I received a call the other day, a nice and efficient lady wanting to know about a former employee of ours. The caller represented a company that verifies resumes, and she had a ream of prepackaged questions for me: how long had the employee worked for us, was her resume accurate, under what conditions had she quit?
“I think I have to let you know,” I told her as soon as I could get a word in edgewise, “that this employee is actually my daughter.” I also felt I needed to explain the seasonal nature of her employment. “She works for us between semesters, over breaks, whenever she is home. See, we have a family farm.”
My disclosure, which I kind of thought represented a conflict of interest, didn’t change the caller’s rhythm a bit. She continued on down her list. “Would you be willing to hire her again?”
At this I paused. “Well, it’s not like she really has a choice.”
How do you explain the dynamic of a family farm operation to people who live outside it? First off, employee-wise we aren’t picky around here. If you can breathe and if you plan to eat, you can help out. Not to say we don’t try to honor freedom of choice. Our standard pre-dinner practice has been that employees can go feed cattle with Dad or make dinner with Mom. Obviously, this standard operating procedure was not well thought out by me. Wind-chill factor has to fall below 10ºF before the hired help starts to look at the kitchen like it’s the more attractive option.
We aren’t quite as demanding with people who aren’t related to us. Not quite, that is, with one notable exception. Apparently, if you are dating one of the COF’s (chief operating farmer’s) daughters, the COF feels free to extract free labor from you. I didn’t even know this practice was going to be a thing until it was a thing. It probably explains why the girls aren’t in any rush to bring boys around. I’ve also noticed that our son has never, ever, ever admitted to even knowing the name of a girl. I find out from other people that he has been seen in their proximity once or twice. My guess is that he may be married several years before we’ll hear wind of it.
Two of my daughters are now married, so the employment of boyfriends procedure is now pretty standardized. Both future sons-in-law came into the house, exchanged names and a handshake with Dave, and then he asked them if they wanted to go help him feed some cattle. We don’t pretend to any kind of leisure or fun around here, and apparently Dave knows how to use a point of leverage when he has one. Admittedly, loading hay is a great ice breaker. Talk about getting past the awkward by right into the manure. As a bonus, Dave sends a pretty clear signal that he expects all boyfriends to be employed, and if they aren’t, he’s happy to help them with that.
To be fair, Dave thinks he’s offering guests the highest form of entertainment when he invites them to join him shoveling out ditches or running a tractor. He’s told me the following history several times without irony. When he started farming in earnest, at around 11 or 12 years of age, he’d invite friends over on occasion. He thought it would be great fun to farm with the guys, and he could hardly wait for them to come. But of course, things never went according to plan. He was repeatedly shocked that after one round of chores, his friends only wanted to ride motorcycles and goof around. They lasted as farmers all of no-time-at-all. Forty years later, Dave’s still disappointed in them.
He would’ve been disappointed in me too. I was cut from different cloth – one of those people he would’ve consigned to the unrecoverable bin. Whenever I had friends over, I considered it a get-out-of-chores-free card. Never in my life, not once, did I ever think, “I can hardly wait for Tonya to come over so we can go get some work done around here.” When my friends actually wanted to go collect eggs or feed horses, talk about a dismal turn of events. Worse yet was when Mom told me to get to work making dinner or cleaning the bathroom and expected my friends to chip in. No wait, the very worst thing was when my friends wanted to hang out with my older sister, which they always did, but that’s a story for another day. The upstart of this confession is that I was a country mouse who wanted to see what the city mice were doing. I was always trying to get myself invited to their houses so we could play video games and watch movies. As a bonus, my friends also ate exotic foods like SpaghettiOs and Hamburger Helper – delicacies which never saw the inside of our cupboards.
You would think I would be a little less baffled then when my kids bring guests home and I hear them say things like, “Like I told you, I’m going to have to help around the farm, but that doesn’t mean you have to.” One weekend I apologized to my daughter, “Honey, I’m sorry, but we’re going to have to get some work done while you’re home.” She looked at me and blinked twice, “I know Mom. What else would we be doing?”
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