
This next road feels extremely daunting, but it could become my real life’s purpose and when I listen to Oprah's Super Soul Sunday Podcast I feel inspired to see it through. So let's nudge down it together...
ROAD NUMBER 2: FINDING MY LIFE PURPOSE AND DIGGING IN
THE WILDFLOWER SCHOOL OF LIFE
Sam is an orchid child, he has a unique and beautiful soul that is very sensitive to its environment and needs particular conditions to thrive. My other two kids are dandelion children, abundant and resilient, they can thrive in a metaphorical crack in the pavement.
I first heard this metaphor when Sam's therapist at Pine River Institute told me that every kid in the program is an orchid child. In his book The Orchid and the Dandelion: Why Some Children Struggle and How All Can Thrive, Dr. Boyce says, "the orchid child is the child who shows great sensitivity and susceptibility to both bad and good environments in which he or she finds herself or himself." In other words, orchid children thrive in supportive, nurturing conditions, especially if they have the comfort of a regular routine.
Sam thrived at Pine River under a regular routine, but I suck at routine, I can’t do it and I'm too old to start now. He was also living in a toxic home environment, but participating in Pine River's Parallel Process with my ex-husband and his new partner forced us to all get onto the same team which was an incredible gift.

It is also part of a parent’s job to push our kids to do new and difficult things, but the biggest challenge of raising an orchid child is that their parent needs to walk a very fine line in this regard. The challenge is the very delicate balancing act between not pushing them into circumstances that will overwhelm them and make them shut down, but on the other hand not protecting them so much that they don’t have experiences and opportunities to develop mastery over these kinds of stressful situations.
My son is very shut down right now and has spent much of his life ducking and hiding when he feels overwhelmed, which is often. His teacher at Pine River nicknamed him Waldo as in the Where's Waldo? books where you scour a picture with lots going on to find Waldo. Sam was always hiding in washrooms in school as a kid, walking out the back door of his many highschools after heroic attempts on my part to get him there, often you're in a room with him and he has this uncanny ability to just disappear, so when I heard that I nearly fell off my chair.

I am giving Sam a safe harbour right now to rest in, but it's a little too safe, he is not being challenged living here with me and any attempts on my part to get him doing more are met with massive amounts of resistance. I really want him to give another therapeutic community such as Caritas a try, but he has spent 1.5 years on the street resisting treatment programs such as this. So my rationale is if my thirsty horse won’t go to water, then maybe water needs to be rerouted to his doorstep?
Agricultural therapeutic communities such as Caritas exist all over the world and are very successful models for recovery, we do not have nearly enough of them in Canada. I have given this a lot of thought and I would love to see my property become some sort of horticultural therapeutic community, but I know I don’t have the bandwidth to get a residential treatment program going here.
However, I have toyed with the idea of getting some sort of communal farming day program up and running for kids like Sam (apparently there are a lot of them in the area), or anyone who needs a supportive community while they are in recovery. It would draw from the therapeutic models already in practice such as Bridewell Gardens which is a hop, skip, and a jump from the Cotswold village we lived in when we did a family sabbatical to the UK in 2009. I'm planning to call this community garden/therapetic day program The Wildflower School of Life, I have already grabbed the domain name thewildflowerschooloflife.org as a first step on this road.
My rational is that wildflowers are a mash-up of orchids and dandelions — they are beautiful and resilient — and they thrive in the countryside. Taking that metaphor to the next step, we could grow wildflowers (amongst other things) and become a ‘pick your own’ wildflower farm/cafe/country store/destination place. I live on an unorganized township so anything is possible.
But this dream feels extremely daunting. I volunteer on the communication committee for Eli’s Place (when it finally gets launched it will be a long-term rural residential program for young adults struggling with their mental health) and that experience has grounded me in reality. Because the truth is it takes way more than a village to get something like this going, it will take an entire town with a very dedicated 'mayor' working overtime for free, and I don't have the bandwidth for that.
I honestly don’t know if I have what it would take to make this happen, but I’m taking this opportunity to put this vision out there into the universe because if it’s meant to be, then the universe will align itself.

