Growing Up Prepper
A Memoir
by Jenny Marie Hatch
Introduction
I grew up in Detroit Michigan during the height of the cold war. Born in 1968, I was a child of parents who came of age during the nuclear scares of the 50โs. My Dad was a door to door traveling salesman during his college years, selling nuclear shelters to those who were concerned about nuclear war. It was into this household that I was gestated, born, and encouraged to find my footing on planet earth. I have done the best I could with what was given to me by concerned and loving parents.
Chapter One โ Upside Down Peanut Butter
My parents walked in the door to our home one day with their arms filled with boxes and bags. They had just returned from our little local health food store on Main street in Berkley Michigan. For the first time in my life I was given Cod Liver Oil, vitamin C, and a big bowl of honey granola for breakfast. Gone were the cheerios, mac n cheese, and gooey desserts that had been our diet up until then. Mom was serious about this change and had removed all of the white flour and sugar from our home. Dad had bought a hand crank wheat grinder and hooked it up to a motor in the basement. It was my job to sit on the motor to keep it steady while he fed the wheat kernals into the grinder.
The motor was old and would occasionally spark and give me a shock on my heiny. I was sad that my job as a seven year old child involved unexpected electric shocks, but that was what was needed to get the job done. My dad always said that if he really needed a job done around the house he would ask me or one of my older brothers, because the rest of our siblings would say yes and then not follow through. This resulted in me being given loads of chores to do.
I was a sickly little person with anaphylactic allergies, asthma, and eczema all over my skin. My mom told me one time that she was highly motivated to get into nutrition because when I was seven I looked like a plucked chicken with rash all over my body. She used to send me to school wearing white gloves to try to protect my hands from exposure to the frigid cold of a winter morning in Detroit. The kids at school were all curious why I was wearing gloves in school, but I just ignored them.
One day I opened the pantry to grab a snack and it was all bins of โingredientsโ to make things, but nothing ready to go. I saw that the peanut butter pail was upside down and I turned it right side up. My mom said to leave it upside down because the oils all congealed at the top and did not mix into the butter very well if we left it right side up. I had to open it to see if that was true. It was! The peanut butter of a mostly empty pail was often gross with this thick chewy unspreadable mess that was impossible to use for toast or a sandwich.
As mom started acquiring new habits and really digging in with her cooking I soon realized that my life was really changed. Instead of munching on white bread sandwiches during lunch, she sent us to school with a half white and half home made wheat bread sandwiches to aid in our transition to whole grains. When we asked about dessert after supper, she would tell us to eat an apple. She said this to me so many times during my childhood I stopped asking for snacks and just went for the apple. When we arrived home from school she would have a counter filled with indian fry bread. This she called a scone, but it was basically whole wheat bread fried in oil and then slathered with butter and honey.
And honey? My dad bought it in 40 pound metal tins. As the peanut butter thickened the honey turned into crystal. Dad often put a tin of honey on the stove in a water bath to melt the crystals and make it more usable. Mom kept the powered milk in the basement in the bag and it was my job to go down and fill up a container with the powder for her to use in her cooking. Dry powdered milk under the fingernails is a feeling I will never forget. Icky.
When mom was expecting me in 1967, the Detroit riots happened about twenty minutes from where my parents lived. My parents had recently moved back home to Michigan and did not have much money. My three older brothers were little and my mom was scared with no food in the house and little if any protection from the mobs. Thankfully things quieted down after three days, but my parents and all of Detroit were scarred by these days of rage and after that my Dad always had loaded guns in the house and they both became really serious about prepping.
For us children nothing really changed until I was seven. All of the wheat, beans, rice, oats, and powdered milk they had purchased after the riots stayed packed up and we continued with our regular diet for about seven years. My parents did have a garden and fruit trees, but mostly when we were little we ate the same white flour and white sugar diet of most Americans. After we changed our diet my mom kept things really pure until I was about fourteen. Then we sort of reverted to a half and half situation where we ate more junk food, went to fast food restaurants more often, and definitely had more sweets in the house.
I will always be grateful for those seven years though because I really felt my body respond to the whole foods nutrition and my skin cleared up beautifully. I also experienced this change during my most impressionable years and watched my maternal grandmother regenerate from a sickly wheelchair bound arthritic to a vibrant and healthy go getter. It was incredible to have the two most important women in my life make drastic changes and get such amazing results when I was so impressionable.
