Tiny Curious
The Traveler XLS by Escape Homes, the tiny home we plan on living in for at least three years.
On the day my eldest son turned twenty-two, two curious things happened; First, we ordered a tiny home. Second, the audiobook for the first novel in my ancient Egyptian trilogy, Origins, came out on Audible. On the surface, they seem unrelated, but in reality it was the birth of my first son that led me to both my desire to live lighter on the planet and my dream of becoming a writer.
Jackson was a surprise. At the time of his conception, I was a software engineer who never wanted children. I lived in Lincoln Park, Chicago, with my husband, on track for the text-book perfect, modern female life. Raising children was so far from my mind, I’d honestly considered it only from the standpoint of “not ever.” I enjoyed traveling, working long hours in tech, studying for my MBA, clubbing on the weekends, and wearing fabulous clothes. I also never once considered how my lifestyle affected the environment. Back then, in the 1990s, climate change activism for this city girl involved avoiding Styrofoam cups and aerosol hairspray. In addition, I certainly never looked at the ingredients in my food—diet Pepsi and Lean Cuisines were the only staples in my rather bare kitchen. Why cook at all? I lived in one of the best food cities in the world, for goodness sake.
However, giving birth took me out of the city and into the suburbs, where the closest food was the Piggly Wiggly or the Subway down the street. The first time I fed my son oatmeal was also the first time I read a food label. I was shocked to discover that the “baby” food had over ten ingredients, most of which I couldn’t pronounce, when all you needed were the oats. As the months and years progressed, I would come to question everything about our food supply as well as raising children. Why was there an entire store filled with gadgets needed to raise a child? Why did he have so many ear infections? Is diaper rash a given? What is that plastic chewing ring made of? Two years later, when I gave birth to my second son, I was a breastfeeding, cloth diapering, home cooking, natural living mom who did the craziest thing of all—I left my tech career to raise my kids.
I hadn’t grown up with a desire to be a woman in tech; teaching myself how to code in BASIC at twelve happened right alongside writing my first novella. In hindsight, I think I’m a person who likes to escape this world, and both coding and writing allowed me chances to create my own worlds, ones I’m in charge of and I decide which path the protagonist, whether it be a data structure or a character, will take. When I was eighteen, I told my Dad I wanted to study journalism and creative writing. He said that’s fine, but I’d have to pay for it myself. To him, college was an opportunity he could give me to be self-sufficient.
“Artists,” he’d said, “are never self-sufficient.”
A few days later, while in my Pascal class at my all-girls high school, I wondered if I could make a living this way. When I asked my teacher, Sr. Mary Newhart, Bob Newhart’s sister, if coding was a self-sufficient job she answered, “Yes, it is called Computer Science. Go right now to the counselor’s office and she will tell you where to apply.” The following autumn, I was studying CS at Purdue University. I loved that career and still try to sell it to everyone I know, but at the time my second son was born, managing the stress of leading software teams combined with raising my kids in a more natural, environmentally sound way, were at odds. In the end, I chose the children, and that led me to both a love of the Earth as well as back to my writing.
I suffered from post-partum depression, both hormonally but also emotionally. Leaving your career to raise children is an identity crisis unlike any other I’ve experienced. In order to manage this state of mind, I worked with a therapist as well as a nutritionist. I threw out the catalogues and stopped buying as much, since we’d lost half our income when I left tech behind. I began going on nature adventures with the kids and my parents each week, hiking the forest preserves and exploring the children’s museums, arboretums, and public gardens. I scaled back on the glitzy part of life and began gardening, journaling, and writing articles for parenting magazines while my mom watched the boys a few hours a week. It would be writing and connecting to nature, as well as my own parents, that would lead me out of the fog of depression and into my life as a mother. By the time the boys were two and four, I was a full-blown Waldorf mom, constantly wondering how to live on the world with less impact while raising my sons to understand their place in nature as well.
