Your Dreams Or Mine?
By Jessica Folkema
@modernfarmwife
“Hey babe?” I lean back in my chair to catch my husband Kyle’s eye as he walks towards the back room. “Can we talk for a second?”
I am tucked away at the desk in the far corner of our dining room. My green leather journal is still in hand and my laptop open from the online therapy session that ended minutes before.
“Okaaay—” he draws out the word as if he hopes in the time it takes to get from O to Y, I won’t notice that he’s darted out the door. I can’t help but smile at his reticence. In his defense, this isn’t the first time this week I’ve pulled us both away from our work to contemplate the finer points of our marriage.
“How’s it going?” Kyle gestures at the laptop and squeezes my shoulder. “Do you feel like you’re making progress?”
“I’m not sure,” I say, truthfully. “But it feels good to talk about it.”
“It” in this case is one of our marriage’s most essential questions. Nearly a year into a pandemic that upended my work, my life, and my sense of self, I’ve also been wrestling through how a city girl and farm boy ended up building a life together. Kyle’s reaction to my analysis—as I combed through old messages and photos from college and asked questions like “How did we get here?”—was one of growing unease. Sensing my husband’s discomfort, I put my hands on both of his shoulders one night and pressed my forehead to his. “Babe, I’m not questioning if we should be together. I just want to remember the things that make us, us.”
But the thing I’ve realized as I’ve sifted through memories and laid out a timeline of our story, is that there’s nothing new about my questions.
***
Ten years earlier, I shifted uncomfortably in my chair as the pastor’s question hung in the air like a fog.
“What did you picture for your life, Jessica?” the pastor repeated, his eyes kind as he asked the question that cut most deeply into my heart. “How is this different?”
I shot a furtive glance at my then-fiancé Kyle in the chair pushed close to mine. That’s the million-dollar question isn’t it? I felt heat rise into my cheeks. Our first premarital counseling session had been going fine until we started talking about farm life and I blurted out, “Well, it isn’t exactly what I pictured.” Kyle and I were on the same page about finances, core values, number of kids, and our faith. Now, we were at the crux of it all.
“I’m worried about losing myself,” my voice caught in my throat when the words finally tumbled out. I stared at the large bookcase behind the pastor’s desk and blinked back tears. “I worry that Kyle’s life and dreams will always come before mine.”
Kyle was offering a life of big skies and swaying cornfields. I originally pictured steel skyscrapers and an office with a city view. But it went deeper than that. When we met in college, our differences were what drew us together. He was adventurous where I was cautious. He was uninhibited where I was quietly insecure. Even though his flippant approach to planning and structure drove me crazy, I found myself looser around him, more open to change, and more accepting of unpredictability. A life with him felt exciting.
During our last year of college, he made the hour-long drive home every weekend to work on his family’s farm and I dreamed of a life anywhere outside the “West Michigan bubble” where we had both spent most of our lives. Even as we talked about the future—naturally full of possibility at the ripe young age of 21—I sensed that his roots ran deeper than mine. I wanted to pick up and start something new. He wanted to see what could be built right where he was.
“What else do you worry about?” the pastor’s voice jolted me back to the present.
My mental list—often at the ready as our wedding day drew nearer—spilled out. What else was I worried about? The relentless nature of farm life. Moving from my third-floor walk-up in the city to the middle of nowhere. Minimizing my own career aspirations to support his. My degree in journalism had been intended for a magazine job in a high rise, not for a woman doing the housework while her husband worked 90-hour weeks.
Despite knowing each other for three years, we hadn’t completely reconciled the different pictures we had for our lives. We just knew we couldn’t be apart.
I told the pastor that, logically, I understood that Kyle wasn’t asking me to change who I was. My determination, ambition, and strong will were the things he loved most about me. But I couldn’t escape the feeling that these characteristics were the very things that made me a terrible candidate for the position of farm wife.
When I finally stopped to take a breath, the air in the room felt heavy. I stared at a spot on the carpet and fiddled with a loose thread on the sleeve of my sweater.
“I feel like I have to give up so much,” I said, my voice barely a whisper.
The pastor nodded after a moment, not in agreement but to acknowledge that I had been heard. “How about you, Kyle? What do you picture for your life?”