When I left home in 1986 to attend BYU, I went full vegetarian and really enjoyed the way my body responded to a meatless diet. I mostly ate this way for the next few years and was passionate enough about it that I knew I could not marry a meat and potatoes man. So when my husband and I got engaged the only real prenup we had was around food. He agreed to eat what I cooked and we were going to be vegetarians. This worked well until we had been married for seven years and Paul developed a gluten intolerance. He was so sick, he dropped down to 149 pounds and was just skin and bones.
Our chiropractor said he needed to eat a meat and vegetables diet and stay away from wheat and all high gluten foods. This was devastating to me. But it was also an opportunity to explore alternative grains like Kamut, Spelt, and Quinoa and I spent lots of time in the kitchen trying to craft the foods that everyone could eat. For a time I cooked vegan and mostly raw for me and meat and veges for Paul, but it was so expensive and time consuming that I just decided while I was nurturing little people and homeschooling, it was probably not the best time to have so much pressure with my kitchen work.
My body quickly adapted to eating meat and dairy and we started to eat way more mainstream with our diet. We also sent our children to school for the first time and they were introduced to all the snacks and junk food I had carefully sheltered them from for the first eight years of our marriage.
I had grown up with some girls whose parents did not have any junk food in the house when we were teens and these young women used to make pigs of themselves at various parties, church events, and social outings. It was sad to see them off to the side at a party wolfing down nachos and potato chips, guzzling soda, and sneaking food into their purses to eat later at home.
I did not want my children to feel so deprived from what the rest of their friends were eating that they engaged in this type of behavior and so I would buy the packaged rice crispy treats, gummies, and chips that the other children had for lunch. And left the purity extremes behind. Interestingly enough a few of my contemporaries kept their homes pure from junk food and when their children showed up to various events it was sad to see the way they gobbled the junk food at the wedding receptions and public suppers we all attended. Extreme eating is often the catalyst for eating disorders.
Elementary aged children have an emotional need to fit in and anything parents can do to help them feel normal and part of the team is healthy and good. My oldest daughter came home one day and said she traded her whole grain muffin that I had baked for three pieces of cake. I felt a little bit sad about this but did not feel like it was smart to make a big deal out of it because I did not want her to have me micromanaging her diet too much more than I already did.
One of my big goals in life was to come up with daughters who never felt the need to starve themselves or puke their way to a thin body. Both of my daughters are well into adulthood and one of the great successes for me as a mom has been the fact that neither of them developed an eating disorder when they were little.
I believe it is important for parents to realize that you only have total control over your childโs diet until they are about four. After that they will be exposed to all sorts of junk at social gatherings and my position was to go ahead and let them eat whatever was offered at the party or the gathering and if you have a tummy ache or a headache try to connect the dots in your own mind to what perhaps may have caused the distress.
My Moms mantra of eat an apple was taken one step further when I made it a habit during the years we were homeschooling to offer snack plates. These would include things like mini muffins, triangle cut sandwiches, cheese cubes, chopped vegetables and fruits, and always a form of whole grain home baked bread like toast, cinnamon rolls, or pizza.
I believe muffins are the perfect on the go food for growing kids. They are portable, not too messy, and contain enough sweet that they feel like a treat, but are not quite a piece of bread or scone. I have spent more time in my kitchen baking muffins than perhaps any other food over the years. And perfecting my various recipes has been a source of joy. My highest traffic blog post has been my WHOLE WHEAT MUFFIN recipe and the thing I am most often asked to teach when teaching at church is how to make whole grain muffins.
Chapter Two โ Mama Mouse in the 72 hour kit
When my children were little we were very disciplined about switching out the food and clothing in the 72 hour kits.
These kits are for when you need to bug out and just grab and go. Every August our church congregation had a campout at Rocky Mountain National Park where we would gather at the big group campground and spend a night or two together eating and singing. During the day everyone would hike and then we would head home. I used this yearly trip as an opportunity to eat up the contents of the 72 hour kits.
The first year we attended we did not have any equipment. We just took the pillows and blankets off our beds and made a big family bed in the back of our van and slept one night away from home.
I had a horrifying altitude headache and was up pretty much all night long. But it was fun to be in the great outdoors with our kids and being away from home gave us the perfect opportunity to discover what the must haves are when on the go with babies and small children. Each year that we camped we added to our equipment and all of the snacks and MRE type meals that we had packed in the kit were taken along to eat on the campout.