I recall watching the big-box stores as they popped up like mushrooms after a good winter rain along the farmland near my home in the early 2000s, and I wondered how there could be so much stuff in the world. Moreover, who was buying all that stuff? All the while, I was unconsciously participating in this stuff frenzy. Before the kids, I lived in a small studio in the city. I owned a couch, bed, and small dining table. When we bought our first house, it was empty and we set out to fill every nook and cranny. Nurseries and then little boy rooms were decorated, master bedrooms upgraded. When we moved from Illinois to California, we barely fit in one huge, eighteen wheeler truck. I remember thinking, how did this happen? What is all this stuff? Contrary to both my husband’s and my desire to live lightly on the planet, we’d done the opposite. At least we could still park in our garage; that was my husband’s litmus test for a long time—if he had to park on the driveway, he’d purge until he could fit his car back into the garage.
When we got to California and found that the master bedroom didn’t have a closet, a regular occurrence in a state with more building codes than self-help books on Amazon, I had to make-due with a small, Ikea wardrobe. This began the habit of only buying something new if I was willing to let something go. The land in Bonny Doon also brought us closer to our need to connect with nature and learn her rhythms. Biodynamic gardening, beekeeping, raising goats, spinning their fiber, fresh chicken eggs, all of this was the culmination of a desire, one born the moment our son opened his eyes, to live with intention in the world.
This connection to nature, the planet, and my body led to a union with my muse I’d never experienced before. From 2011 to 2020, I would write six full-length novels, all but one of which has been published. And now, one by one, they’re also turning into audiobooks, and a new set of readers has been introduced to me. By becoming a mother to Jackson, and then to Michael, I became myself, or should I say, I returned to myself. For as a child, I grew up on the banks of a lake, out in nature unless it was too cold, when I’d be inside writing stories. The smell of dirt, the freedom of my imagination, and the sounds of cattails in the wind are a few of my favorite things.
The fire has presented us with a rare opportunity to fully embrace our desire to live in a manner that is in balance with the environment. For many years now, I’ve been tiny curious—that is I’ve longed to try my hand at living in a tiny home—but the stuff always got in the way. Downsizing is something people dream of, but when you have three structures plus a garden shed filled with stuff, living in 300 square feet is daunting. That was a dream for other people, like Dee Williams, author of The Big Tiny or my latest famous crush, Zach Giffen from Tiny House Nation. You know, cool people with cool lives and no kids. Now all my stuff is gone and my kids are in college. As I realized my dream of rebuilding would require more money than we have, it dawned on me that maybe now is the time to try out this tiny home movement. It seems like the next step on many levels, as if our dream of living lighter on the earth has been granted, even if it took a firestorm to get us here.
We’ve been radically decluttered. Marie Kondo has nothing on us. Yet I can feel the stuff eager to enter our lives, whether through gifts and donations, or old habits of consumption on our parts. Some stuff needs to be replaced, but must I furnish a 2,000 square foot home? Must I fill closets, cabinets, and garages with things? Especially when boxes of things from my life thirteen years ago burned, unopened after all that time? I don’t even have the sentimental items anymore. Living in a tiny home will ensure we stay this empty for longer. I’m not sure that it’s forever, but for now I love the idea of remaining light, spending my money on the land and not my home. Why not try this out for a few years? It keeps us lighter emotionally as well and better able to hear through the noise of the world so we might discover what our next steps will be.
Of course, I’ll need a writer’s studio for this to work. A place I can retreat to worlds of my own. Our dear tree friend, D’ougal, will be coming down next week. We will mill him and my husband will make a small shed for me, where no one may enter without permission. For while I look forward to our project together of restoring the land and creating an apiary where the forest once stood, as well as exploring tiny home living, writing is a private act, and the means of my survival more than any “thing” could ever be. As Virginia Woolf famously said, “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.”
What was that thing my father said about artists and self-sufficiency? I think I’ll start with a room of my own.