Kyle uncrossed his legs and leaned forward. I could tell by the way he rubbed his thumb along his knuckles that he was uncomfortable having this conversation. At first his voice was hesitant, but his pitch brightened as he began to talk about his love of farming. His desire to grow and innovate. His dream of building a business we would one day pass on to our children—like his dad would to him. And he wanted to share it all with me.
I could feel his sincerity and passion. I glanced up from the floor and saw his eyes gleaming.
“I’m excited for our future,” he said before taking a long pause. “I’ll do everything I can to support Jess’s career too. But I feel guilty. All the time. I know she’s struggling, but I don’t know what to do.”
The pain in his voice caused an uncomfortable lurch in my stomach. In spite of myself, I fiercely admired the depths of his dreams. The man next to me was both the source of my existential crisis and the object of my heart’s greatest desire.
“I don’t want you to feel guilty,” I said, pulling his hand close and locking my eyes with his. “We can figure this out.”
But hard, bottomless questions still swirled in my mind.
Are we too different?
Can we both be happy?
Loudest of all: Will our love be enough?
***
My therapist once told me that it’s ok for two opposing things to exist in the same world. “You need to shift from black and white thinking to both/and,” she said. “You can both feed your children the exact same sandwich for lunch five days in a row and be a good mom. You have to get comfortable with the nebulous idea of being both/and. That’s what human life is.”
Nebulosity makes me itchy. Surely, I reasoned, a woman who couldn’t muster up the creativity to think outside two slices of bread for an entire week is a bad mom. But the more I turned the therapist's words over in my hands like a smooth stone, the more I felt a weight lifting off my chest in areas beyond just motherhood.
When I look at the story I’ve been telling myself about our marriage, I think I’ve unintentionally created two one-dimensional characters. To see myself only as a relegated wife trapped in the country or Kyle only as a distant, workaholic farmer is to miss the beauty of our complexity.
The truth is, we are all vessels of contradictions.
If a person can hold (seemingly) opposing ideas at the same time, maybe a life can too.
I can be a farm wife and have a career.
I can be a mom and have a sense of self.
I can speak up for what I need and support Kyle’s dreams.
I can mourn a life I thought I wanted and celebrate the one I have now.
Maybe it’s never been a matter of his dreams or mine.
Maybe we’re building something new entirely.
***
Later that afternoon, Kyle stands in the kitchen with hay on his pants and a glossy white booklet in his hand. The book is the annual report from the community foundation where I work as director of communications and represents months of my hard work.
“This is great, Jess,” he says. “It’s really impressive.”
My cheeks flush—as they always do when Kyle encourages (forces) me to revel in my own achievements. I shrug my shoulders. “Yeah, it’s ok.” I take it from him and halfheartedly flip through the pages of photos, graphs, and stories.
Frankly, the report looks like a failure to a perfectionist like me. It isn’t what I pictured before a pandemic turned me into a remote worker juggling kids, projects, and my own anxieties. “I could have done better.”
“Jess,” Kyle’s voice takes on a fierce tone. “You need to take a minute to celebrate this. No matter what, you did something incredible this year under hard circumstances. You should be proud of that.” He pauses. “I know I’m proud of you.”
Words of protest die in my throat and I let him pull me to his chest. I bury my face in the fabric under his collarbone. “Thank you,” I say, my voice muffled by his black fleece. We sway together for a moment.
Right now, there is no him and me—only us. For the first time in a while, we really see each other and everything feels different. Though we are exhausted, we are also energized.
I’ve been looking for conclusive proof that we can both find fulfillment in the life we’re building, but instead of a clear answer, I’ve found peace in the unknowing. Of planting our dreams in prayer and each other while holding contradictions in our hands.
“Hey, are we ok?” Kyle’s voice alludes to the conversation that has nothing to do with work.
I close my eyes and lean into the chest of a dream that is more real than any imaginary future I could have contrived.
“Yeah,” I say—and mean it.
“We’ll figure this out,” he kisses the top of my head.
“I know we will,” I say. When he finally pulls away, the distance between us doesn’t feel as vast.
Guest essay written by Jessica Folkema. Jessica is a farm wife, mom, and marketing director living in rural Michigan. Ten years ago, she traded stilettos for rubber boots to marry a handsome dairy man and today they’re raising three kids, one border collie, and a giant herd of cows. When she’s not prepping daycare lunches or spreading the gospel of the Oxford comma, Jessica is writing in the margins and reading good fiction. You can find her on Instagram, Facebook, or occasionally on her blog.