Our church congregation was filled with preppers and I had a good time talking to the old timers about situations where they had to abandon their homes to get to safety. Because we lived in the foothills of the rocky mountains the most common situation usually involved flooding, but I also heard stories of fires and a few mentioned being out of work and just needing to be self reliant with their finances.
It was so helpful for me to be around these types of people while we were putting in a store of food and supplies because they really helped me to discover the least expensive resources for prepping and gave so much great advice.
Like for example, I always believed that we would need huge 55 gallon drums of water to โsurviveโ and at one point we did invest in six of them. But one of my prepper friends said that a freezer dedicated to water was a better choice.
The thinking being that if you had a freezer filled with a couple cases of water bottles, you could easily put one in your fridge to keep the fridge food cold and have cold water to drink, and as the days clicked by, most of the freezer water would stay cold to continually add to the fridge and even with the power out, cold clean bottled water would be available for drinking and cooking.
Water is incredibly heavy to carry and so it would be nearly impossible to bug out with those 55 gallon drums, but a case of water could be thrown in the back of the car and easily transported, or even carried. So for years when our kids were little we kept cases of water stored in the back of our van.
We rotated these often and used the bottled water for sports and other outings.
When my children started going to school, quite often I would forget to replace the snacks for their lunches and time after time they dove into the 72 hour kit backpacks to find snacks for school.
Once in a while we would also raid the piggy bank and take the cash out to pay bills, or go to the store, or out to eat.
I sometimes felt bad about these โnon-emergencyโ uses of the kits, but isnโt that what they were for?
To fill in the gaps where poor planning and lack of resources compelled us to approach things differently? Now I look back and wonder that I spent so much time and energy on these things with everything else I had going on.
Perhaps the greatest gift to growing up prepper is that you carry certain habits and ways of thinking into your adult life.
My parents taught me to think defensively.
Instead of thinking of myself as a victim, I was taught to think proactively and confidently about everything.
Instead of sitting around waiting for others to tell me what to do in various situations, I instead was able to confidently think through my problems and approach them logically and outside the box.
Like the time we had let our 72 hour kits lapse and they were just sitting in our front hall closet out of the way.
My daughter went to grab a snack and screamed. A mother mouse had given birth to a large litter of mice next to a cup of noodles.
Iโm sure from the mouseโs perspective this covered hideaway was the perfect place to nest and birth her children. She had a limitless supply of food, water, and comfortable clothing surrounded by packs of aluminum blankets, flashlights, and matches.
During the first year of our marriage I stored ten two and a half gallon water containers in our linen closet. My husband woke me up one day to tell me that they had collapsed in on each other and leaking had caused some mold.
This was our first adventure with water storage. And over 32 years we have had just about every disaster you can imagine. Weevils in the oatmeal, mice in the closet, moths in the pantry, rust in the water, beetles in the spelt, and earwigs in the garden.
It was the pigweed in our garden that was perhaps the most demoralizing. We had worked so hard to put in the garden one year and it was just overrun by this nasty weed. We had very few vegetables in the garden that year and a few months later moved to the next house, so I never had to deal with it. The house we had been living in was razed to the ground and a parking lot built in its place, so the pig weed is no more. But I did not relish the thought of trying to scrape the soil any more than we did and try to get some vegetables out of that patch of land.
It was very frustrating. That final summer we lived in my husbands ancestral home in Utah, we had a bull break free from its owner and bust into our garden. The police knocked on our door one morning asking for permission to go in our backyard because they believed the runaway bull was in it. He was. He left a few droppings and ate some of my earwig covered vegetables and then took off running where he knocked a second woman who lived behind us over in front of her house before the police shot him dead.
Exciting times in Cedar City Utah!
I have not always had the space to grow a garden, and it was a good experience to have one for a couple years and realize how much work goes into growing those lovely vegetables, fruits, flowers, and herbs. Now I am happy to patronize the farmers markets and local food producers as we put in short and long term food supplies. My husband makes home made applesauce, spaghetti sauce, and jam and we bottle some up every year to use. We also spend serious amounts of time working with grains in our kitchen crafting bread, muffins, waffles, pancakes, cinnamon rolls, pizza, and everything that can be made from whole grains and beans.
It has been so gratifying to see my own married children also baking and cooking from scratch. My parents legacy continues on.
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Chapter Three - Sing!