ROAD NUMBER 3: ESCAPING IT ALL (NEED I SAY MORE?)
ECUADOR IS CALLING MY NAME
Recenty I've hit an exhaustion wall that comes from solopreneur burn-out and the heroic parent fear that I’m going to spend the next 10-20 years enabling my adult son. These two things have massively triggered my fight or flight instinct and for the past couple of weeks I’ve been heavily indulging in a fantasy where I ditch all of my responsibilities, sell my business, and buy an Airstream trailer and hit the open road. Or buy a houseboat and hit the waterways. Or jump on a plane to Ecuador. This is not as pie-in-the-sky as it sounds because last week my friend Krissy invited me to Ecuador for a visit. Krissy is a former Deer Lake neighbour of mine who moved there with her husband (Mike) in their COVID version of getting the hell out of Dodge because when you already live in the countryside and still want to escape your life, fleeing the country is one way to do so. They are loving it, especially the we left our adult kids in Canada to figure out their own lives while we live in paradise part. I replied “forget a visit, I might move there!”
It is damn tempting. And it may happen some time in the future, I’m not ruling anything out right now. For those of you interested in their journey you can follow their 'Live the Life You Love' vlogs here.
And then just last week circumstances led me into a conversation with a woman named Kelly, and that was another nod from the universe encouraging me to take this same (possibly irresponsible) detour. Kelly owns land near Beaver Valley which is where I would have happily set up shop if I could have afforded it and the zoning bylaws towards glamping were a bit friendlier. On her land is a compound of women living in trailers (she even said the magic word — Airstream) who are planning to run workshops. I asked her if she has a website and she replied “No, it’s much more grassroots than that.”
Everything about our conversation has got me thinking…
Lately I feel like life is happening now and it’s passing me by way too quickly. I'm also tired of not having the money to do any of the things I really want to do, or time for the people I really want to connect with. I have one child living on the east coast whom I would love to visit, and one child living in the rockies whom I would also love to visit (who incidentaly had to flee the wildfires in Jasper the other night, you just never know what curveball life is going to throw at you) and I have no money to visit either of them because I’ve sunk my life savings into my business. I am 55 and I feel like I’m getting too old to live this hand-to-mouth way, but I didn’t know what my choices are until Kelly put a bee in my bonnet (in the best possible way).
There is something you should know about me that needs emphasizing here: I love Airstreams. About eight years ago I bought a 1969 Sovereign Airstream and restored it because I needed a new gig. The rational at the time was I like restoring old houses but couldn’t afford to buy one, so I bought an Airstream instead because it was a mini travelling house flip that I could put on my extra line of credit. It ended up taking three years though, I definitely would not have taken it on if I had known that, but live and learn as “they” say. I resold it to a woman named Amy who turned it into an Airbnb near Beaver Valley. That was my dream, but I was still living in Guelph so I lived it vicariously through her because I hadn’t landed here yet. I now think of it as my starter-Airstream, and I dream about making my life that simple and small. In fact Pintresting Retro Airstream renos is my happy place and one of my GREAT BIG RETIREMENT DREAMS is travelling in some sort of Airstream caravan across North America.
Because I like a good ol' problem to mull over I went down the imaginary road of retiring now, and this is where that thought experiment led: What if I completely downsized my life to living in an Airstream? What if I sold my business for… say… I don't know... 1.5 million and took that money and put it in a high interest savings account? Could I live off the interest alone?
So I did the calculations and the result is... YES! In fact I’d be ahead of where I am now with my day-to-day finances because the interest is more than the owners draw I currently live off of and I won’t have the huge overhead I have now, not to mention all this work and responsibility!! I could ditch my Bengali tea boy and visit my younger kids living on either coast!!! And, best of all, have money in the bank for the first time in my adult life!!!!
Conclusion of this thought experiment: Holy Shit* Batman, are you friggin kidding me?
This possibility has literally never occurred to me before. Whenever anyone asks me about my retirment plans I tell them "I'm working on Freedom 85 baby!" This my joke in reference to the Freedom 55 Financial commercials that used to be on TV in my teenage years letting me know that if I invested with them retiring at 55 is possible. My Freedom 85 pun is code for I can't retire until I'm 85 because I'm a divorcee and a flaky artist type who couldn't buckle down and do the soul crushing Monday to Friday/9-5 thing when I should have, so I have no pension, or savings other than my business, so what are my options other than running this?
But it turns out that maybe I can retire at 55, although I’m wondering what the catch is (besides becoming an Airstream nomad). There has to be one, but the only ones I can come up with are that I have no idea what my business would be worth if I sold it and 1.5 million could be ambitious; And selling my business means also selling my house, they are a package deal, and there is a lot I want to do to it to bring it up to its full potential; Ditto for the barn; Ditto for my business because if I’m going to get top dollar for it, it has to be turn key and right now it isn't; I’m also a person who likes to own the land I’m living on and this solution feels a bit irresponsible, possibly shortsighted, and potentially very Pollyanna.
It also feels completely freeing, very exciting, and really fucken* tempting.
(*Ed Note: I know it is not professional to swear in a blog posted on my business website, but I think these points need emphasizing, so I'm doing it!)

SO, WHERE DO ALL THESE ROADS LEAVE ME NOW?
With options. Some that I had never even considered before.
But for now I’m going to put my big girl panties on and ignore my first (or second, or third) knee jerk reaction to quick-fix my anxiety when life gets difficult. Because if there’s one thing I’ve learned in life it’s that everywhere I go, there I am. Running from my problems (and my shortcomings) hasn’t made them disappear, they just keep following me to my new location. The harder, and braver, thing to do is to turn and face them, and take some honest inventory of my life and put the work in before I pull up anchor and bolt.
Because my gut is telling me that I am where I am for a reason. Following my gut was the 'Inspired Action' that plopped me down here and it feels like the universe wants me to stay put for now. I know I need to work on my relationship with my son, which really means working on myself (ugh). I also want to give this business my best shot by getting Phase II up and running. And who knows where The Wildflower School of Life might go?
So right now I’m going to take a beat and give my current GREAT BIG LIFE my best shot before I decide what direction to go in, whether to stay the course by upsizing it, or downsize my life to something that feels more manageable for me and then strategically upsize it again when I’m ready.
Honestly it’s 50/50 right now which way it will go, but I'll blog more about all of these roads as I nudge my way down each of them in this crazy little thing called Life.
In the mean time, if any of this has piqued your interest and you are interested in running a retreat, or attending a retreat, or pulling together some sort of girl's weekend (or what have you), or if the Heroic Parents Club intrigues you, or the idea of the Wildflower School of Life resonates with you, please reach out to me at deerlakewildernessretreat@gmail.com. These roads I am travelling down next cannot be traversed alone, so this is my invitation to bumble along this adventure I'm calling MY GREAT BIG LIFE together and see where it takes us.
Coming Soon: INSPIRED ACTION: Listening to the universe’s nudges
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