to a college in high school. It was a fall trip to Western Kentucky University, an hour or two away from Greenville, Kentucky, where my family was living at the time, and I was in my last year of school when we boarded the big yellow bus headed to Bowling Green. A couple of the teachers were taking the seniors there to watch a play. Something from Shakespeare that I don’t remember much about. The thing I remember, though, was that some of the kids on the bus were going to college the next year. A number of them, to the school that we were visiting. They already had it all planned out. Others had the scholarships and grants in place to attend other colleges in other places around the state and country. That was the first time I’d even heard of any mention of college.

  I remember sitting on the bus as we pulled up to that beautiful campus, thinking, How do you go to college? I had no clue, and no one had bothered to tell me.

  Unfortunately, I was part of the group of kids that doesn’t go to college, that never even thinks about universities and degrees. We go to trade schools or into the army. Or to prison. We get wives or girlfriends or both and have babies. That’s how we spend our college years.

  Years later I would find out that I could’ve gone to college. Easy. Almost on a free ride. Not because I was smart or super talented at sports or academics. But because we were poor. The poorest kind of poor. And my mother was raising five of us on nothing. That alone would’ve qualified me for every grant and loan under the sun.

  But nobody told me. I felt like the main character in the movie Rudy. His dream was to go to Notre Dame, but the priest who was taking the kids to visit told him, “Not everyone is born to go to Notre Dame.” That he was more of a “Holy Cross Junior College” kind of student. Less than the other kids. Way less.

  I was probably a bit less than that. Seeing as how no one made any mention of junior or community colleges that might be right for me.

  And so I didn’t go to college. I went into the Marine Corps instead.

  I spent my freshman year of college being yelled at and belittled by four Parris Island drill instructors. Then learning how to fix little black electronic boxes at a naval base north of Memphis. Then around what would have been my sophomore year, I was transferred to El Toro, a Marine air base on the West Coast. I guarded flight lines during the day, and since I still wasn’t old enough to drink legally, I bought a fake ID so I could chase the California girls in the bars at night.

  I caught one and we got married and shipped off to South Carolina. And we had a baby.

  While other kids my age were making plans for graduation, I was stuffing a duffel bag full of uniforms and cowboy boots, about to do a six-month deployment to Japan. During the half year or so that I spent in Iwakuni, I would drink a hundred cases of beer, play music in the enlisted and officers’ clubs on the base at night, and be anything but married. Even though I was.

  It was during this time that I also started working out and would gain thirty pounds of muscle and go from being incredibly skinny my whole life, to not so skinny. My confidence soared, and my character plummeted. I was doing all I could to find happiness . . . but real peace, and real joy, eluded me. It would elude me for another ten years, and then slowly, and in an instant, everything would change—when I finally learned to let go of my death grip on life’s steering wheel and let God do the real driving.

  When the men and women from the class of ’82 graduated from colleges with their sheepskin diplomas in hand and were just beginning to figure out where they wanted to go next and how best to start their lives . . . across the ocean at a base in Kaneohe Bay, Hawaii, mine was nearly over. Within a year or so, my checklist of things accomplished would have already included: married, divorced, and a single dad of two kids—all by the time I was twenty-five.

  Don’t get me wrong, I don’t have any bad feelings about not going to college. It is what it is. Just like it was what it was. I have been given a wonderful life and wouldn’t hardly have changed a thing, knowing now how blessed I would be. But, still, a part of me wonders what if? What if I’d grown up in a different family? With less welfare from the government and more than one parent looking out for the welfare of us five kids? I can’t help but think about what I’d have done if I’d gone to college. Who I’d have become.

  The truth is that I actually did go to college. Sort of. When I was stationed in Hawaii, a university out of Texas offered a program where I could take college courses at night and earn a degree. I took some classes and got an associate’s degree, or that’s what they said it was. But it has never come in handy for a single thing in my life. It never helped me get a job or not get one. Maybe it’s because it wasn’t a real degree. Probably it’s because that teacher who talked to Rudy and the ones who didn’t talk to me were right. I wasn’t meant to go to college. I was meant for something better than that.

  Joey never went to college either. She wasn’t a fan of it. Or at least the idea that when every kid gets out of high school, they should go to college. That never made any sense to her. It makes no sense to me either. It seems like if you want to be a nurse or a teacher or an engineer or something like that, it’s a given . . . you need to go. You have to, to make your dreams happen. But if you want something more than that or something less, then maybe there’s another route.

  When our two older daughters got out of school, we promised that we would pay for one year of college for each of them. From there, if they wanted to keep going, they’d have to figure it out. Neither of them did. Looking back, I’ll bet they’ll say the same thing that we do, that college isn’t for everyone. That there are more good options out there, than just college.

  Honestly, I look back on my coll
ege years fondly. I had some of the most amazing teachers, who weren’t teachers, around me during those years, and I learned a ton about life and love . . . by doing. By making decisions and making mistakes. At times, those years seemed like an eternal spring break, mixed with a boatload of cramming to just keep up. Just to keep from getting expelled from life.

  My real graduation probably came around 2000 or so, when I put the bottle down for a while and picked up a Bible. That’s the moment when I started wanting more of myself than who and what I’d been. Those are things they couldn’t have taught me at WKU or any other university or school. They are lessons that only life can teach. And I am thankful for them.

  Semper Fi

  Technically, I was given an honorable discharge when I got out of the Marine Corps. Unfortunately, almost thirty years later, I don’t feel much honor in it.

  I had been in the service for eight years. Had reenlisted after four and was a sergeant for the last three. I was good at my job and had done my duty well, I think, at least most of it. All but the part at the end.

  It was December 1990 when my discharge papers came in. Our country wasn’t at war, but it was close to it. I was about to miss the whole thing. That wasn’t the reason I was getting out or that they were letting me out a little bit early, but it was a fact.

  I had been stationed in Kaneohe Bay, Hawaii, and I left the air station on a plane in late December, headed to civilian life in Texas. Within a month or so most of my buddies got on planes, but they were headed to Bahrain. A small island nation somewhere in the Persian Gulf. A blink later Desert Storm happened. I watched on TV like most of the world. My friends, the ones who had to leave their families and do their duty during wartime, saw it firsthand.