When I was three years old, Bob on Sesame Street sang this amazing song for the first time.
I do not remember listening to it live, although I probably did because Sesame Street was my favorite show. But I do remember when my parents bought the little 45 single and gave it to me as a gift.
We had a tiny 45 record player and I remember playing this song over and over and over again.
I love to sing.
My parents are singers and so was my maternal grandmother. She used to sing in church. My mother is a choral director who also taught piano and loved to dance. She served as a DJ for many of the dances that I attended as a teen and provided the music for my wedding reception. She had a nice sound system. When my husband asked me out for our first date, he asked if there was anything I would like to do.
I told him that my mother was doing a dance at the stake across town and we could go along for the ride and to help out. So our first date was the Grand Blanc stake Harvest Ball in Michigan, with my parents double dating. It was sort of weird but I enjoyed spending the time driving with Paul and my parents in the car and he was such a good sport to help lug all of her equipment and endless records and tapes into the cultural hall where we set up and then stayed late to help clean up after.
As we drove home from the dance Paul held my hand in the car as we quietly talked. It was romantic, yet still weird that my parents were sitting in the front seat of our mini van.
When Paul and I first met at the Bloomfield Hills Stake young adult Halloween dance, he asked me to slow dance toย Somewhere Out Thereย from An American Tale. As we walked out to the dance floor I remember thinking how cute he looked in his costume. I had dressed up silly, but he looked somewhat dignified with suspenders and a nice hat. As we danced and sang along I mentioned to him that I had not yet seen this movie and he said we would have to rectify that as it was really good. He sang into my ear as we danced and I perked up thinking, โwow, this guy can sing!โ
I always knew that I had to marry a singer because the idea of sitting in church for seventy years next to some guy who was tone deaf was never going to work. I knew that my prenup around food could be a deal breaker and was nervous about imposing too much on my intended when I had this singing requirement as well. The fact that I wanted to have twelve children and every guy I had dated to that point would run screaming like his butt was on fire in case I let that slip, was something I held back for date number three.
As we danced I felt so good in his arms, I just sort of melted into the song. After the dance we all drove over to Dennys, which was the only restaurant open at that hour and chowed on ice cream sundaes and appetizers. I remember my friend Janet and I ordering a huge hot fudge brownie cake from the menu and we ate the whole thing. It was a fun night. Janet then let me know that Paul Hatch had asked her out. I told her that he had asked me out too, to watch an American Tale!
It was so funny to us that we both had upcoming dates with Paul because we had arrived at that dance determined to come home with something social on our calendar. We DID! But it was with the same guy. When I told her that I really liked him, she quietly slipped over to him as we were heading home and told him that she did not want to be in the middle of some love triangle and she broke their date. I have always been grateful to her for that. She married a doctor and is homeschooling seven children right now.
I was born into a musical home. Mama was a composer, an arranger, a dancer, and a musical dynamo the likes of which has rarely been encompassed in one body and mind. When she was a young mother my parents traveled to New York and saw Mary Martin in The Sound of Music on Broadway. They could only afford standing room only, but she never forgot the image of those seven children standing side by side on stage.ย And when she welcomed all eight of us into her life, she was determined that we would be singers. As the oldest daughter in a family with four boys and four girls, I was born as child number four and was blessed to grow up surrounded by a mix of musical sounds.
Sundays were reserved for sacred and classical music and we all sang in church. The various choirs tied to our wards and stakes in Detroit were often filled out with Tripp siblings and if Mom wasnโt directing the choir, she was accompanying it on the piano or organ. We sang during primary programs, youth firesides, and in community outreach settings. We sang for the elderly, the disabled, and the community at large in a variety of holiday and civic events.
When I was eleven the musical Annie had just traveled to Detroit for the first time and for my 5th grade birthday I was gifted with the album.ย I listened to it over and over and my best friend Heather and I choreographed a few of the songs and sang for our parents.ย Then we took things a step further and put together a musical review of some of the songs with my brothers and a few friends and performed it around the Detroit area for civic clubs and church groups.ย I will never forget Ted Cardon who played Daddy Warbucks in that production.ย
He was such an amazing person and to give so freely of his time to a group of young hoofers like us was just such a gift. As he and I would waltz to something was missing, I felt the deep magic of the stage wash over me time and again.
My three older brothers started learning to play rock band instruments while they were in middle school.ย We owned the drum set and so band practice was always at our house. I remember my deep frustrations trying to do math homework while band practice was in the basement.ย
My brothers loved jazz, but they also played rock n roll and jammed with anyone who was interested.ย
Once coming home on the bus a girl asked me if it was true we were hosting a party at our home on the weekend with a live band.ย
I told her yes.ย It then hit me that we were a pretty cool family to have a live band. Until that moment I did not really think much about it.
My grandmother was celebrating her birthday with us one year and word got out that the Tripps were having a party.ย The word spread around the school and that night as our family gathered to celebrate Gram, a bunch of kids from the high school showed up ready to party.ย
They were saddened to learn it was a family party and nobody else was invited. When I was in 6th grade I played Ngana in South Pacific.ย The little french polynesian girl was a fun role to add to my resume.
As I had the fun experience of hanging with all the cool high school kids I was again exposed to a huge range of musical styles and people at various cast parties and events. Punk Rock was just showing up on the scene and I remember slam dancing to what I like about you at the final cast party for South Pacific.
Byย my 10th grade year in high school my brothers were mostly launched into their adult lives and I was coming into my own as a musician.ย I had played middle school sports and loved gymnastics and basketball, but in high school I had to make the tough decision to focus on one or the other and music won out. I immersed myself in choir, the spring musicals, speech and debate (which is called forensics in Michigan), and was able to do some solos at various talent shows and other school events.
My school was also unique in the sense that we had an improvisational team and I loved being on stage doing improv games with an audience. A few friends started a rock band called the Bisch tones and asked me to sing lead vocals with them at a few events.
Highlights of my years in high school include performing with the mime club at North Farmington HS.ย I was only there for a year but it was so great to be a part of that group and I learned so much.ย I also performed in Our Town as a freshman and was in the choir. I choreographed the spring opener for our choir musical review and enjoyed working with the uber talented students at North Farmington HS.
At church I sang a few solos at various church events and really felt my voice developing into something powerful. When we moved to Union Lake my 10th grade year I joined the choir at Walled Lake Central HS and learned so much working with Roger Longrie, who was the choral director. He also directed the spring musicals and took choirs to various choral festivals and competitions.
Our fall musical was A Christmas Carol and I had a character role and was in the ensemble. That spring I performed in Bye Bye Birdie playing Doris and I choreographed the whole show.ย My little sister played the Sad Girl and my baby brother Richard Tripp played my son Randolph in the show. Rich drove me batty by constantly running down to the cafeteria to purchase snacks and soda from the vending machines. I would get in trouble with the director when he went missing.
The next year we performed South Pacific and I choreographed the show and played a nurse in the ensemble. My senior year we performed Fiddler on the Roof and instead of performing I was on crew pulling the curtain.
I was also in some one acts and a couple of fall plays including Scrooge and a summer Dance Festival at church that my mother directed. Mom was also a DJ and we would travel around the state providing music for weddings, dances, and harvest balls.
Chapter Four
Sing Your Baby Earthside
As mentioned earlier, my husband asked me out for the first time and he wondered if there was something I wanted to do.ย
I told him that my mom was Djโing a harvest ball in another stake and asked if he wanted to attend it with us. He said sure, so our first date was a double date with my parents and we drove to the Grand Blanc stake to provide music for this dance. Paul was such a good sport helping to carry in the equipment and stay the whole time and then break it all down and carry it out with us. We had fun dancing together and getting to know my parents.
When I left home to attend BYU I did not want my roommates to know my passion for theatre. I knew that certain stereotypes are associated with musical theatre majors and so I told them that I was an education major planning to teach history at the high school level.
This was not a lie as I was planning to teach high school theatre and history. I combined the two with the first class I took that summer of 1986 which was a History of Theatre class taught by a theatre professor at the Y.
In the class I met a guy who was a drummer for a local garage rock band.ย They were looking for a new lead singer and when I told him I was a singer he asked me to come audition for the band. I did and they asked me to join. We played U2 songs, particularly Sunday Bloody Sunday and performed it around campus at various talent shows and dances. Just before fall semester in 1986 I auditioned for the Honors Program talent show and performed a stand up comedy routine that I had written around being the owner of a very sad broken bike that my mother had purchased for me second hand at Deseret Industries.
During that same summer I auditioned for Funny Girl and landed the bit part of Mrs. OโMalley.ย I was also in the ensemble and sang along to all of the great songs in that show.ย We performed for the homecoming events. For those students who did not want to attend the dance, the option was available for them to attend a dinner theatre with a nice supper and our show as the entertainment.ย This was as student directed show and I was able to connect with many of the older student performers at the school.
I also performed in the mask club with two student directors who were producing one act plays to perform as part of their directing requirements for graduation.ย These connections and the education that went along with them were as important to my skills as a performer as anything I learned formally in class. I also sang with the University chorale and took ballet and jazz classes.
In the fall of my wonderful year at BYU I danced Folk and auditioned for the Folk Team. I did not make it but did dance my way into an advanced class that was really fun. I performed folk and Christmas music with the Russian choir and was president of that choir that was tied to the Russian program at the school. I had taken the Russian class to learn the language hoping to be called to serve in that great country as a missionary.ย But I had to drop and then audit the class because I was too busy to fit all of the homework required to pass the class.
My final semester at BYU I had to get a job and ended up working at the MacDonalds on 9th ave. I did not have as much time for performing as before, but I did audition for three summer stock companies in February of 1987. When I received a call back to the pink garter, I was thrilled to hopefully be a part of the cast, but the director told me that although I could sing and read really well, I was too fat for his group.
The Playmill people were not as concerned about my size so much as my talent and hired me for the Cast of 1987. I spent four glorious months immersed in musical theatre.ย We performed Pippin, a Mellowdrama, and Guys and Dolls. During the days we were taught theatre by visiting professors from BYU and Ricks and then at night we were able to put into practice what we had learned during the day.ย It was the ultimate internship and I will always be grateful for the lessons I learned at the Playmill.
Over the years I sang many solos and appeared in lots of musicals and sang with really good choirs at church and at my schools.
My first big solo was at church when I was eight. I had memorizedย Homesickย from My Turn on Earth and stood in Sacrament Meeting to sing this one simple song. My grandmother had come to watch me sing and Mom was on the piano. She had me sing the song through twice because it is just one minute long. I remember catching my grandmas eye as I sang and she smiled to encourage me.
The next time I looked at her she had tears streaming down her face. I remember having the thought that music must be powerful, because I do not ever remember seeing her cry. Her Irish backbone and Scottish approach to life meant she rarely bothered to cry, she was too busy laughing and having a good time.
I never sang in public with my grandmother, but Mom told me she had an amazing voice when she was younger. Her vibrato took over so much when she aged that she did not feel comfortable singing in public. I met her nephew Gar, who as my second cousin was a genealogist who had traveled to Scotland several times to do research on our family.
He told me that our Great Aunt Mary had been a wise woman in her mountain village who served as the local midwife, herbalist, and was a noted singer. I suppose every family line has that one auntie who feels drawn to music, childbirth, and herbal healing.
My songwriting midwife friend Melania told me that when her first female ancestor was baptized into The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, Joseph Smith himself called her to be the midwife in Nauvoo and while she was being blessed, she was told that her daughters and grand daughters would always be midwives down through the ages. I have thought about that so much as the years have clicked by. Musical Midwives who sing the babies out and welcome them with herbal tinctures, compresses, and oils.
When I first started doing research on Essential Oils, I learned that probably the main reason the wise men brought Frankincense and Myrrh to Jesus Christ when he was a baby was because those oils were traditionally used in Childbirth.
In fact, to designate a baby as a king, the cord would be anointed with Myrrh and then the baby would have Frankincense applied to the crown of his head and massaged into his skin. This was done to protect the child from evil deities. A narrative has grown around the birth of Jesus indicating that the wise men showed up when he was two years old, just before Joseph took off with his family for Egypt. But I believe that if they were going to bring him the gifts that would be most helpful during his birth, they may have shown up sooner and that perhaps Joseph left for Egypt when the Savior was a newborn.
We know that angels from heaven appeared on the night Jesus Christ was born. And that the heavens were opened as angelic singing accompanied Maryโs labor and birth. Mary likely followed theย Levitical practiceย of six weeks of purifying.ย Leviticus 12:1-8.
1ย And theย Lordย spake unto Moses, saying,
2ย Speak unto the children of Israel, saying, If a woman have conceived seed, and born a man child: then she shall be unclean seven days; according to the days of the separation for her infirmity shall she be unclean.
3ย And in the eighth day the flesh of his foreskin shall beย circumcised.
4ย And she shall then continue in the blood of her purifying three and thirty days; she shall touch no hallowed thing, nor come into the sanctuary, until the days of her purifying be fulfilled.
5ย But if she bear a maid child, then she shall be unclean two weeks, as in her separation: and she shall continue in the blood of her purifying threescore and six days.
6ย And when the days of herย purifyingย are fulfilled, for a son, or for a daughter, she shall bring a lamb of the first year for a burnt offering, and a young pigeon, or a turtledove, for a sin offering, unto the door of the tabernacle of the congregation, unto the priest:
7ย Who shall offer it before theย Lord, and make an atonement for her; and she shall be cleansed from the issue of her blood. Thisย isย the law for her that hath born a male or a female.
8ย And if she be notย ableย to bring a lamb, then she shall bring two turtles, or two young pigeons; the one for the burnt offering, and the other for a sin offering: and the priest shall make anย atonementย for her, and she shall be clean.
Music, singing, and oils. Sounds like a good combination for any child being born. I have often though what sort of message Heavenly Father was trying to send when he allowed his son to be born surrounded by dirty animals in a barn to a mother who was barely out of childhood, traveling on the road, and poor.
There was no money for midwives, wet nurses, and the maternal comforts that can be purchased to make things easier for mom. A poor carpenter on the road with a very pregnant wife is a recipe for disaster.
God could have sent his son to a wealthy family who lived in the biggest house, could afford the best medical care, the comforts of good food, servants to do all of the work, and an older mother who was an experienced birther and emotionally mature. Instead of placing his child in an animals manger, filled with germs, the baby Jesus could have been in a comfortable crib, with the finest tapestries, fine linens, and woolens available to cushion and cradle the newly born King.
What was he thinking?
Personally, it is one of the big mysteries of our sojourn here on Earth. Is it possible he was trying to send all of us a message about what is needful at birth when he allowed his child, his only begotten son, to be born in these dire circumstances? He is our Heavenly Parent after all, and could have set up any situation possible for the birth, up to and including sending Jesus to the Earth during the peak of 20th century drug and surgical sophistication and scientific childbirth.
When I gave birth to my son Benjamin in 2002 I decided to plan as if I was going to have a Family Birth with just my husband attending me. I did this with our fourth child as well. Over the years few people have ever asked me why I did this. For all the gossip and questioning that has gone on behind my back, very few people have ever asked me to my face why I chose to do my own prenatal care and give birth alone.
I am a prepper. I am someone who reads the scriptures and I believe they are true. When the Savior Jesus Christ in Matthew 24 claimed that things were going to get a little crazy before his arrival, I took him at his word.
And so I have lived my mothering life assuming that there would probably be a time when moms and daughters would be helping each other with childbirth with no one available to help. And I also have lived my life as if we may have a time when we cannot go to the store for food, or the drugstore for drugs. And I believed that we may even see a time when we cannot get baby formula, antibiotics, or vaccines for our babies.
And because these have been my beliefs, I have acted in what I perceived to be a logical and systematic way to learn the skills that would enable my babies to not only be born healthy, but also thrive without any professionals helping.
So I studied and I researched and I reached out to other moms and I put things into practice and I prayed and I fasted and I have learned for myself what it means to be a provident mother.
On the night of Bens birth Paul brought me hot compresses to place on my bottom to help me stretch. I would drop some myrrh on the cloth and settle in to laboring again. While I was getting ready to push he asked me what he could do to help.
I said, โSING TO MEโ. So he did. He opened up our mormon hymn book and he sang all of my favorite hymns. It was perfect. His singing invited the holy spirit and calmed both of us. I felt our son settle quietly in my womb for this final portion of labor. We both felt some angst because of how things had gone when our son Andy was born at home six years previously.
As I pushed and prayed and asked for angels to help me know what to do, all of a sudden I felt guided to stand up. When the next contraction started I dropped into the Yoga Goddess position, which is a standing squat.
I pushed my son into his Fathers hands.
Paul handed Ben to me and as I laid down on our bed out of the corner of my eye I saw my husband leap for JOY. Yes! We did it!
Then I felt the sacredness of what had just happened wash over me. I grabbed the Frankincense bottle and anointed Benโs head with a few drops. This child has been designated royalty by his parents.
As we have raised him and realized the role that music has and will play in his life, I just have to marvel at the path that Paul and I have trod together from that slow dance toย Somewhere Out There to Singing our Son Earthside!
End of chapter.
More on Hatch Musical Family Life HERE
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